Around 1,000 laptops and iPods are also lost in the depths of black cabs each month, with the VP of security company Credant Technologies, who carried out a survey on the matter, commenting that in ye olde London times, "It used to be small items like brollies and briefcases stuffed full of boring office papers. Now it's laptops, smartphones and thumb drives, all chock-full of valuable information to an identity thief." [Credant Technologies, via The Reg]

Image credit: Annie Mole

- dual WVGA touchscreen displays
- full-QWERTY keypad
- stereo speakers
- Bluetooth
- microSDHC support
- 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus, flash and Schneider-Kreuznach lens

Don't get excited about release dates, because there aren't any in the stack of user manual images whence these vanilla specs came. [Phonearena BGR]

There are a lot of new toys for developers, including some kind of emulator configuration thing called Android Virtual Devices, or AVDs, that apparently will make developers' lives way easier. That's cool for them, but what do we get?

April 2009

The Android 1.5 platform introduces many new features for users and developers. The list below provides an overview of the changes.
User interface refinements

* System-wide:
o Refinement of all core UI elements
o Animated window transitions (off by default)
o Accelerometer-based application rotations
* UI polish for:
o In-call experience
o Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
o SMS & MMS
o Browser
o Gmail
o Calendar
o Email
o Camera & Gallery
o Application management

Performance improvements

* Faster Camera start-up and image capture
* Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
* Smoother page scrolling in Browser
* Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling

New features

* On-screen soft keyboard
o Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
o Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
o User dictionary for custom words
* Home screen
o Widgets
+ Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
o Live folders
* Camera & Gallery
o Video recording
o Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
* Bluetooth
o Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
o Auto-pairing
o Improved handsfree experience
* Browser
o Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
o Copy 'n paste in browser
o Search within a page
o User-selectable text-encoding
o UI changes include:
+ Unified Go and Search box
+ Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
* Contacts
o Shows user picture for Favorites
o Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
o One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
* System
o New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
o SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
o SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
* Google applications
o View Google Talk friends' status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
o Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
o Upload videos to Youtube
o Upload photos on Picasa

Whoa. Soft keyboard, widgets, video recording (with YouTube uploading capabilities!), updated browser features like tabs, system-wide UI polishing... This is a killer upgrade. So, uh, thanks, Google! [Phandroid, thanks trigatch!]

It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but these folks are undoubtedly ahead of the curve on technology. And what they're saying is they're more comfortable using mobile devices as a primary computing and communications tool than they are with notebooks, or even netbooks.

[Notebooks are] still here, but are far fewer. Right now I can see several open tables and an entire open outlet. Instead people are clustered around mobile phones, showing off applications, photos or videos. You can see little clusters of them dotting the halls, like this group I photographed here. I've even seen one or two people charging their iPhones, rather than charging notebooks, in an outlet. As for netbooks, I haven't seen many at all. - Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM

GigaOM notes, and I agree, that this is not the End Times for notebooks. It just means people are much more comfortable with using their phone as a computing/communication tool than they were the year before. Expect that to continue as phones get even more robust and the networks get faster.

Update: Well, people were using smartphones en masse at SXSW, so long as they were not iPhones. At&t apparently dropped the ball in Austin. [GigaOM]

The phone has no display and no buttons, and uses haptic feedback—though it's not really clear for what. Line up the number you're trying to dial on twelve numbered sections and then twist the top until an LED turns green to make the call. Par for the course with its cryptic design, the phone is unnamed. I can't wait to show this to my buddies at the Secret Society of Utterly Useless Gadgets. [Yanko Design]

The only real problem with today's portable electronics is battery life. The gear gets more powerful but sadly battery technology really hasn't kept up, that's why we write about things like solar power. But there are also nifty things called dynamos, devices you pump or crank to juice up your batteries. O2, a large mobile carrier in the UK, will be installing bicycle-powered dynamos around a festival it's sponsoring this coming weekend to charge up music fans' mobiles. Sure, they could have run power cables and created power stations, but where's the fun in that? And as anyone who's been to a large outdoor festival in the last few years knows, you're going to want to power up at least once a day or else you're cut off. And if you've got our luck, it'd be right before Winehouse takes the stage, so you'd have no bawdy SMS session to distract you. [Pocket Picks]

They were brought in after spending an average of six hours a day on their phones, talking, texting or playing games.

Their parents became concerned that the children, aged 12 and 13, were unable to carry out normal activities without their handsets. They were failing at school and deceiving relatives in an attempt to obtain more money for phone cards.

According to the doctors on staff, it's the first time that a "specific" treatment has been used to cure mobile phone addiction. Then again, these are children who are 12 and 13. They seem a lot more like two kids distracted from their school work than strung-out junkies begging for quarters at the side of the road so that they can get their next fix. [telegraph]

The big steps Adobe is going to take to make this work are:

- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Adobe's also throwing in the AIR platform as well, which is "the next-generation RIA runtime for the desktop, supporting HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash technology and PDF." [Adobe]

The same process repeats in reverse when the phone is closed, keeping your screen in good viewing condition at all times. It's a good concept, much like communism is a good concept. Ultimately, it will end up making more problems than it solves. That fiddly cleaning utensil is sure to snap off, at which point the remnants of the device will end up scratching your sexy display. Even if it doesn't break, the cleaning process will soon get really annoying, unless it is super speedy, (which it definitely won't be). Either way, you're better off just washing your filthy, chubby, clammy, blotchy, putrid paws. [Unwired View]

When the alarm is activated, all sorts of things happen: A piercing 100-decibel alarm goes off, dazzling LED lights and the cell calls up to three pre-programmed emergency numbers of the parents' choosing. The child's location can also be sent via SMS to registered individuals.

Actually, it sounds like the perfect phone for accident-prone technicolor dreamers. It's waterproof for up to 30 minutes, can withstand jets of water being squirted at it, lose it and, if you press a button on the spanky yellow bracelet, it will bleep if you are within 10 meters of it. If you're not, the phone will shut down automatically, sending a message to another DoCoMo cell if phone and bracelet are not reunited within five minutes. Available in light blue, orange, black and white, there was a massive, child-friendly launch in Tokyo this morning. [NTT DoCoMo Press Release via Wireless Watch Japan and Akihabara News]

After yesterday's slew of phones, watches, etc, here are a few more gewgaws from the Sony Ericsson stable. First up is the MDS-65 music stand, which turns all of SE's current cellphone models into a PMP. You can run it from the mains as well as with batteries and it'll be available later this year.

What else?

The HBH-DS200 Bluetooth headset with music and calls control, which is similar to the HBH-DS2020, available gratis with the W960.

The MMR-70 FM transmitter, which has a range of 30 feet.

There are also a couple of standard headsets, the HPM-90 and the HPM-83, and all booty will be available later this year. – Ad Dugdale

New music accessories for Sony Ericsson Walkmans [All About Symbian]

Sharp VGA Touchscreen/Fingerprint Reader [Unwired View]