The premium without-ads version of Itsdagram costs about $1.49 (just like other Instagram clients on WP) which was a factor for folks that did not have carrier billing, or dont have a credit card and hence cant buy apps from the Windows Phone Store, which is a pretty common scenario over at this side of the planet.

The Ad-supported version functions just like the full version, except that it has banner ads near the bottom.

All the features of Itsdagram, except Free(with ads)

The only fully featured Instagram client on the market. Register, upload, comment, like, follow, find your facebook friends; All from Itsdagram!

What would an Instagram app be without filters!? Itsdagram filters can be updated daily without the need to update the app. You will never know when you’ve got a brand new filter waiting for you!

Double tap to like
Tap and hold to swap between Timeline view and Grid view.

See photos you’ve liked and have been tagged in on your profile page.

Change your profile picture and password there too!

Pin your favorite hashtags and users to your homescreen to keep track of them.

Available free, right over at the Windows Phone Store.

There’s a new augmented reality view that puts venue information right in your live camera view, similar to the LiveSight feature in the latest Nokia Maps. All you have to do to see it, is tap the camera icon at the top of the maps screen, and you’ll see the augmented reality pop up to make it easier to find venues to check in to.

A neat exclusive feature to have, I guess. Definitely will make non-Lumia Windows Phone fans a tiny bit jealous?

Available right over at the Windows Phone Store. More info over at Nokia’s Blog Post.

According to the blog post:

LiveSight reveals what’s around you through your camera display
Integrated compass shows you which way you’re facing so you can oriented quickly

HERE uses sight navigation as a new way to discover and find your way through the world. Sometimes pins on a map are not quite enough, LiveSight uses sight to recognize and identify places around you simply, by looking around through your phone’s display.

Just open HERE Maps, tap the LiveSight icon and pan around. LiveSight reveals shops, restaurants and your favourite places as virtual signs on buildings right on your screen.

With LiveSight you can ‘see’ the place you’re looking for, and know which way you need to walk, even in crowded areas.

HERE Maps with LiveSight is about getting you where you’re going quickly, even when there are no house numbers or if all the buildings look alike. So LiveSight in HERE Maps lets you literally see your destination.

And there’s one more bonus… LiveSight in HERE Maps works completely offline too.

The LiveSight feature was actually shown off late last year, but nice to see it finally available in HERE Maps. Cant be incredibly useful if you’re traveling and in a new city!

Available right over at the Windows Phone Store.

Well it’s popped up once again in Croatia, but this time with video! The ruggedized S4 features physical buttons, a 1080p HD display, 8 Megapixel camera, and a Snapdragon S4 Plus CPU which contradicts earlier screenshots which showed it having a Snapdragon 600 quad-core 1.9GHz processor, with an Adreno 320 GPU. On the other hand, the S4 plus only consists of dual-core Krait which go up to 1.7GHz.

Check out the video, TouchWiz UI and all, right below:

All that remains now is for Samsung to actually announce this thing.

Opera for Android isnt too different from most other mobile browsers, and uses the popular WebKit engine, but also brings a couple features in from it’s desktop version. There’s features like the “Speed Dial” menu, an “Off-Road” mode which allows you to connect to the web through a proxy, which compresses data so as to speed up website loading times and help you use less data.

Available free, right over at the Google Play Store.

The Nokia Lumia 925 vs the Sony Xperia Z, Samsung Galaxy S4, iPhone 5 and the HTC One:

Nokia Lumia 925 vs Sony Xperia Z:

Nokia Lumia 925 vs Samsung Galaxy S4:

Nokia Lumia 925 vs iPhone 5:

Nokia Lumia 925 vs HTC One:

Not too bad at all, eh?

P.S: If you want to see our HTC One vs Nokia Lumia 925 camera comparison video, check it out right below:

Flickr has gotten a huge facelift in terms of interface, now having huge blocks of images instead of the old thumbnail or list view that was used previously. Users also now have 1 TB (as in a terabyte) of free storage space for their images or videos, which is a lot more than any other online storage.

Flickr also revamped their Flickr Pro service. They no longer offer a Pro subscription, and previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while pro (paid) users had unlimited storage and stats about their photos.

From now onwards though, since users have 1 TB of storage to use, they have new paid plans instead of the old Pro subscriptions. For $49.99 a year, you will not see any ads on the site, and have access to Flickr analytics. And for $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. Considering the amount of images I upload, I feel like I might hit that limit soon, so I’m not entirely happy about insane cost to get more storage space.

