Although smartphones are useful to some and essential to many, the way devices are still treated like a monopoly by carriers makes using any given smartphone with a SIM of your choice an often difficult task.
Creating and sharing images in a quick and sociable fashion has been made simple by smartphones, and made popular by the wonderful Intstagram.
While there have been some fantastic classics-in-the-making since Apple opened its iTunes App Store nearly five years ago, the app devs have made a mint from recreating and rethinking the old classics - capturing the nostalgic imagination of casual gamers far and wide.
One of the primary colossal improvements made to the recently-launched iPad 3 is the Retina display, a vibrant, extremely high-resolution display which makes pixels as hard to spot as Waldo. However, Apple did not address an issue which has impacted the device since day one: You cannot use the iPad in the portrait orientation while wearing polarized sunglasses. Bad news for all of you who planned to do some reading in the sun by the waves this summer (avoiding glare issues by wearing your polarized sunglasses, of course).
Over the last few years, Cydia has gone from strength to strength to become a very formidable alternative to the official App Store experience that Apple provides on their iOS devices. The official repositories that power Cydia is literally packed to the rafters with packages, tweaks and extensions that have been released for users of jailbroken Apple devices. It may not seem like it on the face of things, but Cydia is actually extremely similar to Apple's store in the fact that packages are regularly updated and require users to physically download the new version of the software to the device when a developer pushes it out.
The free of charge Instagram photo sharing application has been going from strength to strength over the last couple of years and is widely regarded as one of the most successful apps available on the App Store, something that was recently recognized by Apple when they named Instagram as their app of the year.
The general consensus is that the Windows Phone 7.x operating system is a winner with the beautiful Metro styling, but that doesn't mean that it is going to keep everyone happy all of the time. One thing we know for sure is that mobile smartphone users have unique tastes, meaning that one mans trash is most definitely another mans treasure.
When Apple announced iOS 5.1 to the public last month, some hoped Siri for iPad would be somewhere on the list. Unfortunately, the fruit company only implemented Voice Dictation, which, although better than nothing, left the Siri hunters to continue using the alternatives available.
The developers over at F.lux Software LLC have created something for the Cydia store that steps away from the standard tweaks that we have come to expect. Their f.lux package is a tweak that is designed with user visual comfort in mind and warms up the iOS device screen in an attempt to match the lighting during the evening.
With the adoption of iOS 5 being relatively high and growing rapidly, most new tweaks which hit the Cydia store have the latest major release of iOS as a firmware dependency before installation can be allowed. The SwipeCam tweak by developer Ron Melkhior that has been released in the last day or so is no different, and offers iOS 5 users the ability to gain access to a few different system toggles through the use of a swipe gesture.
