September 2010 Archives

Sep

Mozilla's Stunning Seabird Mobile Phone Concept - This Is What Dreams Are Made Of [VIDEO]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in News, Off-Topic, Videos

Last Updated: August 13th, 2011

Folks, I wish I could have the pleasure of telling you that what you're about to see is available now or even that it will be available in the next couple of years. Unfortunately, at this stage, this Seabird mobile phone concept, designed by Billy May for Mozilla, is just a dream. A dream, so beautifully projected in this video that it made me feel both sadness and happiness, inspiration and despair, awe and... well, you'll know what I mean after you watch it.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce Seabird:

If you happen to have 3D glasses, Billy ...

Sep

Fresh ROM 3.3.0.1 Based On The Latest EVO 4G OTA 3.29.651.5 Now Available For Download

Posted by Brad Ganley in EVO 4G (Supersonic), Mods, News

Last night we posted about Flipzmod3's caffeine-fueled rampage on the new OTA update for the HTC EVO. The OTA got rooted really-really fast, and now we have a fully-working, stable ROM based on it.

Last night, flipz, the author of Fresh ROM, sent out a test version of Fresh ROM 3.3.0 to all the donors/testers, and we did our job well. We nitpicked every tiny little bug, and the result is that tiny little .1 at the end of the public release flipz announced this morning, with fixes for all known bugs. Here's the changelog so you know what ...

Sep

T-Mobile G2 Pre-Orders Starting Tomorrow For Existing Customers?

Posted by Jaroslav Stekl in G2 (Vision), HTC, News, T-Mobile

We already knew it was coming soon thanks to T-Mobile's own online store, but only know has TmoNews discovered that "soon" could mean as early as tomorrow.

That's right, if this internal screenshot proves to be anything more than an image crudely put together in Photoshop, existing T-Mobile customers will be able to pre-order the device starting September 24 and ending October 4. The offer will, apparently, be available at "select" T-Mobile retail stores, through "Care upgrades," and, of course, online at the T-Mobile's dedicated G2 website.

While there is no mention of pricing (although there does appear to ...

Sep

Verizon’s Motorola Droid X Froyo Update Causing Issues?

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Droid X (Shadow), Froyo 2.2, News, Verizon Wireless

After we posted that Verizon had begun their rollout of the Froyo update for the Droid X yesterday, a number of people told us they were having issues with music and ringtones on their devices. As this seems to be more than an isolated incident, we pinged Verizon to check if they were aware of the issue or had anything in the works. Unfortunately, all we received back was a curt "We're looking into it."

It doesn't seem to be affecting more than a minor percentage of users, so it's likely most people updated without a hiccup. Still, this is ...

Sep

Want Sense On Your Non-HTC Device? Download The Sense Theme For ADWLauncher

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Devices By Manufacturer, Mods, News

XDA-Devs forum member JAguirre1231 has put together a theme for ADWLauncher that makes it look pretty similar to the Sense UI launcher found on HTC devices. Unfortunately, at this point only MDPI devices are supported (for those who don't know, MDPI is for lower-resolution phones, while HDPI is for phones such as the EVO, Epic, and Droid series). However, JAguirre says in the thread that he's planning on making an HDPI version as well.

Installation is more complex than ADW themes found in the Market, but still isn't too rough:

Download the .zip (provided at source link), then unzip
Install

...

Sep

SwiftKey Keyboard, One Of Android's Best Keyboards, Sheds Beta Status, Goes Premium; On Sale For $0.99 Until September 30th, $3.99 After

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

SwiftKey Keyboard has been in beta ever since its introduction to the Android Market a few months ago. Having tried Swype, I also jumped on SwiftKey to give it a fair shot and ended up sticking with it. Yes, it was that good.

SwiftKey is different from other keyboards because it uses predictive recognition based on both tons of statistical information and your own typing habits. In fact, you can make whole sentences without typing a single key and just picking default suggestions.

Every company needs to make money at some point, and so today, having shed the ...

Sep

New EVO 4G Radio v2.15.00.09.01 and PRI v1.77_003 From The 3.29.651.5 OTA Now Available - Download And Flash Away

Posted by Brad Ganley in EVO 4G (Supersonic), Mods, News

flipz, the chef behind Fresh ROM (one of the first and still best ROMs for HTC Hero and EVO 4G) has wasted no time picking apart and giving us pieces of the new over-the-air update for the EVO. In his latest blog post, flipz gives us the new PRI v1.77_003 and the new radio v2.15.00.09.01.

If you're not too keen on what a PRI or radio are exactly, don't be ashamed. Here are the basics:

PRI: Flipz himself said it best in this quote: “… a connection between your phone and the radio… responsible for carrying both voice and

...

Sep

10" Samsung Galaxy Tab Coming In First Half Of 2011

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Galaxy Tab, News, Samsung

SiliconRepublic ran a piece explaining which carriers in Ireland will be selling the Galaxy Tab. At the bottom of the article (the very last sentence), they nonchalantly mention that Samsung country manager Gary Twohig says they'll be releasing a 10" Tablet sometime in the first half of 2011. The only other details included in the article: it will run Android, and rock the V8 JavaScript engine.

