Mihăiță Bamburic

Great news for Canadian BlackBerry fans! The newly unveiled BlackBerry Z10 smartphone is now available for purchase at major carriers across the North American country.

In its home land the BlackBerry Z10 is priced rather boldly against popular smartphones from Apple and Samsung. On a three-year agreement at Bell, the device goes for CAD139.95, while the Samsung-made Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S III run for CAD149.95 and CAD49.95, respectively. By comparison the Apple-made iPhone 5 is available from CAD179.95 for the 16GB variant, with the price increasing by CAD100 and CAD200 for the 32GB and 64GB variants, respectively.

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Coming from Android or iOS, Windows Phone 8 is an eye-opening smartphone operating system. It sets the bar pretty high when it comes to looks and performance -- the design is simply beautiful and refreshing, and the software responsive and fluid -- but it never really manages to outshine its main rivals. After living with the HTC Windows Phone 8X for a while, I can't help but notice glaring oversights in an otherwise solid proposition. The package is not complete.

You see, being pretty and going fast does not cut it among the fierce world of Android and iOS. Microsoft needs to take a good look around and take charge by solving the shortcomings of Windows Phone 8. Fact is, it's easy to pick faults with the immature app selection, like many journalists do, but that's more of a chicken and egg problem. What the software giant has to do is build on the current platform by offering better basic functionality, functionality that's necessary for a greater user experience.

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It was bound to happen at one point or another. Following the rolling out of web profiles in early November, Instagram now allows users to skip smartphones and go straight to the browser for all their filtered picture feed needs.

This latest development is part of a plan to bring Instagram to a larger variety of devices, including PCs and tablets, a move that will undoubtedly help support the social network's growth and popularity among a bigger crowd. Instagrammers only have to visit the popular social network's website, press the log in button and enter their account information to start using Instagram inside a browser, without any encumbrance.

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With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices, Kim Dotcom's Mega storage locker appears out of place without an official smartphone or tablet app, especially when Box, Dropbox and Google Drive, to name but a few alternatives, embrace the on-the-go user. Thankfully Alexander Hansen, an Android developer, has come to the rescue with his unofficial Mega Manager Alpha.

As the use of "Alpha" in the name implies, Mega Manager Alpha is not a stable release at the moment but rather a "work in progress". The developer also warns that users might experience "some crashes". That said, the app only comes with a limited feature-set, which includes the ability to browse and download Mega content, and does not support uploading files to the cloud storage service.

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Microsoft Open Technologies unveiled the VM Depot public preview early last month, and the software giant has just announced that its community-driven open-source virtual machine image catalog is now integrated into the company's cloud platform, Windows Azure.

The new feature is available through the Windows Azure management portal and is designed to ease the handling of virtual machine images from VM Depot. The cloud platform's users can take advantage of open-source stacks, "based on supported Linux distributions, made available by members of the community and directly provision the files as personal images straight from the Windows Azure portal".

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On Tuesday, Huawei unveiled a new smartphone running Windows Phone 8 aimed at the "rapidly-growing" African market. Dubbed 4Afrika, the device is based on the Ascend W1 unveiled at CES 2013 in Las Vegas, and is marketed as an "affordable option" for developers, first-time smartphone buyers, small businesses and students.

The 4Afrika is part of larger initiative which, by 2016, plans to deliver tens of millions of modern mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) into "the hands of African youth". The initiative also intends to bring one million small and medium local enterprises online, and help 200,000 locals succeed in entrepreneurship and employability.

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Do you really care about security on the interwebs? According to the latest Microsoft Computing Safety Index (MCSI), most of us don't. Of the 10,000+ PC, smartphone and tablet users surveyed, 55 percent experienced multiple online risks, but only 16 percent took proactive safety measures.

The numbers keep piling up. When it comes to theft of account information or passwords, 47 percent of surveyed users said they find it a reason for concern. However, just 33 percent of respondents are actively fighting online theft by using secure websites, and only 28 percent of surveyed users steer clear of using open Wi-Fi hotspots on mobile devices.

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On Monday, the United Kingdom arm of the global telecommunications company Vodafone revealed that, starting February 6, it will carry a Windows Phone 8 smartphone lineup. In merely two days, Vodafone UK customers will have access to five devices sporting Microsoft's new mobile operating system.

