Today Zynga rolled out a shiny new update to Hanging with Friends for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Android will probably have to keep waiting…). I just downloaded it to my iPhone 4S. I’m happy to report it hasn’t crashed yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the Hanging with Friends Facebook page to see if others start having problems.

So what’s new?

Zynga has updated the Extinguish lifeline, and I can only hope they have made it worth using. In Hanging with Friends, the Extinguish lifeline is available for use while trying to guess your opponent’s word. I don’t have much problem solving words very often thanks to my Hanging with Friends Word Solver. But every now and then someone picks a hard word, and I need help. The Extinguish lifeline is one I rarely use because it has historically been fairly useless. In the past it would remove 4 letters that are not in your word. In theory, this is supposed to help narrow down your word. In reality, it didn’t reliably extinguish letters that I would have considered picking anyway! It seemed that Extinguish would randomly pick 4 letters without really thinking about what would be helpful.

In the 4.12 update of Hanging with Friends, Zynga has changed the Extinguish lifeline to now remove 5 letters instead of 4. Now a 5th random letter would be just as likely to be as useless as 4 random letters. The exciting part is that Zynga now claims that the Extinguish lifeline is “smarter about what it takes out for you.” I haven’t even had a chance to try it out yet, but I have my fingers crossed that Extinguish becomes a useful tool in my Hanging with Friends aresenal. I’ll report back on how good I think it works later.

Zynga also claims to have improved the loading time and removed some bugs from Hanging with Friends. We will have to wait and see if they’ve added more bugs than they removed. Oh yeah, they also added some new features to the coin store to help you find ways to spend your coins on the balloons and characters. Even though I hover around 5k coins, I’ve yet to buy anything in the store. Maybe I should…