Listing

Tech giant Apple has released a list detailing the best selling apps of the year as well as the firm’s own favourites. According to the ‘best of 2012′ list, messaging app WhatsApp was the best-selling iPhone app of the year, while Apple’s Pages word processor was the best-selling iPad app of the year. The number one free iPhone app of the year was YouTube app, released in September after Apple dropped the version of the app which came pre-installed on the iPhone until iOS 6. The top free app for the iPad was Skype, the video calling service, the Telegraph reports. According to the paper, Apple also listed its editors’ apps of the year. Paper, a notepad and sketching application, was Apple’s iPad app of the year and the runner-up was Green Kitchen – a recipe app for vegetarians. For the iPhone, Apple’s editors picked Airbnb, the travel service, as app of the year, with taxi app Hailo as runner-up, the paper said. Rayman Jungle Run, a platform game, was i...

The next competition in technology is your face – anywhere, anytime. As the cameras and screens of smartphones and tablets improve, and as wireless networks offer higher bandwidth, more companies are getting into the business of enabling mobile video calls. The details vary from one service to the next, but the experiences are similar: from anywhere in the world with a modern wireless network, a smartphone’s screen fills with the face of a friend or relative. The quality is about the same jerky-but-functional level as most desktop video. Sound is not always perfectly synced with the image, but it is very close. The calls start and end the same way, by pressing a button on the screen. Mobile video calling has risen so quickly that industry analysts have not yet compiled exact numbers. But along the way, it is creating new business models, new stresses on mobile networks and even new rules of etiquette. “All the communications – social messages, calls, texts and vide...