Tech News » phone

Early Android 2.0 "Donut" build available, up and running on G1

admin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:15:08 +0000

Android’s official code repository has been updated with a fresh load of Donut stuff in the past day or so, and as you might imagine, the dev community is already having a field day with it. Early reports show that all of the features demoed at I/O this year have made it into this cut in one form or another, including universal search, text-to-speech, and gesture support, allowing users to draw symbols on the screen to trigger actions. What’s more, though, the codebase is showing signs of CDMA support — a must for Sprint and Verizon, of course, both of whom will almost certainly have Android sets at one point or another — and a cool 5-in-1 bank of toggle switches in a home screen widget that can be used to control common features like Bluetooth and WiFi.

Read the whole article on Engadget

Seidio Plam Pre battery adds more staying power, retains slim figure

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:04:15 +0000

Admit it, your 1150mAh stock Palm Pre battery is far less than stellar — it’s okay, we won’t tell anyone. In fact, you can pick up an even larger, 1350mAh battery from Seidio that manages to keep the same physical proportions as its predecessor, meaning no dead giveaway / gaudy bulge the back of the phone. Ideally, that’d get ya an almost twenty percent bump in usage, but we doubt it pans out so nicely in field testing.

Read the whole article on Engadget

Poll: How’s your Palm Pre holding up?

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:23:05 +0000

It’s been nearly a month since the launch of Palm’s newest handset , the Pre . Since then, we here at Engadget have heard some vague and hard to substantiate claims of hardware failures — cracked screens, a little broken plastic here and there — but nothing on a large scale, so far as we can tell. We thought it was about time to turn it over to you the readers (the ones lucky enough to have a Pre, anyway), to tell us how the phone is holding up physically.

Read the whole article on Engadget

BlackBerry Curve 8520 blessed by FCC; T-Mobile subscribers’ mouths water

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:07:53 +0000

Yeah, we’ve already confirmed that the BlackBerry Curve 8520 will be dropping on T-Mobile next month but while the Tour trolls are occupied with a flurry of new fodder , why not take a moment to enjoy it once again? Mmmmm, optical trackball. T-Mobile customers are often forced to wait what seems like ages for hot new devices so it’s always nice to see what looks like a timely release shaping up.

Read the whole article on BoyGeniusReport

iPhone 3G S Dropped in Swimming Pool: Real or Fake? [Video]

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:22:03 +0000

If you’re thinking of belatedly picking up an iPhone 3G S this weekend, be assured that your new phone can swim…maybe. A video posted to YouTube last week, and bubbling up on Twitter today, purports to show an iPhone 3G S user testing out his new phone at the swimming pool…before accidentally dropping it right in. Miraculously, the iPhone survives and keeps filming – and yet the setup seems almost too good to be true.

Read the whole article on Mashable

iPhone 3GS: $179 to build says iSuppli

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:35:31 +0000

iSuppli’s just released its estimated cost of Apple’s newest offering, the iPhone 3GS . Total costs for the 16GB model costs $178.96 to manufacture, according to them — give or take $4.63 more than the 8GB iPhone 3G estimate from last year. It’s also about $40 more than iSuppli’s most recent manufacturing estimate for the Palm Pre . The estimate covers only materials, and doesn’t take into account various costs such as shipping and distribution, packaging, royalty fees or all the miscellaneous accessories included with each handset.

Read the whole article on Engadget

Homebrew Pre firmware just a button, cable away?

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:59:50 +0000

If you were to put the Pre on a scale of hacker friendliness from 1 to 10, where 1 is the iPhone (remember how long it took for the first jailbreaks back in the day?) and 10 is, say, OpenMoko , we’re starting to get the impression that Palm’s latest effort falls somewhere way past the 5 mark. We got out first hint that they’re being good sports about letting developers play with the Konami code access to developer mode , and now we’ve got news that it’s easy — nay, trivial — to run whatever firmware you’d like on the phone. It seems all you’ve got to do is hold down the volume up key when connecting the Pre to your computer via USB, then you can flash the phone ’til you’re blue in the face; even better, the enterprising dev who found the trick says that it’s mega simple to modify the stock build and he’d wiped out the activation check with minimal effort. This can only be good news for tweakers and anyone wanting to walk off the App Catalog’s beaten path, and if this ultimately means we’re a few solid steps closer to a Pre running WinMo 6.1, sign us up.

Read the whole article on Engadget

The Short Lifespan Of The iPhone

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:18:14 +0000

For the past several weeks, I’ve been noticing something about my iPhone: Severe slowness. I put it sleep and wake it back up, clear its memory (with an app ), restart it and even sometimes manually reboot it — some of these methods alleviate the symptoms, sometimes. Other times, I have to just deal with it being too unbearably slow to do much of anything, including the basic phone functionality like placing a call or sending a text message. And sometimes the iPhone gets really hot, even when it’s in its sleep state, and I’ll turn it back on to see the battery mostly drained.

Read the whole article on TechCrunch

Microsoft’s Bing mobile site now live

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:31:11 +0000

We’re not sure if Microsoft plans to get as deep into the mobile website business as Google but as of yesterday, the company’s new Bing mobile site is alive and ready for action. Bing, for those who took a long weekend, is Microsoft’s new search engine ; a reincarnation of Microsoft Live Search that is infinitely more usable. Since its launch yesterday in preview form, Bing has definitely received a fair amount of acclaim from around the blogosphere and preliminary user feedback is pretty positive as well. In the short time we’ve tested the site so far, Bing mobile is no different.

Read the whole article on BoyGeniusReport

San Francisco First City to Instate City-Wide 311 Twitter Program

admin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:02:15 +0000

San Francisco is hip to Twitter, and not just when it comes to its tech savvy users. Starting today, the City of San of Francisco will support all 311 services via Twitter, with the help of Twitter CRM tool CoTweet . Now citizens can send direct messages 24 hours a day to the sf311 Twitter account to report standard non-emergency city-related sightings (like pot holes), request street cleanings, and any other service already supported by the phone or website. The announcement was made today by San Francisco’s Mayor, Gavin Newsom, and Biz Stone in a press conference (video pending).

Read the whole article on Mashable