There were rumors out there that the iPhone would be coming to authorized resellers soon, and we’re finally starting to see it showing up. Surprisingly, The Shack will be the first one out the gate.
The story dropped this morning, via an announcement from the executive vice president of store operations. The letter said that the phone will be sold initially from company owned stores in the Dallas Ft. Worth and NYC areas. The nationwide rollout is expected to start in early 2010. No word yet on exactly what the value add of buying the phone from The Shack will be, but time will tell. Maybe they’ll throw in a free AA battery.
♪It’s close to midnight and something cheesy’s lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight, you see a phone that almost makes you barf♪
Man. Just last weekend, I was looking at my boring ol’ phone and thinking to myself: if only this were covered in faux-gold and diamonds and molded to look vaguely like Michael Jackson’s torso!
Some of the main features, according to the only available pictures, are “High-definition Camera”, “Ebook”, and “Calling leave word”. SOLD.
[Shanzhai Via Engadget Mobile]
Early this morning, 200 Android developers woke up to one hell of an e-mail: they’d made it into the final round of the second Android Developer Challenge, and were thus one giant step closer to as much as $250,000.
Android Developer Challenge 2 officially began way back in May, though the actual voting didn’t begin until some time in September. The votes were split amongst Android users and Googlers (with the latter getting a 55% say), with all voting taking place in a special, custom-made application. To be eligible, applications had to be completely fresh (read: no updates allowed) to the Android Market as of August 1st, couldn’t have been a part of the first Challenge, and must run on Android v1.5.
My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week’s iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I’ve got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it all seems to indicate one thing: people want more. We hear you.
There are a number of worthwhile topics I simply didn’t get a chance to touch on, and a few observations I’ve made since that are worth mentioning. For those, may we present: Round 2.
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Not sure what to make of this Droid-alike but it seems Verizon has another Droid on its way, this time called the Saygus VPhone V1. It looks very much like the standard droid but a bit smaller and with a 624MHz Marvell processor.
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Another week, another truckload of Samsung devices dumped onto the shelves. This week’s Samsung shipment brings two new TouchWiz-based touchscreen handsets: the Mythic, and the Flight.
Before we dive into the specs, we gotta give Samsung some grief for the names. Not because they’re bad – in fact, I really, really like both of these names. So much that I wonder why the hell Samsung is giving them to two random TouchWiz handsets. I mean, come on: LG has to resort to calling one of their best selling phones “Cookie“, and you throw away Mythic? For shame!
Anyway, on to the handsets:
There’s a silly study, conducted by Retrevo, making the rounds that purports to analyze how iPhone users fare in the dating world. I know, right? One stat to whet your beak: one in three iPhone owners have admitted to breaking up with their significant other via text message. Amazing.
The HTC-built DROID ERIS will go on sale tomorrow at Verizon stores for $99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and two-year contract agreement. Equipped with HTC’s “Sense” user interface, the ERIS “offers customers the opportunity to customize a seven-panel wide home screen with a wide variety of widgets designed to bring the most important information to the surface.” On sale tomorrow at Verizon’s retail stores and website.
![Screen shot 2009-11-04 at [ November 4 ] 7.04.42 PM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Screen-shot-2009-11-04-at-November-4-7.04.42-PM.png "Screen shot 2009-11-04 at [ November 4 ] 7.04.42 PM")
Needless to say, AT&T’s none too happy about Verizon’s “Theres a Map for That” campaign. AT&T first complained about the ads back in October, saying they were misleading. Verizon responded by adding a few extra words and an itsy bitsy disclaimer – but that wasn’t enough for AT&T. Early this morning, AT&T filed a false advertising suit against Big Red, presumably in an effort to get the ads off the air as soon as possible.
This afternoon, AT&T sent out an internal memo regarding the lawsuit, and we’ve obtained a copy.
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![Screen shot 2009-11-04 at [ November 4 ] 3.21.54 PM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Screen-shot-2009-11-04-at-November-4-3.21.54-PM-152x300.png "Screen shot 2009-11-04 at [ November 4 ] 3.21.54 PM")
Look – we’re certainly not the world’s biggest fans of Windows Mobile 6.5, but we still absolutely feel that anyone who has the opportunity to upgrade from 6.1 to 6.5 should certainly do so. If you’ve got a Samsung Jack, we’ve got good news: that “anyone” group now includes you.
Samsung just hit us up to let us know that the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade package has gone live here. It doesn’t seem like the simplest upgrade process ever — you’ll definitely want to back up your stuff before you dive in — but in return you’ll get Internet Explorer 6, the Windows Mobile Marketplace, and all of the other goodies that Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard brings along.
