News written by Matti Robinson (December, 2015)

One of the most popular messaging apps WhatsApp is down. Nearly a billion people have been suffering from the outage for the majority of the past four hours.

According to Down Detector, a site that detects services for downtime, the first reports came in four hours ago. After that the problem appeared to be resolved a couple of times but only for a moment.

As of this moment WhatsApp seems to be down again – or still – but the company is promising to work on a fix as fast as possible.

Obviously today is one of the busiest days for the messaging platforms as people are celebrating the New Year. Hopefully WhatsApp will be able to resolve the situation before your obligatory "Happy New Year" texts.

As people celebrated Christmas et al., Amazon celebrated record-setting holiday season for Prime. The company also doubled the number of Amazon devices.

According to the stats more than 3 million new people joined the Amazon Prime just in the third week of December alone. Amazon Prime shipped over 200 million items for free during the holiday season and the Christmas Eve was the busiest Prime day ever.

Amazon also sold twice as many devices compared to last year which held the record previously. The two of the top 3 most popular items on Amazon were their own products (#1 Fire tablet and #3 Fire Stick).

A record number of people also accessed Prime Music, Prime Video, and other services. The company has listed all the records, interesting facts about the most popular products, and all kinds of information about the services here.

Netflix has completely rebuilt their Windows application as a cross-platform or universal app. The new app will become available this week.

Thanks to Windows 10 and its universal app ecosystem largely the same code base is used for all the different variations of the application. Windows 10 on smartphones, tablets, PCs will be using the same app – even the Xbox One will share features. However, at first the app will only be available for tablets and PCs.

Lumia smartphones will be getting the new Netflix app "in the near future", possible in early 2016.

In addition to the architectural update the new version brings about an improved layout. Like on other platforms the categories are now browsed vertically and the titles within the categories horizontally. The description view has also been revamped.

More information about the update can be found from the Windows Experience Blog.

Earlier today Brazil court ordered mobile carriers to block WhatsApp traffic because the company had failed to cooperate in an investigation. The app that is used by over 90 million people in Brazil – and same percentage of internet users – was quickly unblocked.

The initial ban was meant to go on for 48 hours but was overturned by a São Paulo judge before the first 24 hours had expired. According to BBC, Judge Xavier de Souza said that it was "not reasonable that millions of users be affected by the inertia of the company".

Most of Brazil's internet users also use WhatsApp because of the high prices of traditional texting and mobile phone plans in general. As much as 93 percent of the country's internet population uses Facebook owned app, TechCrunch reports.

Some have questioned if the reasons for blocking are tied with the investigations of criminal activity within the messaging service or if it's a plot by the telecoms. The latter can be refuted by the fact that blocking a single service would not stop people from using online messaging. The messaging app Telegram proved the point by gaining millions of users immediately after the ban.

Smartphone manufacturers, especially the big ones, love their predictable release cycles. Apple releases an iPhone every fall and Samsung releases a top-of-the-line Galaxy S every spring.

Samsung's Galaxy S7 is "the next big thing", as Samsung likes to put it, but might steal once more a trick or two from Apple.

The rumors have it that Samsung will be unveiling the follow-up to Galaxy S6 (pictured) in February and start selling the phone as early as March. But it is the main features that Wall Street Journal is reporting on now. One of them being the key new feature of this years iPhone.

According to the WSJ sources the Galaxy S7 will feature a pressure-sensitive display, quite like the 3D Touch Apple introduces with the new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. Less surprisingly Samsung in said to upgrade the USB port to the new speedier and reversible Type-C port.

Microsoft has released an official apology to the customers who have bought their new Surface devices – or more specifically to those who've had "a less-than-perfect experience". The official apology comes with a promise to do everything to fix the issues with Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book.

Microsoft notes that it has already issued several software updates to fix some of the bugs people have experienced with the devices and their Windows 10. The flickering displays were already fixed and now it's time to tackle the lacking Sleep mode.

Users have been surprised that after putting their devices to Sleep they've awoken them with barely any battery life. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and will be fixing the Sleep mode in a software update in early 2016.

The message titled "A Note to Our Customers from The Microsoft Surface Team" doesn't do much else than assure that everything is done to right the wrongs and fix the bugs. For now all you can do is replace Sleep mode with Hibernation. More details on this temporary fix you can find from an article by Windows Central.

To the surprise of some iPhone users, Apple has started pushing aggressive advertisement to App Store users with an older iPhone models. A full screen popup ad is a new strategy in Apple's arsenal.

The popup ad (shown below) opens up as the first thing when opening the App Store on iPhone. It suggests an upgrade to the new "ridiculously powerful" iPhone 6s.

Apple has yet to comment on this advertisement but it appears that it is directed at iPhone users with models that predate iPhone 6. There's no word on what markets are affected by this but we've heard reports from the US and the UK, as with the tweet below.

