A while ago, people opined that the PS Vita – despite horrible battery life and a dearth of compelling game titles – could become a sort of “gamers iPad,” a tool that ends up being more than just a console. That dream is coming closer to fruition with the announcement of Skype for Vita.

The Vita can now make voice and video calls and you can even receive calls in the background while playing games. Skype credit allows you to call out to landline phones.

While the addition of the Skype app doesn’t make the Vita a fully-fledged cellphone, the app does support Wi-Fi and 3G WLAN calls and essentially makes the device the N-Gage everyone always wanted.

The app will be available for download in the Vita app store tomorrow. It will be free.

BlablaCar, a European carpooling marketplace that connects any driver who has empty seats with paying passengers, has now launched its iPhone app in the UK. The app connects drivers who have spare seats with paying passengers. At the same time its competitor Carpooling.com has released a new app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

BlablaCar’s app features the ability to post a trip then add the number of available seats and price per passenger. You can find a ride, message other travellers, rate your fellow travellers. Members also specify how “chatty” they are by choosing either “Bla”, “Blabla” or “Blablabla”; hence the name BlablaCar…

Munich-based Carpooling.com says it moves over 1 million people each month in 5,000 cities and 45 countries across Europe. Key new features of its app include messaging, online booking, search for rides, and payment with Paypal.

Both BlablaCar and Carpooling are similar to GoCarShare in the UK, and to U.S.-based startup Ridejoy and ZimRide, which also aims to be a carpooling marketplace.

Blablacar raised $10 million back in January taking total funding to $12.5 million and rolled up competitors. It now operates in Italy, Spain and the UK and has over 400,000 drivers among its members.

OS X: There are a lot of tools that'll convert videos for your iPhone, iPod, or iPad (like our favorite, Handbrake), but they aren't always easy for the average joe to use. iConvert makes it as simple as drag, drop, and click. More »

Android, by most accounts, is proving to be the most popular smartphone platform when it comes to devices getting sold today — partly due to the sheer variety of devices and price points that are out there. But a new research tool that tracks usage in real-time shows that when it comes to usage, consumers, in the U.S. at least, are far more active on Apple’s devices than on any other.

The numbers come from the ad network Chitika, which notes that in the last 24 hours, iOS devices, covering the iPhone, iPad and iPod models, accounted for just under 68 percent of all usage on its network. Android, meanwhile, accounted for just under 28 percent. Other platforms (Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc.) were less than five percent of all activity. But there have been periods in the last few days when Android accounted for as little as 19 percent of traffic (on April 19, as it happens).

You can watch the new tool in action right here.

Chitika also breaks out what kind of iOS traffic we are talking about, and it looks like iPad tablet users are sending more traffic to its network — and browsing web sites and apps where Chitika’s ads appear — than iPhone users, with iPod traffic being the smallest of all.

If you look at the graphic on the site itself, you can run the cursor over the line chart to get specific percentages.

The stickiness of iOS and the iPad are also borne out by a separate piece of research from Chitika, which found that users of iPad tablets had the highest click-through rates. Looking at “hundreds of millions” of mobile ad impressions on its network, covering April 9-15, Chitika found iOS devices had a 0.72 percent CTR, and Android had a 0.60 percent CTR.

Within iOS, iPad users had the highest CTRs at 0.80 percent, compared to 0.67 percent for iPhone and iPod had 0.62 percent.

For the real-time research, Chitika explains that the numbers come from monitoring unique impressions on mobile devices covered by the Chitika Ad Network. It says it works in a six-hour delay into the numbers for “maximum continuity of data.”

Does this sound like mobile stat watching gone too far? For the majority it may well be — but this is actually a pretty interesting bit of data for the world of mobile advertising and mobile content in general. It potentially gives ad networks, and advertisers, a lot more insight into planning campaigns on platform versus another and one device compared to another. Publishers can use this kind of data to help decide how it channels resources for serving content to different apps and platforms and devices as well.

I think that we are bound to see some kind of response from the Google camp on these usage numbers, which do not put Android into the best light. It will also be worth watching to see if other ad networks follow suit and offer similarly granular insight into daily/hourly usage.

Update: In the original post I didn’t really go into the “why” behind the numbers because I was focusing on the actual real-time results — but in response to some of the comments below, here is some further detail on that end. As these numbers are based on Chitika’s own network traffic of hundreds of millions of impressions, they are not necessarily a picture of “all” of mobile internet usage. Others below also refer to data consumption varying between iOS and Android. That may be the case but this is not about how much data is used; but traffic from ad impressions. Another person makes the point that Android devices are often bought as cheap “feature” phones and not used as much for their web capabilities. That could be another reason why Android seems to generate less traffic than you would think compared to overall market share.