So you’ve lurked the blogs, watched the unboxing, and read the coverage, and you just know: you want your Droid. You already know that most Verizon Stores are opening the doors a bit early at 7 AM to get your your fix – but what if you want it even earlier?
We just got word that a very, very limited number of Verizon stores will start peddling the Droid as soon as the clock ticks over to November 6th, from midnight to 2 a.m. The emphasis here is definitely on “limited”.
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While other carriers might finally be dipping their toes in the Android water this month, T-Mobile has been in this game for a long time. They got their first Android phone (the G1) out last October, and managed to launch two more (the myTouch and the CLIQ) within the year. It makes sense, then, that they’re the first to pipe up with some usage details.
T-Mobile today shared a few interesting Android statistics, and announced a number of ways they’d be increasing their support for the Android Market.
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The Nokia X3, not to be confused with the Android-powered SE X3, just made it through the bowels of the FCC, which is somewhat of a surprise. The phone launched back in September and we didn’t really expect to see it stateside like many of Nokia’s fun and unique handsets. But here it is, in all of its GSM glory.
The phone isn’t 3G so it’s up in the air whether it’s AT&T or T-Mobile bound. But as long as the European specs remained, the S40 slider should come with a 3.2MP camera, FM radio, stereo speakers, microSD expansion ports, and dedicated music keys. The X3 costs €115 ($169) unlocked in Euroland, so hopefully we’ll get a similar price.
Don’t expect to scam Verizon on BOGO deals anymore, folks. The carrier is raising early termination fees on Novermber 15 to $350 for “advance devices” only. Clearly VZW is targeting users who were abusing the buy one get one free BlackBerry deals and those that figured out that it was cheaper cancel their current contract and pay the $175 ETF than to pay full retail for the hot new handsets like the Droid.
![Screen shot 2009-11-04 at [ November 4 ] 2.11.36 AM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Screen-shot-2009-11-04-at-November-4-2.11.36-AM.png "Screen shot 2009-11-04 at [ November 4 ] 2.11.36 AM")
Seeing as HTC’s CEO Peter Chou sorta slipped up and mentioned this back in October, it’s not exactly, you know, news news – but just in case you were a little bit shaky on the dates, HTC has gone ahead and confirmed that the 1 Ghz, WinMo 6.5-powered HTC HD2 will be coming to the United States “with a major US carrier in early 2010. ”
Note that they specifically say a US carrier – implying that it’ll be just one, at least right off the bat. The rumor mill has endlessly pinned this one as being destined for T-Mobile, so it’s at least somewhat safe to assume that’s where its heading.
Either way, we’ll be getting it a bit later than our overseas brethren; in the same press release, HTC disclosed that HD2 shipments in Europe and Taiwan are heading out right this second, and the rest of Asia should see it hit the shelves over the next few weeks.
If this latest commercial is any indication, the Motorola Droid is going to be air dropped from stealth fighter planes into random locations where people have no idea what it is.
Ack! Talk about bad timing. T-Mobile is just barely off the grill for their guilt-by-association connection with the Great Danger/Sidekick outage of 2009, and now they’re right back in the network-outage spotlight.
This time around, it appears that it’s their entire network – or at least, a big ol’ chunk of it – that has gone down. Voice and data are both coming up empty, Twitter is on fire with complaints, and T-Mobile has confirmed that they’re aware of the issues and have got engineers cracking away as we speak.
Tmo’s Statement on the matter:
All – We’re aware of the current service disruption. Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide further updates as more information is available.
Rapid response team, eh? I’m imagining a band of men wearing pink berets, repelling onto cell towers out of a helicopter piloted by Catherine Zeta Jones.
When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.
Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.
We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.
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Good news, everyone! As you may have heard by now, the iPhone 3GS and 3G are now fully carrier-unlockable thanks to blacksn0w – but that’s not all!
In addition to making your iPhone carriers SIM card slot play friendly with just about any SIM you can cram in there, blacksn0w also undoes some of the locks put in place by Apple/AT&T during the upgrade to 3.1. Namely, it removes the IPCC lock which prevented tethering.
I just got my iPhone up and tethering in all of a few minutes – we’ll have a tutorial up in just a bit.
Whenever you hear about bugs and exploits being discovered in the iPhone’s browser, Safari, it’s usually the doings of some masterful meddler who devoted hours to unearthing any flaws they could find — not some user casually tapping around the application. Apple’s pretty good at keeping things locked down, and the iPhone’s got enough users that most of the nasty user-facing bugs have been flushed out. Well, except for this new one.
It’s not an incredibly common bug, and it doesn’t seem likely that it would hit most users – but for the iPhone users this newly discovered bug does affect, it could mean huge operator fees.
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