As part of the redesign, Flickr also released an updated version of their Android app, which brings it on par with the iOS version released last December. There’s a more content-focused layout which resembles the website, and better social sharing through Tumblr and Facebook, as well as image editing features and filters via Aviary, all built right in.

The official Flickr Android App.
Smile. Everyone gets a free terabyte.
That’s right, a terabyte of space.
Flickr lets you share your photos in brilliant, full resolution from anywhere to any device and anyone.
Biggr: Others measure in gigabytes. Flickr guarantees up to 1000x that: a terabyte of space. That’s 500,000 photos* to share and enjoy in their beautiful, original quality.
Whenevr: Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend and any follower.
Spectaculr: All of your photos in original quality for upload and download, beautifully displayed.
* To be exact, it’s actually 537,731 photos at 6.5 megapixels.
New to Flickr? Sign up from your Android device.
Flickr Features:
1. Full bleed and high-resolution images
2. Justified views everywhere
3. Sixteen artistically designed filters
4. Photo editor that allows you to enhance, draw, crop, add text or retouch your photo to get them just how you want them
5. Your photos are always yours on Flickr and we give you complete control of your privacy with every photo you take
6. Find and join groups, share photos and join the discussion
7. Explore beautiful and interesting photos from the massive Flickr community – nearby or across the globe
8. Keep track of where you take photos automatically with geotagging
Flickr!

All in all, it’s a long overdue update that was much-needed, and finally puts Flickr up to par with it’s competition. Available right over at the Google Play Store.

Take photos worth sharing
The new Nokia Lumia 928 easily captures vibrant photos in near darkness. Only on Verizon.

And here’s another commercial right from Microsoft’s Windows Phone YouTube channel:

See how to capture your night like never before with the Nokia Lumia 928, the best low-light smartphone camera. Better than the Apple iPhone 5. Better than the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Meet your Nokia Lumia 928 at Verizon Wireless: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/pho…

This innovative Windows Phone smartphone sports an 8.7MP camera featuring a high-quality, wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens. And, the unique combination of Optical Image Stabilization and a Xenon flash make the Nokia Lumia 928 the best smartphone camera for low-light photos.

With Windows Phone 8 on board, you also get innovative Lens photo apps built right into the viewfinder of the camera, so you can easily enhance your photos and unleash your creativity as you point and shoot. And Lens apps are only available on Windows Phone.

Dayum I wish the Lumia 928 was a global product so I could get it here at my side of the planet, heh.

Google+ will now automatically show you “highlights” of each photo gallery, so you dont have to go search through an entire gallery of images. You can also preview or undo automatic photo enhancements, and there’s a new “Auto-awesome” tool that allows you to create animations or panoramas from still shots. Very cool.

Organizing and editing photos takes lots of time — time most of us don’t have — so today’s update helps you make more beautiful images faster. The new photos experience on Android includes:

Auto Backup, to safely and privately store your photos as you snap them
Auto Highlight, to browse a selection of top shots from every set of photos you add
Auto Enhance, to make subtle improvements to the people and places in your images, automatically
Auto Awesome, to create fun new versions of your pictures (like animations and panoramas) based on the photos in your library

Getting started with these features is as simple as uploading a few pictures, then visiting the Photos section of the new Android app. There you can view your Highlights, review Google’s enhancements (and undo them, of course), and enjoy any awesome’d pictures you’ve got waiting for you.

Once you’re freed from labor-intensive photo tasks, you may discover an appetite for more artistic enhancements, and we’ve got you covered there too. Today’s Android update includes some of Snapseed’s award-winning photography tools — from filters like Drama and Retrolux to more specific controls like saturation and contrast — all inside the app.

There are also various Snapseed photo enhancements now available within the app, including various filters such as Drama and Retrolux and the usual cropping, rotating and exposure settings. There’s also new location settings as well. The changelog goes:

If (and only if) someone’s sharing their location with you, you’ll see their current whereabouts on their Google+ profile. Today we’re improving this experience by including a new “Locations” section in the Android app. Tapping “Locations” will display your friends’ current locations on a map, making it easier to make plans and meet up.

Available right over at the Google Play Store.

Yup, it’s the Blackberry Z10 and here’s our long-overdue review of it.

As you might already know, the company formerly known as Research In Motion, and now just simply known as BlackBerry, went into hibernation for much of last year and finally released their long-awaited fully-touch smartphone running their new QNX-based BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system. It’s a huge gamble for the company and one that they hope re-establishes their prominence in the business. Because of the long time they took to create it though, Blackberry is facing an uphill battle with spec-ed up Android smartphones, colorful and stylish Windows Phones and the good ol’ iPhone, all well established in the market right now. That being said, the company still maintains a very loyal following which might give this new platform a chance after all.

