Visual Supply Co (VSCO) has announced that its smartphone camera app VSCO Cam is coming to Android.

Finally. VSCO Cam is my favourite app for editing my iPhone photos. Android photographers will be delighted to finally be able to add this awesome app to their arsenal.

Users will also be able to access VSCO Grid, an online gallery for users to showcase their works.

WIRED.com reports that Android’s Google Keyboard is not correcting certain words.

The banned directory includes “butt” and “geek,” all seven of George Carlin’s dirty words, a frat party’s worth of homophobia and misogyny, and is peppered with pornographic sub genres and fetishistically obscure medical terms, like “gonadatrophia” and “irrumination.” Genitalia is banned (with special attention paid to women’s bodies) as well as a mystifying selection of words that aren’t generally considered offensive, like “thud” and “LSAT.”

Taken as a whole, Google’s list suggests not only a surprising discomfort with sexuality, but also reproductive health and undergarments. Words like “panty,” “braless,” “Tampax,” “lactation,” and “preggers” are censored along with sexual health vocabulary like “uterus” and “STI.”

“I try to Swype-type the word ‘condom’ and I get ‘condition’ or ‘confusion,’” said Jillian York, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There is no context in which that makes any sense. Grow up, Android.”

It is fun to text my Android-using friends, especially when they are too drunk or tired to check their typos. This is going to take some fun out of it unless they disable the filter.

Android Central reports that Samsung has announced three new colours for its Galaxy Note 3.

Its black and white models now comes with rose gold versions that has gold instead of silver accents. It also unveiled a merlot red version.

HTC launched a gold version of its HTC One after producing a limited edition in real gold. After launching a limited edition gold Galaxy S4, Samsung is bringing gold to the mass market with the gold Galaxy Note 3.

I think we are way past the debate on whether a gold phone appeals to the public. The gold iPhone 5s has silenced the critics.

Samsung doesn’t seem to understand that a gold plastic phone feels completely different from a gold aluminium phone.

Vlad Savov writes on The Verge about his experience with the Jolla phone.

All the effort of adapting to Jolla might be worth it if the device offered some unique advantage over others on the smartphone market, but it doesn’t. The only standout quality it has is the goodwill of old Nokia loyalists and those who like to support grassroots projects. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a very good smartphone here, and that’s what you need if you intend to compete with behemoths like Google, whose Nexus 5 is a startlingly good value at 70 euros less.

The Jolla’s strength is in having a lighter software stack — underpinned by the Qt framework, which provides the basis both for its native apps and its UI — than Android while still being compatible with Android apps. Alas, not being an actual Android device, it lacks access to the Google Play Store, so you’re left to fend for yourself with the limited Yandex and Jolla app stores and the downloadable Amazon Appstore. You can sideload app APKs if you wish, but that’d require that you understand what the process involves and where to find the requisite software. It’s rough going.

The product is still rough on the edges, but it has a passionate team working on it. There is potential for Jolla to become a good alternative to Apple and Android smartphones. But at the moment, most consumers would probably go for similarly priced phones that has better features. I can’t see people going for this phone unless they want to support the Jolla team.

Hackathons are usually greeted positively, though the way that Salesforce handled the judging of its recent hackathon seems pretty disappointing. One of the most notable issues is the rule that teams can only start working on their apps from Oct 25, and that they must be coded from scratch. That sounds fine until you realize that the winning app (Upshot) was also demoed on Oct 8 at a Salesforce meetup. Salesforce eventually responded that it was acceptable to use pre-existing code as long as the code did not comprise of the majority of the app and did not violate any third party’s rights. Only mentioning that after the winning app was discovered to use pre-existing code hardly seems fair, and still doesn’t resolve the issue that it was demoed before the Hackathon started.

To make matters worse, one of the engineers in the winning team was a Salesforce enginner for a good nine years. Though the rules state that employees as of Sept 1st 2013 would not be able to enter, and since this person was employed until sometime this year, it’s probably still within the rules, but considering the issues mentioned above, it’s certainly going to cause some discontent amongst contestants.

The Dirty Secret Behind the Salesforce $1M Hackathon

While Salesforce rules say employees as of Sep 1, 2013 could not enter the hackathon, it appears people who were employed not just as recently as this year, but who is “Formerly an engineer at Salesforce for 9 years. Lead engineer on Salesforce Analytics. Tech lead for Custom Report Types and many other reporting features” sure are allowed to participate and win. And guess what their app was? A “tool that lets you easily create and edit [Salesforce] reports on a mobile device.”

The company did get around to officially responding to the issue on its blog, even going so far as to announce a second winner for the $1 million prize. Unfortunately some folks also noticed that the folks behind the second winning app (Healthcare.love) work for a company that Salesforce has invested in. Unless the rules explicitly state otherwise, this usually isn’t an issue, but then again, we are dealing with a sensitive situation here, and the complaints are still coming in.

While Android and iOS devices are constantly fighting for the top end of the market, Windows Phone has slowly and steadily been working the low end of the market. That’s not to say that Android doens’t compete there too. There are countless cheap Android phones that flood the market, and more are being churned out by manufacturers each day.

The interesting thing to note is that since it’s fairly easy (and cheap) to have Android running on a phone, there are so many low-end Android devices with sub-par user experiences on the market, normally due to underpowered processors or the lack of RAM. So far Windows Phone hasn’t had to contend with that issue much, as most of the Windows Phones in the market are currently being churned out by Nokia. Even the lower end Nokia Lumia 525, which is priced around $199, has some respectable hardware, which should offer a reasonable user experience.

Could the strategy of releasing cheap and good low-end Windows Phones actually beat Android at its own game?

The Windows Phone may be quietly becoming a real competitor to Android

That’s not what ordinary shoppers thought. Numbers out this morning from market research firm Kantar Worldpanel show that more people than ever before are buying the phone, and not just in its traditional stronghold of Latin America. For the three months from August to October, the Windows phone’s share of smartphone sales doubled or more over the year prior in nearly every large European country, while also showing respectable gains in Australia and the United States. The only place its market share fell is in China, which is unsurprising given that China’s market is dominated by local players who tend to install their own versions of the free Android operating system.