Smartphones

HTC Touch Dual Is Official

The HTC Touch Dual, which we previously called the Touch Slide, is now official. It’s got the same front face as the HTC Touch, but is slightly thinner and has a slide-out keypad. The keypad isn’t SureType like we saw before, but just a standard T9 interface. But it does have a 2-megapixel camera, 3G…

I was interviewed by Katie Hafner of the NYTimes for a piece, Altered iPhones Freeze Up. The NYTimes gets how important this is to us. [NYTimes]

Bring a Bricked iPhone to the Genius Bar and Talk to the Hand (Video)

Here’s a video of a guy named Jean being surprised to find out what we learned earlier in the week: Any sort of iPhone app installation, unlocked or not, won’t be supported by the warranty Indian Givers at Apple. No Service for You! What brings the whole situation home for me is to see the…

iPhone Revisited (Verdict: Don’t Buy)

Click to viewIt’s about 3 months after the iPhone launch, and happy with the improvements, I was planning to change our “Wait” verdict to a full-on and rabid “Buy”. That wasn’t because of Apple, but because of the cool apps being offered by independent developers. All that came to an end yesterday after the new…

Palm Centro Hands On And Gallery (Verdict: They’re Gonna Sell a Lot Of ‘Em)

The Palm Centro was a joke until the price dropped this morning. $99 for a full featured touchscreened Palm device is a great value. It loses the heft found in previous Palm Treos, and it’s even a little bit…shiny. The only thing to be concerned with is that tiny keyboard. Despite it being targeted toward…

Palm Centro Launch Event (The Treo for Hobbits)

12:25 There’s little doubt today’s event is about Centro. We’re here, and we’ll just see how it goes while we eat lunch. 12:37 Ed Colligan is up on stage, says he’s going to announce a new phone, but first, goes into marketing. Yay. 12:38 Why aren’t people buying smartphones? He says it’s because they’ve been…

Specs and Pics of the Samsung i780 Released

First spotted at Gitex in Dubai, Samsung’s i780 is a GPS phone with full QWERTY keyboard and is expected to hit Europe, Sweden first, at the beginning of next year. There is speculation that could be the new Blackjack, but you can judget for yourself by looking at the specs, which are below. HSDPA/WCDMA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE connectivity…

Sling Steps Outside With SlingPlayer Mobile for Symbian S60

SlingPlayer mobile, the app that lets you watch all your TV shows on your cellphone streamed from your SlingBox, has just launched in the US for $29, Canada for $34, and the UK for £19. It’s the same basic functionality—although this has streaming support over 3G and/or Wi-Fi and landscape fullscreen support—but now supporting Nokia…

AT&T’s 3G Network Getting a 6X Kick In the Upload Pantalones

Cellphones on AT&T’s 3G network will be getting a speed bump that could be worth 6x. Right now, AT&T’s HSDPA networks are limited to 130kbps of upload, but when HSUPA (High speed Uplink Packet Access) is pushed live in October/November, the network will be good for 500 to 800kbps with HSUPA devices only. (Who knows…

Running Any Third Party iPhone Apps? Bye-Bye Warranty!

Click to viewYou heard that the new firmware bricks unlocked iphones? Get this: Apple just confirmed to me that running any third-party app at all voids the warranty, and you won’t be covered if your iPhone bricks for whatever reason. The reasoning is that Apple cannot distinguish between other third party apps and those that…

Palm Treo 500v Hands-On Video

The guys over at PDA Expertos in Spain got a hands-on with the Palm Treo 500v (which we saw unboxed and groped), flipping through the Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone UI as well as taking a quick tour around the body near the end. There’s no audio, unfortunately, but from what we see the UI is…

Comedian Stephen Fry Blogs Spectacularly About Smartphones

British comedian Stephen Fry is awesome in a way similar to Ricky Gervais or Hugh Laurie (his previous showbiz partner), but writing 10,000 words about smartphones just put him over the top into living idol territory. You can’t tell from his public persona, but he’s apparently a huge nerd, knowing intricate details such as how…

Tony at MobileTechReview forum just realized the LG’s KU990 Viewty isn’t just a crazy looking phone, its a crazy looking phone that does DivX playback. [MobileTechReview] https://gizmodo.com/hands-on-with-the-lg-ku990-smart-phone-verdict-defini-295766

Sidekick Getting MySpace App

You whippersnappers won’t have to wait for the Sidekick 4 to get a Hiptop upgrade: Sidekicks are all getting a MySpace app. The app lets you edit your profile, upload photos to their galleries and receive messages and friend requests by push. Why’d they do this? Apparently, 80% of all Sidekick browser clicks belong to…

Sony Ericsson Orders Up Windows Mobile Smartphones From HTC

Digitimes’s insider at HTC tells them they just received ODM orders for Windows Mobile smartphones from Sony Ericsson to ship sometime in the 2nd half of 2008. We’ll find out whether this means SE will dump Symbian altogether (unlikely) or just have two smartphone OSes, like Palm. [Digitimes via The Unwired]

iPhone Faux-GPS Hack Works and is Awesome

Click to viewWhoa, the iPhone just got GPS. Well, it’s actually using peer-collected GPS data linked to cellular tower, which Navizon describes as peer to peer location detection. Either way &mdash it actually works. This morning, the Navizon GPS app showed up in Installer.app. After creating a username and login (get this: email NOT required),…

Amazon may have jumped the gun with it, but AT&T’s Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry 8820 is on sale from tomorrow, costing $299.99 for a two-year contract with rebate. https://gizmodo.com/first-wifi-blackberry-8820-on-sale-now-297904

Jobs pretty much says that Apple will hunt down iPhone unlockers in a game of “cat and mouse.” This is Not Good. [Computerworld]

Digitimes Reconfirms gPhone

Digitimes has a quick bit on the gPhone, saying it is definitely coming out, sourcing factory workers, who may very well have the GPhone innards in their. We already knew this, from Crunchgear’s HTC insider. They talk about whether or not EDGE or 3G will be on the phone, but that looks more like a…

Erica at TUAW does some quick and dirty math on how many iPhone hackers are out there. Based on 60k SSH downloads, and that being a fraction of those who hack, she guesses 10-20% of all Apple phone users are doing some sort of unofficial cha cha with unofficial apps. [TUAW]