With the Blackberry Z10, the specs are far from most of the top-tier Android phones out there but the spotlight is on the new operating system that’s running the show. Is it good enough to give Blackberry a fighting chance versus the other three main mobile platforms? Read on to find out.

The Design:-

Since the Z10 is the first smartphone meant to showoff their new platform, you’d think that Blackberry would have put a huge emphasis on design as well. Instead rather, they’ve gone with a more minimalistic design, one that doesnt really standout as much compared to what else is out there.

Infact it kinda looks similar to the iPhone 5 in terms of design, and much like the Blackberry Dev Alpha that was distributed to developers earlier. Personally I feel like the design suits Blackberry very well, though I wish there were more colors available.

You can buy the Z10 in Black (and in some countries White) color models but Blackberry has also given developers a Red version and a Blue version as well, which look much nicer in my opinion.

The construction is mostly all hard high-quality plastic and the Z10 feels solid enough. The finish is fairly clean, with a dotted rear casing that feels rubbery to the touch, and gives it a bit more grip.

Measuring 130 x 65.6 x 9 mm and weighing 137.5 grams, it fits well enough in the hand and is comfortable to use.

At the front you have a 4.2 inch 768 x 1280 LCD screen, with a discrete microphone hidden along the bottom edge.

The display has plenty of detail and clarity, with a pixel density of about 356 ppi. Since it’s an LCD screen, you also have neutral colors instead of the unrealistically saturated colors of an AMOLED display.

The Z10′s display is also more than usable outdoors, with strong brightness and decent viewing angles. That being said, it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet though, and does not use Gorilla Glass.

Towards the top, you have the centrally located earpiece, light sensor, proximity sensor, a single LED notification light (which is way brighter than it should be imho), and a nice little 2 Megapixel front facing camera for video calls (that can also record video that up to 720p).

On the left side, you’ll find a microUSB port for charging and connectivity, and a very useful microHDMI port which allows for video-out.

On the right side, you have aluminium volume controls, which have decent feedback and are easy enough to find and use.

There’s also a multi-functional key in the middle that you can use to access to device’s voice control services when long-pressed, and also acts as play/pause music control.

At the top, you have a physical power button which is positioned right in the middle. It’s a bit flush which the surface, which makes it a bit hard to find and use, but you get used to it.

On either side, there’s a noise cancelling microphone and a standard 3.5mm audio jack.

At the bottom, you’ll only see a little notch to remove the back cover, which also acts as a speaker grill.

Coming to the back of the Z10, there is an 8 Megapixel auto-focus camera (which can record video up to 1080p) with a single LED flash.

Taking off the back cover reveals that the NFC chip is incorporated into it, with the 1800 mAh battery, microSD card slot and microSIM card slot all located at the back.

All in all, it’s an interesting enough design, though a little too similar to your usual black glass slab monoblock.

The Hardware:-

Blackberry’s phones never really sported the latest hardware but they’ve managed to use something respectable this time around.

The Blackberry Z10 features a dual-core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus processor, with 2GB of RAM, and 16 GB of internal memory (out of which about 9.9 GB is available) with a microSD card slot available.

It’s the same processor used on some other flagship phones, and it’s more than enough to guarantee smooth and consistent performance from Blackberry 10.

In terms of connectivity, there’s 4G LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, mobile hotspot functionality, aGPS and NFC.

The Software:-

Most of the hype around this phone is about the new Blackberry OS 10.

RIM, or as they prefer to be called now, Blackberry developed the new platform all the way from the ground up to create a modern, touch-friendly OS that honestly doesn’t really look like the ol’ Blackberry OS we’ve seen in years past. It was quite the gamble and Blackberry could have pulled a move similar to Nokia, who abandoned their Symbian and MeeGo OS to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. Instead the company choose to take time off to reinvent themselves to take on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, and develop and tweak their OS to bring it up to par, if not even better.

Even visually, there’s a lot of attention paid to detail, like the various neat looking transition effects that compliment the new UI. One example of that is the cool fading effect when you unlock the Z10.

Ofcourse visuals don’t mean much if performance is slow, which is why we were glad to see the solid, consistent and fluid performance all through the device.

In terms of personalisation, it’s the same situation here as on iOS, where you can only change the wallpaper and change the layout of the app shortcuts.

Unlike iOS though, there’s a bit of a steep learning curve with Blackberry’s new OS, which might turn-off some potential buyers, many of whom are used to last generation’s Blackberry OS.

