Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

If you needed any more proof that Apple's lame cat-and-mouse game with the iPhone jailbreak community has only served to increase the scene's resourcefulness and creativity, look no further than the iDongle, a slick piece of hacker-made hardware that can jailbreak and activate an iPhone 3GS or iPod touch running OS 3.1.2 just by plugging it into the dock connector. What's more, it allows ... Full story

Naturally, we need to first disclaim this noise by saying that rumors of third-party multitasking capability in the iPhone are as old as the iPhone SDK itself. That said, it's hard to ignore a new reference to a "multitasking dialog box" buried deep within the iPhone SDK 3.2 beta that -- while not new to beta 4 specifically -- we're told didn't exist in ... Full story

Palm just showed us the Unreal Engine 3 running on webOS, which apparently took a couple weeks to port over to the platform using that fancy new PDK . It runs at a pretty smooth clip, with just a tiny bit of artifacting in our enemy's death animation. As an added bit of wow factor, Palm has it currently setup to demonstrate the game ... Full story

We already got a look at Microsoft's little XNA show-and-tell as relates to Windows Phone 7 Series, but our colleague Andrew Yoon over at Joystiq had a chance for longer sit-down with Xbox Live general manager Ron Pessner and XNA Game Studio manager Michael Klucher at GDC today, and he's been kind enough to share the interview with us. The main topic of conversation ... Full story

Were you up late at night trying to imagine what a Mobiado 712ZAF might look like were it covered in 8 microns of 18-karat gold? Well, an honest night of peaceful slumber might finally be within reach now that the Canadian company has answered the call with the 712GCB. The pricey candybar carries over everything you love (or hate) about the 712ZAF, including the ... Full story

Mobile manufacturer and platform market share stats for the US are in for the month of January thanks to comScore, and as usual, they tell a fascinating (and somewhat unpredictable) story of what's actually going on at the cash registers. Motorola -- which has long since fallen off its high horse on the global stage -- still maintains a commanding presence in the American ... Full story

Even though Microsoft's big MIX event is still days away, the Windows Phone 7 Series development platform is already pretty well defined. It's also clear that Microsoft wants to keep things tidy for developers by requiring all WP7 phones to meet a certain base-level spec . Now, thanks to a post from Microsoft's Shawn Hargreaves, we know the display resolution for the first batch ... Full story

Back in January 2009, as Vodafone was preparing to close a Full story

Filed under: Cell Phones As far back as 2008, retailers were flirting with the idea of offering customers coupons via cell phones. It never really caught on, but, now, Target hopes to change that. According to a press release , the retailer began a program today that allows customers to receive digital coupons on their cell phones. Using a barcode on the screen, customers ... Full story

Filed under: Cell Phones Forget thumbing through racks of paper greeting cards . Some card companies are now offering a video alternative on cell phones . According to The New York Times , American Greetings has taken the lead, and is now offering short video messages that are selected from a Web site and sent to a phone. Best of all, these e-cards are ... Full story

We hadn't heard that the Storm2's unique piezo-actuated touchscreen was acting up in any statistically significant way, but apparently, there'd been enough with dodgy lower left corners to prompt RIM to do something about it. BerryScoop and BlackBerry Leaks are reporting that Verizon stores have been ordered to return their existing stock in favor of new Storm2s with "silicone actuators" added to "to improve ... Full story

We know you've barely recovered from our Devour review , but Moto just threw another Blur-ified phone in our laps this afternoon - the CLIQ XT . We've been playing around with the Android 1.5-based, Flash Lite -supported, multitouch-capable handset for the last couple of hours -- but before we grace you with our first impressions, just a fair warning: we don't yet know ... Full story

It feels like the Brigade's been in the public conscience for forever and a day (and let's be honest, November is forever and a day ago by phone standards), but amazingly, Casio's latest rugged G'zOne for Verizon still isn't being offered -- at least, not in any official capacity. It seems some HowardForums posters have managed to order and receive their Brigades by calling ... Full story

Granted, they got off to a slow start -- but every since the Dream and Magic originally launched, Rogers has done a pretty commendable job of leading the Android charge north of the border. Latest in the line is Samsung's venerable i5700 Galaxy Spica , a phone that won't win any awards for running up-to-date firmware (it still rocks Cupcake ) nor any medals ... Full story

Whether you covet your Irish friends' ability to make in-flight cellphone calls or value your aerial naps too much to care either way, you must admit that the promise of in-flight SMS, MMS, voice messaging, and text email is tantalizing. To this end, the kids at Asiq have announced a little something called the Bluetooth Access Point. This device uses the aircraft's satellite link ... Full story

Guys, guys, look: unboxing is our job. We know it's fun and we know it brings eyeballs to your site, but we think your customers would be better served if you just concentrated on shipping the mighty X10 rather than teasing them with a product they can't yet have. Apparently, Sony Ericsson just took delivery of its first commercial samples of its inaugural Android ... Full story

