Author: Greg Kumparak

1234. 1111. 0000. When it comes to 4-digit unlock codes, most people fall back on the same patterns/ideas that everyone else uses. “Boy! I sure hope the big bad hacker folks don’t think to punch in my Birthday!”

Alpha-numeric passwords (that is, passwords with both letters and numbers) are inherently more secure. More possibilities means more security, right? Alas, the iPhone only supports 4-digit codes — out of the box, at least. A few clever gents have figured out an incredibly simple modification that gives you access to the full keyboard for your lockdown duties, no jailbreak required.

Full credit for the discovery of this modification goes to the dudes at 9to5mac

How to do it:

1. Open Safari on your iPhone
2. Either come to this page and click this link (on your iPhone/iTouch), or manually type in: http://9to5mac.com/9to5mac.mobileconfig
3. Install the profile.
4. If you’ve got a 4-digit code in place, it will ask you to type it in before you enter the new password
5. Type the new password. Type again to confirm.
6. You’re done!

Doesn’t get much easier than that, right? To uninstall the modification and go back to the standard, 4-digit system, just head to Settings > General > Profiles and uninstall the “9to5mac” profile.

Warning: Alphanumeric passwords are more secure, but they can also be harder to remember. Don’t forget your password – if you do, you’re going to have to dump everything off your iPhone before you can get back in. Don’t blame us for your bad memory, you hear?

Its been nearly 2 years since Apple launched the App Store. In that time, would-be comedians around the Internet have successfully extracted just two jokes from it. “Fart apps and tip calculators!” Hah! “There’s an app for that!” Hah hah. Hah. Hah. Little did we know, there was still one untapped source of hilarity involving the app store left: physical humor.

At the end of last year, Butterfinger (as in the Nestle-owned candy) threw a contest challenging people to make a commercial in the vein of their classic “Nobody’s going to lay a finger on my Butterfinger” campaign. Though the contest and its resulting videos went mostly unnoticed by the population of the Internet, the winning commercial, “Butterfinger Phone App”, is just starting to make the rounds on TV.

Ready for a ride on the ROFLcopter? Check out the video below.

Since we’ve spent two posts covering Street Fighter IV, a game that will presumably be terrible to play on the iPhone, I thought it was only fair to give a bit more love to a game that should be awesome on the iPhone. Actually, two games: Final Fantasy I and II.

We knew they were coming (see trailers/screenshots here) – but now we know when they’re coming. And it’s surprisingly soon!

According to PocketGamer, we can expect both releases to hit this Thursday. In just two days, we’ll see a game the likes of which have never been seen by any mortal. Well, except for when these games were released on the NES.. or when they were re-released on the Game Boy Advance.. and then re-re-released on the PSP. Okay, they’ve been seen a whole friggin’ lot of times – but come on, holy crap Final Fantasy on the iPhone.

Unlike some of the past re-releases, this won’t be a bundle deal; you’ll have to buy each one separately. Just how much damage that might mean to your wallet is still a mystery, as neither game’s price has been revealed just yet.

We may give AT&T a bit of grief for the fact that their network essentially curled up into a ball and cried for two years after the launch of the first iPhone, but they’ve been dumping a ton of change into improving things over the last 8 months — and it looks like its helped.

A lot.

The crew over at PCWorld ran a fairly in-depth series of tests across 13 major cities in the US, comparing 3G download and upload speeds and network reliability across AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. The hands down winner? AT&T.

AT&T’s download speed averaged nearly double that of the competition, and the same goes for upload. From Baltimore to Seattle, AT&T rarely dipped below 1,000kbps, while the competition rarely climbed above 1,000kbps.

Average reliability (as tested by continuous 1-minute performance tests) leveled out at 92% for T-Mobile and Verizon, with AT&T and Sprint coming in just a wee bit higher at 94%. This is a huge change from when PCWorld ran a similar test 8 months ago, when AT&T’s reliability was puttering out somewhere around 64%.

Of course, this is solely a performance test. Other important metrics — such as coverage maps — don’t come into play. Either way, keep it up, AT&T – we (and everyone else on the Internet) may give you flack at every opportunity, but it certainly seems like things are on the up and up.

Just last week, HTC announced the Legend. As the epic name implies, it’s essentially the “Hero 2“; its got the jutting chin, the rounded corners, and HTC’s software signatures all over it. The primary difference, outside of a minor (but still worthwhile) hardware spec bump, is the design of the body; carved from a single block of aluminum, it’s ridiculously light weight, super strong, and drop dead gorgeous.

While we somehow managed to over look it whilst roaming (almost absurdly) huge halls of Mobile World Congress, our buddies at MobileBurn spotted a display case showing off examples of the unibody shell as it steps through the manufacturing process.

Alas, there weren’t any nice little placards detailing the trip from point A to point B. I wouldn’t worry too much; even if there were placards, they’d probably all just read “Lasers.”

Check out MobileBurn’s gallery here.

Back at CES in January, Palm announced that webOS 1.4 and all of its video recording talents would be hitting Pres and Pixis around the world starting in “February”.

