Confirming long running rumors, Microsoft announced today its plans to bring its Cortana virtual assistant to devices running Android and iOS. Think of Cortana as the Microsoft equivalent of Google Now. The app is currently only available on Windows Phone devices and Windows 10 preview PCs, but Microsoft acknowledged that, in order to make it truly competitive, Cortana needs to work on the two mobile platforms...

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After months of being an iOS exclusive, Twitter has finally brought its streaming application Periscope to the Google Play Store. The app lets you broadcast live streams directly to your Twitter account, notifying your followers when your broadcast begins. The Android version is very similar to its iOS counterpart, but with a few added features. More detailed notification settings are present on the...

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There's a new version of the Play Store rolling out, and that means you're probably obsessively hunting for the APK. Well, we've got that. More importantly we've taken a look inside the APK to see if there's anything of note. There are some minor layout alterations, but also some interesting clues inside. Left: older layout, Right: newer layout - ignore the Nexus S Googler Kirill Grouchnikov explained that this...

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A rainbow of MIDI cables The humble Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) protocol—which allows a wide range of musical hardware and software like synths and digital audio workstations (DAW) to communicate with each other—is over 30 years old at this point. Due to widespread support, though, it remains the primary connection protocol in the audio production world. Now, thanks to Google, built-in MIDI support is available...

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Google is expected to unveil a new photo sharing and storage service at its annual I/O conference on May 28. According to reports, the service will be separate from its social networking site Google+. According to a Bloomberg report, Google will unveil the service at the upcoming I/O developer's conference in San Francisco. The photo service will have some new features including the ability to share photos on other...

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Android app drawers come in all shapes and sizes, but most stick to the same basic formula. There's a homescreen with apps, folders, and widgets. Everything else is tucked away inside the app drawer. Well, that isn't the case with Hexy. This experimental third-party launcher takes the apps that would otherwise be in your drawer and dumps them all over your homescreen. There they reside in a sea of hexagonal tiles. If you've...

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Adobe brought the stripped down Photoshop experience to Android tablets back in 2011, and added a version for phones in 2013. In a blog post today, the company says the all-in-one approach doesn't make as much sense. Therefore, Adobe will be releasing three new "capture" apps called Color CC, Brush CC, and Shape CC. The classic Photoshop Touch apps are being discontinued and will be pulled from...

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A few Android phones have sported fingerprint readers over the years, but these were all using software built specifically by the OEM for the device. We're now hearing whispers that Google is planning to build fingerprint reaching technology into the core of Android when M is announced at I/O next week. Both Buzzfeed and Ars Technica have talked about the possibility that fingerprint scanners could become a supported...

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We've been following the development of Google's Hangouts Chrome app for quite some time. The project referred to as Ultraviolet in August later launched in October as a floating chatheads-style experience. It was okay, but at the beginning of this month we caught wind of a change in the works that completely redoes the experience. That change has now gone live.   The new interface...

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The 2nd gen Moto G got Lollipop back in January, but that just wasn't written in cards for the 1st gen model here in the US. Folks carrying around that older device have been stuck on KitKat, waiting to get their hands on all the slick animations and material design they've been drooling over since last summer. Now, with Google I/O 2015 a week away, here we are. Motorola has announced an over-the-air update bringing Android...

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According to new findings in Snowden's documents, the "Five Eyes" nations, which includes the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand planned to hack Google's mobile app store in order to infect Android smartphone users with malware. The documents showing the project are dated between November 2011 and February 2012, so it's possible the intelligence agencies have succeeded in their goals, or at least they...

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If you're into hidden object games, you are probably familiar with Artifex Mundi. This developer has a bunch of these titles in the Play Store, all of them with thousands of downloads/reviews and nearly perfect ratings. They're also rather pricey, but for the next two weeks you can get a good deal on the whole catelog from Artifex Mundi and contribute to charity thanks to the Humble Bundle. I'll assume...

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If you've got a Find 7 or Find 7a phone from OPPO and you're itching for an official Lollipop ROM, head on over to the company's user forums. A beta version of Color OS 2.1, running on top of Android 5.0 code, has been posted for you to download. At the moment this edition of the software is not available via an over-the-air update, though that should be coming soon enough. According to the post, this version of...

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Expectations are high for each update to Google's core apps on Android. After all, we know there are going to be a lot of new features announced at I/O in less than 2 weeks. Quite a few apps have recently gone through a Material refresh, and plenty of others have seen smaller changes as they slowly coalesce around the current design guidelines. That appears to be the story with the latest Google App update. The latest version...

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The Asus ZenFone 2 is one of the more interesting unlocked phones to be announced lately, and you can secure yours right now on Amazon. A few more US retailers now have product pages up, but it looks like it's just Amazon taking orders. The first round of orders will ship on May 20th. Now that the Amazon listing is live, we can find out exactly which variants come in which colors. The 16GB version...

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  Left: old, Right: new Our long national nightmare is finally over—Google has updated Maps with a translucent status bar. No more will you stare at that flat black status bar and curse your life and everyone in it. The status bar is plain gray on the main map interface, but it's blue in the areas of the app that use a standard action bar (i.e. local business listings and the settings). There very well...

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YouTube updates have been rolling out about every week or two for the last couple of months. Most of the changes haven't been very big, but they're polishing up little aspects of the app in notable ways. The latest version bump doesn't make a lot of changes, either, but it's continuing the trend of small but visible changes. A permanent Cast button has been placed in the action bar and there are updated icons in the privacy...

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