Google has updated its Play Books and introduced a cloud feature which allows you to save the books on the Google Cloud and then access them from any device. Both the iOS and Android versions of the app have been updated and for now and users can store up to 1,000 files on the cloud as long as they are under 50MB.

Once a user saves a book on the cloud, it can be accessed on the Internet, mobile devices and tablets. Google also says that the last read page, bookmarks and notes will be synced across all devices, so you will never have to worry about flipping the pages to where you last were when you switch devices.

The introduction of cloud service and syncing across devices, gives Play Books a distinct advantage over Apple’s iBooks which currently does not support sync across various devices. However, it brings Play Books to parity with the Amazon Kindle app, which employs ‘WhisperSync’ technology for a similar use case. You can download the latest version of Google Play Books from the App Store and the Play Store for free.

Earlier today Instagram for Android and iOS got updated to version 3.5, introducing features like ‘Photos of You’ which is a photo-tagging functionality ala Facebook. Besides the tagging function, Instagram has also improved the quality of uploaded photos, added camera grids and fixed some bugs from the previous version.

With the Photos of You feature, one can add and tag one’s photos on Instagram just like how you would do on Facebook. It replaces the ‘@username’ kind of tagging that you normally associate with Twitter. The Facebook-like tagging feature also brings with it similar kind of privacy settings wherein you can select people with whom you want to share the photo or even hide them from certain users.

In addition to the above, the latest update also improves the quality of uploaded images on older devices running on Ice Cream Sandwich and above and also added grids to its camera to help amateur photographers click their desired photo.

You can download the latest version of Instagram for free from the App Store and the Play Store. In the meantime you can see how the Photos of You feature works in the demo video below.

Tony Stark is back as the metal-suit-wearing-villain-bashing superhero in Iron Man 3 which released earlier today and the movie makers have collaborated with another company to promote movie. After Alcatel featured its One Touch Idol and the One Touch Idol Ultra in the movie, Gameloft has now launched the official Iron Man 3 game for Android and iOS devices.

Gameloft describes Iron Man 3 as an endless ‘flying’ game where the user takes control of the superhero as he zooms through different locations in his quest to stop the evil ‘A.I.M’. The game features numerous side-missions as well as boss battles against the likes of Crimson Dynamo, Ezekiel Stane, Living Laser and the M.O.D.O.K. The game also offers a host of customization options where you can develop and upgrade up to 18 different Iron Man suits which include the iconic MK II, MK V and the Silver Centurion among others.

The game is quite heavy and you will require about 795MB and 644MB of space on your Android and iOS devices respectively. To download the game for free, head over to the Play Store or the App Store and in the meantime you can watch a short demo of the game below.

According to Opera’s latest report on the state of mobile advertising for the first quarter of this year, iOS leads over Android in mobile devices based impression volume and continues to remain the top platform in terms of monetization from advertisements, with the highest average eCPM and greatest percentage of publisher revenue. The findings recorded more than 50 billion ad impressions per month from over 12,000 sites and apps reaching about 300 million global consumers. Also the major category to drive the revenue growth and gets maximum traction has been recorded to be music, video and media.

According to the report, iOS leads the market when it comes to driving ad revenues from users, generating close to 45 percent of traffic and about 50 percent of revenue alone. With 31.91 percent of overall smartphone traffic, the iPhone has recorded a slight lead over Android devices with 31.26 of traffic recorded this quarter. On the tablet front, Android tablets have been noticed to be doing well, and have picked up by a small yet significant share in contributing to ads. Meanwhile, the iPad dominates, growing to over 6 percent of all ad impressions and over 12 percent of all revenue. It has also been recorded that, Samsung’s Galaxy S III has driven 11 percent of all Android traffic, which is about 2 percent up from 9 percent last quarter.

As far as the countries are concerned, India ranks fifth among the top countries in ad revenue generation from mobile devices, and contributes a major chunk of the 14.25 percent of total impressions registered from Asia Pacific. At the top, the US contributed approximately 60 percent of all ad requests registered in Q4 2012 and this quarter has dipped by almost 10 percent to 50.67 percent. European markets have been recorded to have generated over 21 percent of ad requests, up from 14.61 percent the previous quarter.

