New Pwnage Tool for 3.1.3 available
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by John Biggs on February 8, 2010

Fear not, people who jailbreak your 3GSes! PwnageTool for the latest firmware, 3.1.3, is available and ready to crack, hack, and otherwise damage your iPhone.
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by Marc Flores on February 7, 2010

For me, the best part of the Super Bowl is the commercials. And after you see this one, you may have to agree. Just note that you’ll have to play the video several times over before you realize there’s a phone there – the Motorola DEVOUR with MOTOBLUR, to be exact. So, what happens when Megan Fox uses her DEVOUR to send out a hot, wet image via a social network?

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by John Biggs on February 7, 2010

This is the so-called HTC Incredible running on Verizon. It has a Snapdragon CPU with 256RAM and a bold and beautiful screen a la the Nexus One. Interestingly, it has two rear LED flashes and appears to be clad in a red backplate which reminds me of butterscotch pudding although a video, now unavailable, shows it is really red.

Click through for a UI shot. Also, can I just say that I am more in love with Android every time I see it? It just seems fresh.

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by Nicholas Deleon on February 7, 2010

Check your calendar, friends, for the first time in a long time I was just wowed by a tech story. Google says it’s working on smartphone software that would automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue. So, if you’re talking to your Venezuelan pen pal, and he says, “No me gusta el fútbol americano,” you can react in horror as you try to explain to him the importance of a game where more time is spent setting up plays than actually executing them is the greatest sport in the world. Porqueria.

Linux creator says, ‘Nexus One is a winner’
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by Marc Flores on February 7, 2010

Since we all know that Android runs a modified version of Linux, you’d think that the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, would absolutely love Android handsets. Nope. As a matter of fact, the man hates cell phones. Torvalds says that he got the G1 when it came out but rarely used it because of his distaste for the distracting gadget. So why does he call the Nexus One a winner?

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Traveling with batteries and ordering gadgets online could soon get pricey
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by Marc Flores on February 6, 2010

Here are two totally unrelated things I like to do: order gadgets and smartphones online, and travel with loads of spare batteries. Well, perhaps they’re not all that unrelated. Both offer a lot of convenience and save a good amount of cash, but with a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Transportation, that could all soon change.

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HTC patent shows a new, spring-loaded clamshell design
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by Greg Kumparak on February 5, 2010

HTC’s no stranger to stuffing ridiculous mechanisms into smartphones. I mean, have you seen the HTC Tilt — or better yet, the HTC Universal?

Looks like they’re at it again, if this just unearthed patent is any indication.
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Please take our reader survey
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by Greg Kumparak on February 5, 2010

Two things.

First of all: No, the image has absolutely nothing to do with the post. It was between “Stock photo of a bunch of survey check boxes” and this picture of a cat with a human smile – which would you have chosen?

Second: Please take this reader survey. We’re working on some awesome new stuff moving forward, and knowing a bit more about our readers would really help make it happen. It’ll only take a moment, and I’d really appreciate it.

Apple & Google clash over “Android” in the App Store
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by Chris Velazco on February 5, 2010

And the Apple-Google war continues. This time, instead of just bad-mouthing each other, Apple is running with a strategy that they’re no stranger to: censoring words in the App Store. Instead of just “boobs” and “booty”, which they don’t seem to have a problem with anymore, Apple’s new target is the word “Android”.

Now, Apple only seems to be looking for the word used within a particular context. A quick look through the App Store reveals a decent number of apps with “Android” in the title that have gone totally unscathed. However, at least one developer in particular has had their app held up pending removal of an Android reference. In its preview Tim Novikof’s Flash of Genius SAT app made mention of the fact that it was a finalist in Google’s Android Developers Challenge, and Apple had him remove the offending snippet before it could go live. Apple’s justification?

“providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store.”

Novikof reportedly didn’t mind having to pull the reference, but it’s crazy that a developer would have to remove a recommendation (and a weighty one at that) just because Apple doesn’t like who it came from.

[via AppScout]

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by Greg Kumparak on February 5, 2010

When Nexus One owners were suddenly blessed with multi-touch support on their handsets, we saw the same comment posted just about everywhere we looked: “Great! Now when will the Droid get it?”

The answer, it seems, is today.

AT&T may have fibbed regarding Sling player for iPhone
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by Marc Flores on February 5, 2010

Just the other day, AT&T announced that it was able to work with Sling Media in order to optimize Sling player for AT&T’s 3G network. That’s good news for consumers and all, but it appears as though AT&T might have been doing a little posturing to make itself look like the good guy. After all, Sling users were disappointed about the lack of a Sling player on the iPhone when the application had been avaiable on BlackBerry for some time – and on AT&T’s network, no less.

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Video: Nokia N900 + SNES Emulator + PS3 Controller = Portable geek bliss
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by Greg Kumparak on February 5, 2010

I’ll admit it: When the oh-so-damned-clever coding community managed to get an SNES emulator running on the N900 at fullspeed with features like TV-out, I got all kinds of excited. Hell, even Nokia was excited about it until they got smacked by the Mighty Hand of the Law for showing it.

Well, it just got even better.
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by Serkan Toto on February 5, 2010

For years, Japan was the innovation leader in the cell phone industry, until South Korea and the US started catching up rapidly. If you look back at what Nippon’s mighty carriers have released in the past few months, you mainly see super-powerful handsets with large OLED screens, 12MP cameras, Blu-ray recorder connectivity, double digital TV tuners, etc.

But the form factor never really changes, as the majority of Japanese consumers still demands clamshell phones with jog dials enabling them to conveniently thumb-text emails. But if a country churns out 100 different handsets per year, there have to be some exceptions. And the most notable exception (that now has been priced and dated) is Fujitsu’s F-04B featuring the world’s first separable two-module body.

Gigabyte will have an Android handset, but it’s not the one you saw
by Devin Coldewey on February 4, 2010


I saw a few of these pictures floating around a little while ago, when Gigabyte was announcing it was putting out an Android handset. “Good for them,” I thought, “but they couldn’t come up with something a little more original?” As it turns out — they might have. Because it turns out those pictures were fakeity-fake. I mean, the pictures themselves were real pictures, but they did not depict an actual Gigabyte handset. Seems weird that there would be this amount of intrigue associated with something as un-exciting as a phone launch by a relatively minor player, but hey. I don’t make the news, I just report it.
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Symbian goes open source, releases code to developers
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by Marc Flores on February 4, 2010

After so many years of hoping and wishing, developers can start getting excited about coding for the Symbian platform. Sure, it’s taken a while and some might be looking forward to Maemo 6 later this year far more than a newer version of Symbian, but opening up the source code to the world’s largest operating system is nothing to sneeze at. The Symbian operating system is aging and hasn’t changed dramatically over the last several years and this is exactly what the platform needs for a major facelift.

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