Lastly, some numbers from July 2011, also from Chitika, seem to indicate that iOS’s traffic share have slightly grown. Those numbers gave iOS a 60 percent share, compared to Android’s 36.3 percent. “Others” have also grown a little since then (it was 3.3 percent in July; now it’s about 4.5 percent).

Gmail is amazing. It's chock full of more shortcuts, settings, and features than you could shake a stick at. Even if you consider yourself a Gmail ninja, though, there are quite a few tricks you might not know about (and some that Google didn't even intend). Here are our top 10 clever tricks built right into Gmail. More »

Breaking down the language barrier is tough when you aren't fluent and need to constantly look up words and phrases for basic communication. SayHi Translate takes the effort out of this by letting you speak in your native language and then repeating what you said in most any language you choose. More »

If you prefer a search engine other than Google, Bing, or Yahoo, you can add it to Safari on iOS with this jailbreak hack. More »

iOS: The latest iPad received a global voice recognition feature for us in any app and the iPhone 4S, of course, has Siri. While there is no shortage of apps that translate your voice into the written word, most are limited by a few functions. Voice Assistant, on the other hand, will send the text it translates to pretty much any app. Additionally, it allows you to email, tweet, and do a few other things without leaving the app at all. More »

I’ve tried a dozen different apps that allow you to browse Instagram on the iPad, and some of them have been very decent attempts. Iris, however, is on another level entirely.

Built from the ground up to faithfully translate the Instagram experience, the app is absolutely made with care. A clean design that keeps consistency with Instagram’s layout and interactions, full commenting and liking features and wonderful sound design make it a lovely way to browse through your photos and the ones in your stream.

The main view allows you to comment and like photos, which so many other clients do not. It has a single layout that the developers kept consistent with Instagram’s way of doing things on the iPhone. I’d personally like to be able to switch to a smaller grid of images, to see more at a time, but I respect that they wanted to mimic the stock experience as closely as possible.

The comment pane slides out from the side, letting you keep the image in view while you add your take. A single tap brings up the image in a larger lightbox view, with access to a geolocation map, which is nice. 

Your profile gives you access to your list of followers and the folks you’re following. It makes it much easier to bounce around among big lists of followers to check out their streams and profiles than on the more cramped confines of the iPhone.

In the popular selection, the grid is smaller, allowing you to see more images at once. The refresh mechanism, which is a pull lever in the bottom right, is also clever and lovely to use. Every action you perform also has a cool little sound associated with it, making it satisfying to even tap on buttons.

In your profile view, you’ll notice a small toggle that allows you to swap between a larger and smaller size of image grid, which I would like to see ported throughout. I appreciate the fidelity that the developers were trying to maintain between Instagram for iPhone and Iris, but it’s a shame not to use the larger screen real-estate more fully.

The ‘earth’ button toggles a fun view, which allows you to see all of your images mapped out by location. It also works on other people’s profiles, letting you see where they snapped the shots you’re looking at. In a nice attention to detail, the developers also added a ‘Share’ button which allows you to send a well-formatted email inviting others to follow you or any other user you think is cool.

While there are a few things that I would like to see tweaked about the way that Iris displays images, it still ends up being the best Instagram app I’ve seen for iPad. If you’re a heavy user of the service and have been looking for a great lean-back experience for managing, commenting and viewing on the iPad, then Iris is it.

➤ Iris App for iPad

It should come as no surprise that 500px is quickly becoming the popular alternative to photo sharing and hosting site Flickr, as it recently announced a $20 yearly plan that takes aim directly at Yahoo’s prized service.

To build out its community even more, the company has launched its first Android app today, and a seriously updated version of its iPad app.

The service tells us that its iPad app users spend more than 40 minutes in the app every session, checking out, interacting with, and sharing photos. The Android version, without a doubt, is set to see the same type of traction.

Not only is 500px popular for sharing photos, it’s also become a marketplace for photographers to sell prints of their work, which is something that Flickr never even attempted.

Here’s what 500px CEO and co-founder Oleg Gutsol had to say about the 500px mobile success:

We’re in the midst of a movement to reinvent the experience of photography and culture on mobile devices. The way we take photos, and what we use to take them, is evolving. The way we showcase and consume photos must follow. With our site and applications, everyone can be an artist or a curator or both, through any medium.

500px for Android, which is optimized for viewing photos on a tablet, is absolutely gorgeous:

Its iPad app has gotten a once over with Retina Display support as well as in-app purchases, so that people can buy as they browse. According to 500px, the iPad version has seen 300M pages of photos flipped through since its launch. In addition, users can now download HD versions of their favorite photos using the app.

The service itself hosts over 6M photos, which is an impressive accomplishment given that there are multiple players in the photography space.

➤ 500px for Android | iPad