If watching the IPL matches from the comfort of your couch or cheering for your favorite team at the stadium was not enough, now you can immerse yourself further into the cricketing extravaganza by playing the matches yourself on your mobile devices. Indiagames has launched IPL Cricket Fever 2013, the official IPL Season 6 game on Android, iOS and Java platforms.

IPL Cricket Fever 2013 is a cricket simulator which uses real time physics and swipe-based controls to make the game feel as real as possible. To further enhance the experience, the game has all the official teams from Mumbai Indians to Delhi Daredevils and also includes every player in the tournament from Sachin Tendulkar to Adam Gilchrist.

To play the game, you’ve to select and challenge one of your friends and once he or she accepts the challenge, the match begins. The objective is to hit the maximum number runs in one, three or five overs and set a target for your friend to beat. By winning matches, you win points and move up the leaderboard while also gaining new skills and unlocking in-game rewards.

The game has already garnered more than 10 lakh downloads and features in the Top-Free Android games on the Play Store. You can download IPL Cricket Fever 2013 for free from the Play Store and App Store.

It’s been nearly a year since Google introduced Chrome on iOS and has since then steadily improved the app by introducing new features and tweaking the browser’s performance. Earlier today Google again introduced an update for its browser, which introduces new features like fullscreen view on iPhones and cloud and air printing.

Now people using Chrome on iPhones and iPod Touch can take advantage of fullscreen viewing when browsing the Internet. The navigation bar hides at the top when you scroll up thereby using the full screen space to display the webpage and will reappear as when you scroll back down.

Google has also introduced the ability to save a webpage in PDF format on Google Drive and also print these pages through Google Cloud Print or Apple’s AirPrint. In addition to these new features, Google has also made improvements to the security and the performance of the app.

You can download the latest version of Chrome from the App Store.

Music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have been a boon for music lovers around the world letting smartphone users listen to music on the go without having to download or buy them off the Internet. But in a country where a majority of people prefer jazzy Bollywood numbers and regional music, the Spotifys and the Pandoras of this world feel grossly inadequate.

Enter Gaana, Raaga, Saavn, Dhingana, Hungama and HindiTop— apps that offer the same kind of service as the aforementioned apps but with a whole lot of regional content. But the question is which one among them should you choose? We pit them against each other in a shootout to determine which is the best free Indian music streaming app on iOS.

Catalog

All the apps aim at providing the most number of songs spread across the widest variety of genres and Saavn, Gaana and Dhingana lead the pack in this regard. They offer more than a million songs that include the latest Bollywood songs mixed with healthy dose of regional and international music. Dhingana though slightly edges ahead with the sheer variety of music that it offers. Hungama, Raaga and HindiTop follow with a database of music which grows almost every day.

Winner: Dhingana

User Interface

These apps try their best to provide users with the best and the fastest way to start streaming music and in this regard Dhingana and Hungama have to settle for a tie. Where Dhingana has a very simple and uncluttered UI, Hungama sports a very modern looking Flipboard-styled layout with each tile dedicated to a song, album or playlist.

Dhingana’s landing page shows all the latest songs and albums sorted according to the number of likes it has got and the music player carries forward this simplicity showing album art, playback buttons and relevant sharing and like buttons. It also offers lockscreen support wherein you can play, pause or skip songs without having to unlock your device.

Hungama, on the other hand, offers a unique gesture-based interface with the player always visible at the bottom that can be swiped up to show the full player. The player also offers two modes, a gym mode which takes away all the buttons and replaces them with only three huge buttons that can be easily touched when running on a treadmill and a sleep mode that shuts the player after a set point of time.

Gaana follows behind with a very orangish looking UI that stays true to its logo and also sports some neat looking 3D buttons at the bottom, but it loses out because of its ugly landscape mode. The app in this mode looks incomplete using only half the screen and when in the music player, the album artwork overlaps with the player’s playback buttons rendering them useless. Saavn goes with a very minimalistic UI that slightly borders on boredom and the music player only displays the song queue instead of an album art. Raaga and HindiTop with their awful UI don’t even warrant a mention in this category.

Winner: Hungama and Dhingana

Listening Experience

This is by far the most important of category that can prove to be a make or break feature for these apps and Dhingana again comes up top here. The songs works well and sound great on 3G and a steady Wi-Fi connection, while the music player’s adaptive bitrate feature alters the quality of the song when on a 2G connection. Though the quality goes down, the song plays without buffering.