Flash forward a few weeks, when a supposed snapshot of an internal Sprint scheduling sheet indicated that it would all start rolling out on February 15th. February 15th has, of course, come and gone — and our Pres remain un-updated.

Fear not, however – if the rumor mill doesn’t fail us a second time, we can still expect the update to roll out this month.

With only 6 days left in the month, any stab in the dark has a pretty good shot of being correct. However, the guys over at PreCentral say they’ve been tipped by a Verizon know-all who says that the roll-out has been pushed back to this Thursday, February 25th.

Keep your eyes peeled and start tapping that “Update” app come Thursday, and be sure to let us know when it goes live.

Back when we first got word that the HTC Desire was essentially a slightly upgraded Nexus One with a bit of customization on HTC’s part, we knew there wasn’t much to worry about for recent Nexus One purchasers; the very vast majority of the Desire’s upperhand was all in the software, which was bound to be hacked over eventually.

What we didn’t know, however, was just how fast it would happen.

The handsets not even released yet, but its goods from the Desire have already been stripped down and almost entirely ported to the Nexus One. Paul over at MoDaCo managed to dig up the ROM, and they’ve since been pushing out build-after-build, each with a bug fix here and a new feature there. HTC’s Sense UI is in place, Flash in the browser is working and, at this point, it seems like the lingering bugs won’t be lingering for long.

It’s nothing you’d want to dive into with a twitchy finger or a faint heart, but you can find all the necessary materials over here.

Think about the size of an SD card. What things could you design in that amount of space? I think I might be able to build a stick figure out of tooth picks in a space that size. It probably wouldn’t even be very good.

Perhaps just to show that they can (or perhaps because they just have extra money to throw around after getting rid of Helio) SK Telecom has gone and stuffed Android and just about everything needed to run it down into a SIM card.

SK’s Android SIM packs a CPU, system memory, and 1 gigabyte of flash storage inside – in other words, it’s more or less everything but the display and input device.

Now, what exactly does that mean to you and I? Not a whole lot, at this point. It’s just a prototype for now, and they don’t have any immediate plans to bring it to the market. If they do bring it to the market, however, it could work out to some pretty cool stuff; you could pop your SIM from one device to another (like from your phone to a tablet, or a netbook for example) and bring everything from the OS, to the settings, to all of your files with it.

Of course, there are about a dozen ways to do that without stuffing everything onto the SIM (like syncing everything to the cloud, for example), which is presumably a big part of the reason why this is solely conceptual. SK Telecom is considering making themed versions of the chips (such as Android installs pre-loaded with wallpapers and media for sports teams) which carriers could sell to the consumers in place of pre-flashed handsets.

Are you an Android user? Are you jealous of all nine people who have Nokia N900s and thus can already use Firefox Mobile? Good news!

While we’ve known for some time that Firefox Mobile (otherwise known by its code name, “Fennec”) was coming to Android, but we didn’t have the slightest idea when. As you could probably assume from the headline of this post, that has since changed.

The guys over at TechRadar had a chat with Mozilla’s VP of Mobile, Jay Sullivan, who went on the record saying that Firefox for Android should debut “late this year”.

So why not sooner? According to Jay, they just couldn’t do it when Android only supported Java development. Once Google added native C/C++ support back in June, however, the path was clear for development.

With Skyfire on the way for Android and Firefox coming within the year, the competition for browser share on the platform should get pretty fierce pretty quickly – and you know what? We’re perfectly okay with that.

It’s an unavoidable truth of carrying a cell phone in a world full of massive skyscrapers and thick-walled tunnels: Dropped calls happen.

It always seem to happen at the worst of times, too. You’re driving along with your Bluetooth headset clamped to your head, when bam! Call is gone. You don’t want to look away from the road to check if the signal has returned, right? Because next thing you know, your front end would be half way through a highway divider.

A company called Movius is looking to make the whole dropped call process a little bit less annoying for BlackBerry users with an application called Snapback.

While Snapback can’t miraculously fix your carrier’s shortcomings and end dropped calls all together, it will reconnect calls at the first opportune time once they’ve dropped. Snapback constantly runs in the background, monitoring for call failures – once one occurs, it waits until the signal strength has returned to a strong, steady level, then reconnects your call. And don’t worry: It’ll beep and throw up an alert window letting you know that it’s reconnecting to decrease the odds that you’re going to get caught cussing at your phone when the call is reestablished.

The app is available in the BlackBerry App World now for $5 bucks. If a bit of convenience is worth a Lincoln to you, you can find Snapback right here.

This alleged snapshot of Windows Phone 7 Series running on the HTC HD2 has hit our inbox roughly a dozen times already, so I figured we’d go ahead and clear things up: No, it is not real.

I’m still in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, and it’s really, really late here (as in 4:30 AM), so I’ve got to make this quick for the sake of getting any sleep tonight.