Engadget speculates that Samsung may be waiting for Gingerbread or Honeycomb, which certainly sounds like a fair assessment to me. After all, Google recently said that Android 2.x isn't designed with tablets in mind, ...

Sep

Android Explodes On American Corporate Scene, Gaining Market Share Fast

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in News

Yesterday, Macworld ran an article on Android's popularity among US businesses. In a survey of over 1,600 corporations, Android's growth is more than 20 times higher than that of the iPhone. In fact, 16% of respondents said their firms are already using Android devices, up from 10% just three months earlier. By contrast, iPhone use increased to 31%, up from 30% - growing, but not nearly as fast as Android.

Still, despite the fact that Android has experienced significantly more growth in the past few months, keep in mind that the iPhone already has nearly twice the market share of ...

Sep

Samsung Intercept Coming To Virgin Mobile USA

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Intercept, News, Virgin Mobile

Virgin Mobile announced via an image upload on their Facebook page that they're landing the Samsung Intercept as their first Android phone. No word yet on pricing or release date, but we can't imagine it would be too terribly much (should be in the range of their LG Rumor Touch).

What we do know are the specs of the Intercept:

3.2” 240 x 400 px LCD display
4 row slide-out QWERTY keypad
Android 2.1
Samsung S3C6410 ARM 11 CPU @ 800 MHz
512 MB ROM, 256 MB RAM
3.2 MP Camera (with video)
802.11g, Bluetooth (2.1), headphone jack
2 GB

...

Sep

The New HTC EVO 4G 3.29.561.5 Update Already Rooted

Posted by Brad Ganley in EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, Mods, News

Earlier, HTC and Sprint announced that they would be rolling out an update for the EVO 4G to fix some issues. Very shortly after the announcement (not the update itself, which literally went live 30 minutes ago, but the announcement of it, mind you), a rooted version of said update was released by the insane, caffeine fueled developers at XDA. Normally, after an update such as this you would have to wait for some kind dev to root the update or take advantage of Unrevoked Forever. Apparently, though, the Android community was ahead of HTC themselves in releasing ...

Sep

T-Mobile Teases Online Pre-Orders For G2 : Coming Soon

Posted by Brian O'Toole in G2 (Vision), News, T-Mobile

While there have been several third party retailers already grabbing headlines with pre-orders of the T-Mobile G2, T-Mo themselves have been keeping mum about when the phone will go up for sale. Well, several T-Mobile customers have been reporting today that the G2 has appeared in their online store with an enticing label: “Pre-ordering starts soon!”

While this is no concrete date, it’s still enough to set vanilla Froyo fanboys’ hearts aflutter, despite the continued lack of an official release date for the G2 (don’t give up hope, guys).

Lest we forget in all the excitement: RadioShack are already advertising ...

Sep

Updates For HTC EVO 4G And Hero Now Rolling Out, Bug Fixes Abound

Posted by Jaroslav Stekl in EVO 4G (Supersonic), Hero (Sprint, HeroC), HTC, News

Thought the Fascinate was the only device getting a ~~super exciting~~ bug-fixing update today? Wrong!

As it turns out, Sprint's just decided to push out updates to not one, but two devices: the infamous HTC EVO 4G, and its slightly older brother, the Hero. The former of those two devices is, according to Sprint's official changelog, getting an update that fixes an issue with multiple GMail Account syncing as well as an issue with calendar event editing... and nothing else.

However, Engadget has managed to grab a screen shot from an internal Sprint document that also acknowledges fixes of ...

Sep

Dell Streak Headed To Best Buy While Its 7-Inch Brethren Gets Teased (Could This Be The Looking Glass?)

Posted by Jaroslav Stekl in Dell, Looking Glass, News, Streak

Ever since the Dell Streak launched with Android 1.6, the company has been making desperate attempts to bring the 5-inch tablet/phone hybrid into the eyes of the public, but somehow, the public just hasn't noticed yet (even releasing the source code didn't help).

Dell's latest attempt at stardom? Making the Streak available from Best Buy. No word on that long overdue update to FroYo, lowering that sky-high price tag, or even that leaked update to Eclair, but hey - at least now you can get it from a location where all employees are dressed in blue, ...

Sep

New Survey Says Consumers Want Tablets, Android Has High Brand Loyalty But Low Brand Recognition, And Bigger Is Better

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Devices By Manufacturer, News

Sybase (owned by SAP) commissioned a survey on tablets, and the results are rather surprising. Before I dig in, however, I feel it's only fair to point out what I perceive as a flaw in the survey: they provide minimal information on the survey questions and how it was conducted. As a result, it's hard to tell whether the survey was free of bias; based on how the results are presented with bias, I'm guessing not.

That said, Sybase made a spokesperson available to talk about the results, and I'm sure they could clarify things (or pull the wool over ...