Gaana follows with decent performance on all kind of connections, but loses out because a user has to go into the settings menu to switch the audio quality to keep the music playing on slower speeds. HindiTop is a light app and the music quality is not too great, hence there is no marked difference when switching between 3G and 2G speeds.

Saavn and Hungama, on the other hand, offer some really good performance when using with Wi-Fi or 3G, but are absolutely buggy and even crashed quite a few times when on 2G. Raaga wouldn’t play any songs without logging in and the app for some reason wouldn’t let us register either.

Winner: Dhingana

Additional features

Value-added features are always a plus point and Hungama wins hands down in this category. Apart from a radio service that the rest of the apps provide, Hungama goes a step ahead and offers music videos too. The free app though only offers videos as 25 seconds previews and full videos only become accessible when you upgrade the app by paying Rs 110. Hungama also provides a unique rewards system, wherein a user can earn coins by sharing their music tastes and inviting friends, which can then be redeemed to buy different things ranging from songs, albums to even gadgets. Saavn allows offline listening on its Pro version, a very handy feature that allows users to save their music and then lets them listen to them even when there is no data connection available. HindiTop follows with access to international Hindi radio stations from the UK, US and Australia among others courtesy of radiokhushi.com.

Winner: Hungama

Verdict

When everything is taken into consideration, Dhingana is the clear winner and though it has its share of faults, is overall much better than all the other apps. Gaana follows closely behind and if not for its ugly landscape mode that literally renders its music player useless and the tedious process of going into the menu to change the quality of the audio, it would have been a close tie between the two.

Final Winner: Dhingana

Google has given its Google+ app on iOS and Android an update. This update brings a new design layout and also introduces new features like photo editing and filters among others.

Google+ for iOS, gets some design tweaks and also a photo editing feature from Snapseed. These photo editing tools now allow users to rotate or crop photos from within the app itself and also add filters like Drama or Retrolux. Users can also swipe to adjust the saturation, contrast or the brightness of the photos and when you are done, with a single tap the app now allows you to compare your creation with the original photo.

The Android version on the other hand gets a big update in terms of how the content is now displayed. Compared to before, the app now displays more text and images, with the buttons like re-sharing, commenting and +1 more prominent. Looking through photos has also become smoother, with the ability to swipe through photos inline without having to click on individual photos every time.

In addition to the above, both the apps now have the ability to share your current location with your circles, with your permission of course. The app also gives users more control on how they want their app to perform. They can adjust the volume of community posts in your home-screen, search for members and moderate content, and re-share news with a community.

You can download the updated Google+ app from Google Play and the App Store.

We had recently reported about DropBox acquiring Mailbox which was garnering quite a bit of interest among iOS users since its launch 6 weeks back. The mobile email client earlier today announced that it had reached a new milestone when it took its 1 millionth reservation.

Reservation, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is a system that puts you in a queue before you get actual access to the app. Once you’ve downloaded Mailbox, you can see where you stand in the queue and how long you will have to wait till you can start using the app. The system is quite transparent in its working and the company has been asking the waiting fans to ‘stay tuned’ and also assuring them that its line ‘continues to get faster every day’.

On this occasion, Mailbox also released an update for the app which introduced a new feature called ‘shake to undo’ and also added various fixes and improvements.

For those of you haven’t tried out this app yet, you can download the Mailbox from the App Store.

We had reported last month that music-streaming service, Saavn would be launching its Saavn Pro service for iOS devices sometime this month. Saavn has now updated its iOS app to version 2.0 bringing with it the Pro service and a host of other changes.

Saavn Pro is a subscription-based service that enables users to listen to music offline and will also be ad-free. The Pro service will be available as a free trial for the first 30 days, following which users will have to pay Rs 220 per month as a subscription fee. Rather than letting users download music, the service will keep a cache of music and makes it available offline when the user hits the cloud icon next to any song or playlist.

Besides the Pro service, Saavn has also updated its UI, made improvements to the app’s performance and stability and also added options to share your music tastes with your friends.

You can download Saavn from the App Store.

Zomato for iOS has been updated bringing with it new features and security updates. But among these updates, the one feature that Apple device users in India will welcome is the app’s integration with Google Maps.