Much of the learning curve has to do with the new gestures, and the way they allow you to interact with the phone. So lets take a quick look at them, shall we?

First up, when you first get the Z10 in your hand, you’ll notice there’s no home button anywhere at the front. Nothing to bring you back to the homescreen. Instead, the ’homescreen’ is made up of three distinct panels made up of an App panel, Active Frames panel, and lastly, the Blackberry Hub.

At the homescreen, you can swipe left or right to get into any panel but if you’re in an app, you’ll have to swipe upwards from the bottom bezel to ’minimize’ the app, so to speak. The app is then placed as an active frame in your homescreen, which is a nice take on multitasking compared to some other platforms.

Similarly, you can also ’peek’ at your notifications by swiping up from the bottom bezel but not letting go of the screen. This gives you a quick look at your notifications but you’ll still technically need to go over to the Blackberry Hub to actually interact with your notifications.

Speaking of which, the gesture to get to the Hub is interesting. You swipe upwards from the bottom bezel, but then move the swipe towards the right side, which reveals the Blackberry Hub.

The Hub aggregates all your notifications, emails, text messages, and missed calls, all in one place.

And lastly, there’s one more gesture which is a downwards swipe from the top bezel, which shows you different settings depending on which app you’re using. Basically it’s a gesture to give you access to more settings of an app.

Right, so now that we’ve discussed all the gestures, lets move on to functionality. The core Blackberry 10 organiser apps arnt much different from anything else though.

Accounts work just as you’d assume they would, and if you add a Gmail account, you can also sync over contacts and calendar entries as well.

The core organizer apps include the usual clock, weather, calendar, and file manager apps, but there’s also a compass app, print to go and docs to go as well as good ol’ BBM.

BBM or Blackberry Messenger as it’s officially known, also now features video calling and you can also send content to other users while in a video call which will probably impress business or enterprise users. Blackberry also announced that they will be bringing BBM to iPhone and Android too, so I’m not entirely sure if this is a huge advantage any longer.

Coming to Messaging, Blackberry’s phones are known for their messaging abilities especially since most of them come along with some really solid physical keyboards. Since the Z10 is an all-touchscreen device, I was interested in seeing how they could stay true to that, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the new onscreen keyboard layout actually did a really good job.

The keyboard is nicely spaced, super responsive and kept up with my rate of typing very well.

There are even more gestures to make use of with the keyboard. Swiping down on the keyboard allows you to access the various different layouts available.

Personally I would have liked to see punctuations built into the main layout but eh, the implementation is pretty good. The auto-correct is really great, and predictive text functions in a pretty interesting and contextual manner. Based on what you’re typing, different words will begin to appear over different letters, and all you have to do is swipe up on the word to ’flick’ it into the sentence.

It’s a feature that is definitely appreciated, though I feel like it didn’t really improve my pace much. I was much faster typing the old fashioned way, but hey, this might work for you.

There’s also a voice dictation feature where you can just speak your words. It’s pretty accurate, even with my strange accent, so it can be useful at times.

Speaking of which, there are voice control services available in BB10. They’re not as ’smart’ as Siri or Google Now, but you can send a text message or email, even messages over BBM, or call a contact, dictate notes, reminders and searches over the Internet.

You can customise it in the main settings menu, which also gives you access to a lot more options to tweak.

Coming to email, it hasn’t changed much with Blackberry 10. To get to an email, you’ll have to access it via the blackberry Hub instead of a separate app icon or something. The layout of the email experience and th functionality is pretty comprehensive and gets the job done, though there is some room for improvement, I guess.

Coming to the web browser, it was able to load complex pages quickly enough, handling even the most intense websites. Even pages with heavy flash content, which was quite impressive.

Pages were rendered quickly, and once again performance was fluid, as so were the navigation controls such as pinch-to-zoom and scrolling around a web page. There’s also support for multiple tabs, but it would have been nice to have a gesture to switch between them.

Moving on to multimedia, the image gallery sports a conventional layout of image thumbnails in a grid. You can share images via email, BBM, text message, and NFC, and there’s a few editing options as well as onboard artsy image filters.

Coming to video, the Z10 can play back high definition videos with no issues, with support for H.264, MPEG-4, DivX and Xvid video codecs out of the box.

Not to forget, there’s also a microHDMI port on the Z10 which allows for mirrored-video-out connectivity to a high definition display. Strangely the homescreen does not support landscape so it’s displayed in portrait when connected to a TV bit most apps like the web browser, do support landscape.

The music player doesn’t look as modern or fancy as the rest of the OS which was mildly disappointing.