This might be the first time that Apple uses App Store to promote its new devices but it certainly isn't the first time Apple is cross-promoting its other products on App Store. And it is fairly certain that the effect of this type of advertisement has been extensively discussed in Cupertino, and that the positives (sales) outweigh the negative feedback.

Like Kleenex is to tissues, or App Store is to, well, app stores, GoPro is synonymous with action cameras. But the company has revealed its next big thing, a flying camera called Karma.

Karma is of course an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a drone. This drone will be featuring GoPro's industry leading action camera technology that has already of course been attached to numerous drones around the world.

Before developing the Karma, GoPro was associated with drone manufacturer DJI. GoPro and DJI were cooperating closely even to the point that a joint quadrocopter was in the plans. However, companies drifted apart after disagreements and DJI has since started developing their own cameras.

The flying GoPro will launch next year but other details are still scarce. In addition to the name, we do know that Karma will be a quadrocopter and we have a grasp of what type of footage it can film – given that the video was actually filmed on one.

Amazon announced today that it has expanded the one-hour delivery provided by Prime Now to another 4,000 items. Amazon says the expansion includes electronics, toys, wrapping paper and even baking supplies.

Amazon's Prime Now started from Manhattan a year ago and has grown steadily. Prime Now operates in over 20 metropolitan areas in 16 states and is now starting to deliver beer, wine, spirits and other items from Eataly in Manhattan.

The company says it is the "procrastinator's dream" and promises that it'll deliver the tens of thousands of items this holiday until midnight on December 24th. Prime Now one-hour delivery is $7.99 and two-hour delivery is free

Prime Now is available in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, Orange County, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Seattle and Richmond.

A month and a half ago Reuters rumored that Sony's booming camera business, one of the few divisions making profit in the company, would be acquiring more camera sensor know-how.

Now the rumor has been confirmed as the Sony and Toshiba have come to an agreement over Toshiba's camera sensor business. Sony will pay Toshiba 19 billion yen or $154 million for its sensor business. This includes approximately 1100 employees and the manufacturing facility in Oita, Japan.

Sony's Exmor camera sensors have been one of the company's few flagships that have kept the boat afloat during rather tough couple of years. This will certainly solidify Sony's competence more and give muscle against rivals for the ever-important deals like that of the iPhone camera sensors.

Toshiba and Sony are said to finalize the deal before April next year.

The new console generation provides developers good tools to create powerful games for both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Even though the differences between the consoles have nearly diminished, the tools and the potential that developers have in use differ slightly.

Now it seems that Sony has released some additional power that developers – game developers in particular – have in their arsenal. According to the members of the Beyond3D forum, the new FMOD Studio documentation reveals that Sony has unlocked the seventh core for the use in game developers.

Eurogamer reports that PS4 will still use the seventh core for some of the operating system's functions and won't be wholly in the use of game devs. The eight core is still used solely by the OS.

Sony has yet to comment on this but it does seem like the future games might be able to use a bit more of PlayStation 4's processing power. Microsoft has made a similar change for the Xbox One earlier this year.

Samsung announced today three new Galaxy handsets that will update the midrange A series. The metal and glass design of Galaxy A3, A5, and A7 gets a facelift, but there are some specs changes to look forward to too.

The major upgrades are bigger batteries (albeit thicker, heavier devices), better cameras, and in case of A5 and A7, Samsung Pay enabling fingerprint sensors. Samsung didn't announce an A8, so the new A7 is the new top-of-the-line A series model for now. It features a 5.5 inch Full HD Super AMOLED panel, 3 GB of RAM, 16 GB microSD expandable storage and a new optically stabilized 13 megapixel shooter alongside 5 megapixel selfie camera.

A5's display is a tad smaller at 5.2 inches but retains the Full HD resolution. In addition to a smaller battery (3300mAh vs 2900mAh), the middle sibling loses a gig of RAM. In other aspects it is virtually identical to the A7. A3 is clearly a lower tier model with only a 720p HD display at 4.7 inches, 1.5 GB of RAM, less processing power, no optical stabilization and no fingerprint sensor. Also Fast Charging found on A5 and A7 is missing on the cheapest model.

Starting from China the new A series will come available in mid December. The pricing obviously depends on the market but European prices of 329 euros (A3) and 429 euros (A5) have been released. There is no official word on the price of A7 but an off contract price of $499 would not be a surprise.

Samsung Electronics has decided to switch things up a little bit. The mobile devices have been on the decline since 2013 and consumer electronics is struggling as well. That means two of the CEOs are stepping out of their respective development positions, reports Bloomberg.

The mobile chief J.K. Shin will leave the position for Koh Dong Jin who has been influential in the current generation of Galaxy S and Galaxy Note products. Koh Dong Jin has lead the development of Samsung Pay as well as Samsung's own mobile operating system Tizen.

The consumer electronics CEO B.K. Yoon will leave his daily duties. Like Shin, Yoon will retain the CEO title but will focus on future long-term strategies. The third and last of the CEOs, Kwon Oh-hyun, will continue to oversee semiconductor operations that have been performing better.