Zomato till date had been using Apple Maps and as the app heavily depends on the user’s location, the results and recommendations weren’t always accurate. But with the use of Google Maps, we can now expect accurate results and more relevant recommendations.

Besides the integration with Google Maps, Zomato has also introduced other features like ‘Happy Hours’ for restaurants, improved Facebook integration and the ability to use your Google account to login to the app.

If you haven’t used Zomato yet, you can download it from the App Store.

Remember playing games in the 90′s? If yes, then you will surely remember the side-scrolling action-shooter Duke Nukem II. For those like us who miss the good old days, there is some good news, as Interceptor Entertainment and 3D Realms have announced that they will be releasing Duke Nukem II for iPhone and iPad next month.

The game will feature 32 levels, which will stay true to the classic while adding things new artwork and music, save/load feature, full-screen support and leaderboards.

The game will launch in April and will be available on the App Store for $2. Currently there is no word if or when this game will be available for Android and Windows devices. You can watch the game trailer below.

Google Maps for iOS has hit version 1.1 and the new update for the free mapping solution brings a number of new features including the ability to search addresses of contacts from within the app. More so, users can now search for a multitude of categories that include food, coffee, bars, gas stations, attractions and many more.

But the bigger deal is the ability to search for addresses saved in your Google contacts. If you are logged-in, then you can search for a friends name and if he or she has added their address then you will be able to search for it. However, for this to work the user will need to enable Google Contacts sync via CardDAV on the iPhone or iPad.

An English version of the app is also hitting a number of Middle Eastern countries that include – Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. As always the app can be downloaded from here.

Over the past few months the rumors of an iWatch by Apple are gathering steam faster than the rumor of the iTV, which Steve Jobs had admittedly cracked according to his autobiography.  Bloomberg has run a series of stories that talk about the development of the iWatch, but the latest report says that it will come later this year and would run on an adapted version of iOS, its mobile OS that powers the iPad, iPhone and the iPod Touch. The Verge has also corroborated this report with its sources.

The report claims that the iWatch business could be more lucrative than the rumored TV project that Apple is working on. Apple has apparently poured a team of about 100 engineers who are working on the project. According to the report, Apple’s design chief Jonny Ive ordered boxes of Nike Sports watches for his team to study. His teams even visited Nike factories in the mid-2000s. This project has been a long favorite of his.

Apple is betting for 4-5 days of battery life, but current prototypes only last a day. Additionally, because Apple is building the OS, it could have a more elegant solution that would work even after a Bluetooth connection is broken and reconnected, unlike some of the products in the market.

As far as the feature set is concerned, nothing is set in stone, but there are a lot of features under consideration. Features like making calls, see identity of caller, check map coordinates, pedometer, and sensors for monitoring health can be in play.

Bloomberg claims that Apple has filed for 79 patents that include the word wrist including one for a device that has a flexible screen. Interestingly, this patent also says that the device could be powered by Kinetic Energy.

Looks like 2013, could be the year where wearable computing devices go mainstream. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already said that its Glass will be available to the public later this year. Apart from this, Pebble is a company that’s generating a lot of interest with its smart watch. Previously, Nike has offered iOS compliant wearable accessories that have tapped the boundaries of wearable computing and an older version of the iPod nano was often converted by people into a watch, by adding watch straps. In fact, even Apple realized the opportunity and added Mickey Mouse watch faces so that users could have customization options.

We reported yesterday about Google allegedly working on releasing Opera’s Turbo-type feature for its Chrome on Android to help speed up Internet browsing. Today, Google has introduced this feature on the Android version of the browser and also updated the iOS version by adding new features and security improvements.

Chrome on Android has been given a shot of adrenaline and now, Google says, websites will open faster and smoother than before. This is due to the use of the latest V8 Javascript engine now optimized for mobiles which has also resulted in a 25 percent performance improvement. The Android version also gets extended support for HTML5 with support for features like CSS Filters.

Chrome on iOS too gets some new features that promise to make web browsing easier. A feature now allows you to long press the back button to see what pages you have recently visited on that particular tab and go to it directly. The latest update also brings in some social elements to the browser with the addition of a ‘Share’ button on the Menu. This will allow you to share any webpage via messages.

You can update Chrome directly from your mobile phones or visit the Play Store and the App Store to download the latest version.