Filed under: Cell Phones , BlackBerry , iPhone Winter may be drawing to a painstakingly slow close, but the countless potholes it leaves in its wake can linger for much longer. Whereas most of us simply wait for the public works crew to get around to fixing the mini-craters in our streets, a new GPS-based Web site called SeeClickFix now gives citizens the ability ... Full story

Filed under: Cell Phones One day, Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology grew annoyed at a fellow train passenger who was loudly squawking into their cell phone. "I thought 'I need to change this'," she recently told the BBC, after unveiling -- at the Cebit Electronics Fair in Germany -- a device that can essentially read lips. Called "silent communication," Shultz's ... Full story

Filed under: Cell Phones At an age when we were still playing with plastic toys, 10- and 11-year-old kids today are downloading games, sending text messages and surfing the Web with cell phones . After the communications fall-out of 9/11, many parents saw cell phone ownership as not just a priority, but a safety measure. Providers cashed in on family plans, and the nation ... Full story

Filed under: Cell Phones Once a bastion of laziness, the office cubicle may no longer be safe from workers' oldest enemy: work. According to Asiajin , a team of researchers from KDDI Corporation, one of Japan's largest cell phone companies, recently developed a technology that would let your boss remotely monitor your every move. The cornerstone of the monitoring system is deceptively simple: a ... Full story

If this contoured piece of QWERTY kit looks familiar, it should -- it's the same as the Freeform that came late last year to Alltel . US Cellular's version is the same thing (heck, it's even the same color) with a 1.3 megapixel camera, 2.2-inch 176 x 144 display, four-row QWERTY keyboard, and memory expansion up to 16GB via microSD, perfect for the on-board ... Full story

AT&T's preaching about the mucho dinero it's dropping into renovating its network to pretty much anyone who'll listen these days, and a veritable cornucopia of press releases this week start to go into detail on some of the upgrades we'll be seeing over the course of 2010. We're counting at least a dozen here, covering everything from New York City to Florida to Oklahoma, ... Full story

As mocoNews points out, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a fascinating (if not obvious) observation at his MWC keynote last month: for his company, mobile's now the primary focus while the desktop plays a secondary role. Yahoo seems to be reaching a similar conclusion on news that it has officially broken up its Mobile unit, instead moving mobile-focused employees into other divisions within the ... Full story

Guess we don't have to wait until MIX to have all our Windows Phone 7 Series questions answered! Microsoft's Eric Rudder, speaking at TechEd Middle East, showed off a game developed in Visual Studio as a singular project (with 90% shared code) that plays on Windows with a keyboard, a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype device with accelerometer and touch controls, and the Xbox ... Full story

Guess we don't have to wait until MIX to have all our Windows Phone 7 Series questions answered! Microsoft's Eric Rudder, speaking at TechEd Middle East, showed off a game developed in Visual Studio as a singular project (with 90% shared code) that plays on Windows with a keyboard, a Windows Phone 7 Series prototype device with accelerometer and touch controls, and the Xbox ... Full story

Just days following its announcement, the FCC saw fit to grant Nokia's low-end C5 all the regulatory approval it needs (well, not all , but some) to start hitting shelves stateside. Whether it'll actually be sold in any official capacity in North America is another story altogether -- but the prospect of a sub-$200 unlocked smartphone from any top-tier manufacturer is a difficult one ... Full story

Just days following its announcement, the FCC saw fit to grant Nokia's low-end C5 all the regulatory approval it needs (well, not all , but some) to start hitting shelves stateside. Whether it'll actually be sold in any official capacity in North America is another story altogether -- but the prospect of a sub-$200 unlocked smartphone from any top-tier manufacturer is a difficult one ... Full story

Heads-up, kids -- AT&T's first-ever slice of Android is now available. Just let that sink in a minute. Feels good, doesn't it? Motorola's Backflip has gone on sale just as promised, and that debatably awesome Blur action can be yours for $99.99 after mail-in rebate and a 2-year agreement. So, you pulling the trigger, or you are you waiting for whatever Dell and / ... Full story

Heads-up, kids -- AT&T's first-ever slice of Android is now available. Just let that sink in a minute. Feels good, doesn't it? Motorola's Backflip has gone on sale just as promised, and that debatably awesome Blur action can be yours for $99.99 after mail-in rebate and a 2-year agreement. So, you pulling the trigger, or you are you waiting for whatever Dell and / ... Full story

Here's a little spicy rumor for you Palm fans on this tranquil Sunday: according to TopTongueBarry who claims to work for AT&T , his company has just finished certification tests with GSM flavors of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus ahead of a possible April 26th launch -- a date not far from what we've heard earlier . However, the bigger news from Barry ... Full story