You see the the album cover artwork, track information, and the usual on-screen playback controls. But these controls disappear if you place it in the active frames area. Instead you can only access the mini-player from the lockscreen, after the volume buttons are pressed.

The loudspeaker is averagely loud, though it can sound a bit strained at times.

Apart from that, there’s the ’Blackberry World’ App Store where you can download more apps and games among other content. There are about 70,000 apps in the Blackberry world and you have some apps pre-installed on the Z10, such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn.

Most official apps do a good enough job though they can sometimes be lacking in terms of feature set compared to the Android or iOS versions. And ofcourse there are third party apps for services that don’t have official apps available, such as ’Apollo’ a Blackberry app for Pandora. Then there’s the YouTube ’app’ in the app panel that is basically only a link to the mobile website, which is disappointing. Nowadays, apps are what lures consumers away from other platforms, so I’d hope that Blackberry are bringing in a lot more.

Then there’s the Maps application. Blackberry have their own mapping application, which was quite the suprise, and it isn’t too great unfortunately. It’s lacking in terms of features in comparison to Nokia’s HERE maps and Google Maps, and even Apple’s Maps for iOS. There’s no walking or transit directions, or satellite view but that being said, there is voice guided turn-by-turn directions.

The Camera:-

Blackberry 10 makes it very easy to access the camera app. You can launch it right from the lockscreen, just by pressing and holding the camera icon in the bottom right side, or with the icon on the homescreen, or just by tapping on the camera app icon in the app panel.

The camera UI sports a very clean layout, with very few icons around the viewfinder so that it doesn’t look too crowded. There’s an icon in the upper right corner which lets you switch between photos, videos, and Blackberry’s new Time Shift feature.

At the bottom right side there’s an icon to allow you to access more settings and shooting modes, like stabilisation and burst mode.

There’s no onscreen shutter key, or a dedicated camera button, so instead you just tap anywhere in the viewfinder to take a picture. You can adjust exposure using the square box which you have to press, hold and move to a specific area, which is a little different from the way other camera apps work.

And lastly, there’s the aforementioned new Time Shift feature which takes images before you snap a shot, so that you can kinda travel back in time to select a better picture or best faces from each person in the image, and stitch them together to create one nice photo.

The Blackberry Z10 features an 8 Megapixel auto-focus camera and in terms of quality, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.

Overall image quality is average, and shots taken outdoors in well lit conditions have a decent amount of details and saturation. You’ll have to be careful with the focus box though because images can be either over or under exposed depending on where you place it.

In low lighting, there’s a lot of noise that creeps in, but there is an LED flash to help with portrait shots. Colors will appear a bit washed out though.

Here’s a couple camera samples from the blackberry Z10. Just to give you a better idea:

Coming to video, quality is about the same as with images. You can record at up to 1080p high definition, but details are average and the microphone tends to pick up wind noise fairly easily. There is a steady frame rate though.

Here’s a couple video camera samples from the Blackberry Z10 to give you a better idea:

The Call Quality:-

Call quality was good and voices on either side of the line sounded loud and clear. The noise cancellation works rather well, which is much appreciated, and we never had any issues with network reception.

The earpiece volume is average, and so is the loudspeaker, though it can sound a bit strained at times.

The Battery Life:-

There’s a 1800 mAh battery powering the Z10, which unfortunately isnt as much as some other high-end smartphones.

As such battery life is below average, and we only got about 10 hours of moderate usage out of the Z10, on 3G. You’ll have to charge this one up every night, for sure.

The Conclusion:-

I had some pretty high hopes out of the Blackberry Z10. Mostly because of Blackberry 10 as a platform.

While I do wish they had worked on the design of the Z10 more, some might actually like the industrial design. The star of the show though, is the new Blackberry 10 platform, and the QNX based platform honestly is a joy to use. There is admittedly a very steep learning curve with all the various gestures and settings, but once you master that it becomes second nature. Performance is smooth and consistent and it’s still a great messaging device. Though I’m not a fan of the onboard maps and battery life isnt too great.

That being said though, my only worry with BB10 is that it doesnt really have anything to pull people away from rival platforms and ecosystems. Previously they had BBM, but now that’s going to come to Android and iOS as well. If you’re still a Blackberry user though, you’ll love the transition over to Blackberry 10. Ultimately it depends on Blackberry committing to keeping the platform up to par in terms of functionality, and trying to bring in as many apps to the platform as possible.

In the meanwhile, consider me impressed with what Blackberry has done with the Z10 and curious the new Blackberry 10 platform, but somewhat cautious overall. Kudos for a job well done Blackberry, but there’s still work to do, eh?