The UK carrier covers the market from top to bottom, with the Nokia Lumia 920 and the HTC Windows Phone 8X taking the role of the flagship Windows Phone 8 smartphones. The former ships in black and yellow, while the latter comes in California Blue or black.

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In the camera department, Windows Phone 8 is an interesting piece of kit -- users have access to a high number of customizable options and there is even support for add-ons, or lenses, as Microsoft likes to call them. But one major feature is still missing to nail that perfect picture, namely burst-shot mode.

The software giant's research arm, Microsoft Research, has introduced a new app for Windows Phone 8 devices, dubbed Blink, that fills the gap in the otherwise competent camera bag. Blink works both as an individual app as well as a lens, and allows users to snap a significant number of shots, all in one go, and save the best one afterwards.

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The HTC Windows Phone 8X is a smartphone that you will either love or not want to touch even with a 10 foot pole. Part of the arguments for and against it stem from the operating system of choice, Microsoft's latest (and greatest) Windows Phone iteration. Sure, the device has good build quality and the software is fluid and responsive, but the app selection is currently lacking compared to rivals like Android and iOS. So where does one draw the line between success and failure?

I've been using the Windows Phone 8X for almost two weeks and the early impressions are still on the positive side. In my initial review I touched on a number of points that I found revealing for my brief time with it, but the real test is how the Windows Phone 8X fares over a longer period of time. My main and initial gripes concern the limited app selection and general usability issues of Windows Phone 8 when coming from the stock flavor of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. The real question is this: Is it good enough?

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Little more than four months ago, Team Win Recovery Project introduced the last major iteration of the popular Android custom recovery TWRP. Now there is a new version available that packs features as well as bug fixes.

After switching from libtar instead of busybox's implementation, TWRP 2.4 can now create TAR files larger than 2GB. The popular custom recovery also introduces support for memory cards formatted as exFAT as well as support for decrypting internal and external storage on Samsung devices sporting a TouchWiz encryption.

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Little more than two weeks after the beta version debuted, the new Carbon backup app has made its way onto the Play Store. The biggest change comes for Android users with non-rooted devices as they can now also perform app and data backups, a feat previously exclusive to those running the little green droid with elevated permissions.

Carbon is the work of ClockworkMod and ROM Manager developer Koushik Dutta who, with the help of 12,000 beta testers, has managed to squash out most of the bugs from previous versions of the app. Dutta, however, warns that due to the way Motorola handles the adb backup functionality (also known as the built-in backup feature in Android) the Google subsidiary's smartphones are prevented from installing Carbon.

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In mid-December, as part of the "Winter cleaning" operation, Google announced plans to drop support for Exchange ActiveSync effective January 31. Microsoft condemned the decision, and quite vigorously.

Matters are changed. Windows Phone users will get a six-month reprieve, until July 31, to give Microsoft time to adapt. "The Windows Phone team is building support into our software for the new sync protocols Google is using for calendar and contacts -- CalDAV and CardDAV", Microsoft's Michael Stroh says. The company also will use IMAP for push support in order to fully replace EAS' functionality.

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Today is the big day -- Research in Motion finally took the wraps off BlackBerry 10 and two new smartphones. The Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based company, which new name is same as the device, bleeds market share to Androids and iPhone. During fourth quarter, BlackBerry fell out of the top-5 smartphone makers, as measured by shipment share, according to IDC. The latest operating system and new handsets might just well be the last chance to regain lost ground.

CEO Thorsten Heins officially launched the much-anticipated platform during BlackBerry World. The BlackBerry Z10 comes with a 4.2-inch touchscreen display and 356 pixels per inch, whereas the BlackBerry Q10 sticks to a traditional layout featuring a physical keyboard. According to Heins, both the on-screen as well as physical keyboard provide the best mobile typing experience, but more on the two after the break.

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On Wednesday, popular cloud-based voicemail provider YouMail unveiled a new premium service aimed at businesses and professionals. Dubbed Business Edition, it comes with a host of exclusive features ranging from more customizable greetings to the removal of in-app ads.

YouMail Business Edition runs for $6.99 per user, per month, and builds atop of the currently available functionality. Subscribers can choose to implement "smart business greetings" which can accommodate the user's full name and company, as well as other information.

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