Why it’s fake:

• The fonts aren’t quite right. Microsoft specifically mentioned how much thought they put into the typography on the homescreen of Windows Phone while they were briefing us, and this just isn’t the same font.
• The e-mail tile reads “Outlook e-mail” – the real tile reads simply “Outlook”.
• A few of the elements, such as the right arrow indicating that you can swipe to the next page , just aren’t right.
• “Foto’s”? It’s not the spelling we’re worried about (We’re in Spain after all, where it’s “Fotographia” rather than “Photography”) – but note the random and totally improper apostrophe. That panel belongs to Foto?
• At least as far as we’ve been told, Microsoft absolutely requires that Windows Phone 7 Series handsets have Back, Start, and Search keys. The HD2 has the first two, but there’s no search key to be found. No search key = no certification, and no certification means no Windows Phone 7 Series.

If you’re rocking an HD2 and were gettin’ all antsy about the idea of bumping your handset up to Windows Mobile 7 Series, I’m sorry if we burst your bubble. Unless Microsoft changes their certification process or someone hacks WP7 onto the handset, it’s just probably not going to happen.

We’re in Barcelona keeping an eye on Eric Schmidt’s Mobile World Congress keynote, where the Google CEO just disclosed an interesting fact: Google and their hardware partners are now shipping 60,000 Android handsets each day.

Whether “shipped” here means “sold to end users” or “ordered by retailers” is unclear – but regardless, it’s quite the feat either way.

If that’s a true average rate and it holds true for the next year, that works out to about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21.9 million per year. Not only that, but the rate seems to be growing fairly rapidly; according to Schmidt, the rate has nearly doubled over the last quarter.

Solely as a point of reference for the curious: Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter.

Considering just how similar the new HTC Desire is to the not-quite-as-new Google Nexus One (read: very, very similar), I wasn’t expecting to walk away from my hands on session with my mind too blown. I mean, it’s essentially just a Nexus One with HTC’s Sense UI and an optical trackpad, right?

Right – and that’s exactly why it’s amazing.

Now, a big part of the reason I was so impressed by the HTC Desire is because I haven’t spent time with a Nexus One in a few weeks – I’d forgotten just how great it feels in your hand and how speedy the entire operating system is on the 1Ghz Snapdragon chip. Both of those still ring completely true with the Desire; the build quality is rock solid, and HTC’s Sense just downright flies.

Notes and Impressions:

• As I mentioned in the Legend hands on, I walked away from my time with these handsets with far more confidence in the optical trackpad than I went in with. The transition was effortless.
• It looks just like the Nexus One – and that’s a good thing. The Nexus One is easily one of the best look Android handsets around – hell, it’s one of the best looking handsets around regardless of platform.
• We’ve heard a few reports of Sense being a bit buggy during demonstrations (it is, after all, a new build), but we didn’t see anything of the sort. Check it out in the video down below – a 1Ghz CPU, Sense, and a big ol’ high resolution screen is really just a perfect combination
• In addition to the jump from trackball to optical trackpad, the HTC Desire has physical, pressable buttons where as the Nexus One’s are all touch. I’m a sucker for physical buttons. I’d take the button layout over that of the Nexus One any day.

Should you hold out on buying a Nexus One in hopes that this is coming to the states? Probably not – HTC seemed pretty adamant that this model won’t be coming stateside. Should recent Nexus One owners feel chuffed? Nah – the Desire is better than the Nexus One on a few counts and seemingly worse on none, but the majority of its perks are at least somewhat trivial. The real, solid selling points here are almost entirely software-based. Once this thing’s released, I’d imagine it won’t be too long at all before Sense and all that comes with it gets hacked straight onto the Nexus One.

When the HTC Hero was announced in June of last year, I would have made a valiant effort to eat my own head if it meant I got to own one. It was just so damned pretty.

I just got the opportunity to play with its brand-new successor, the HTC Legend – and, well.. to put it gently, it makes the HTC Hero look like an antique.

I only got to spend a few minutes with it, but I walked away not wanting to walk away. Read on for my impressions.

First Impressions:

• It’s absolutely gorgeous. The majority of the unibody design is cut from a single sheet of aluminum, ensuring that there are no screws or unsightly seams. It’s hard not to compare it with a MacBook Pro; side by side, they look like they were born from the same robotic mother.
• The Hero was notoriously slow at launch – and while it sped up over time, it still had its lags here and there. The Legend is only 72Mhz faster (600Mhz vs 528mhz), but that little bump (and all of the work Google and HTC have been doing, presumably) make this an incredibly smooth ride.
• Being accustomed to trackballs, I went into the hands-on a bit unsure about the optical trackpad. I didn’t even consciously notice the difference until someone mentioned it – which says a lot. It works perfectly.
• In terms of durability, the unibody design makes this thing a friggin’ tank. As long as you don’t go smashing the glass screen, you’ll be hardpressed to damage the guts inside. HTC smashed the handset onto the desk multiple times hard enough that it was uncomfortably loud, and it walked away unscathed.
• HTC introduced a Exposé like multi-touch zoom control on the home screen, allowing you to use two-finger pinching to show all of your widget pages at once. This seemed silly in theory, but it’s pretty great in practice. You don’t realize how annoying it is to scroll through 7 pages of widgets until you’re given an alternative

After spending a bit of time with the handset, I’m admittedly rather bummed that it’s not coming to the states. On the upside, HTC said not to worry, as “the US will be getting plenty of really cool stuff later this year”

We knew it was coming and caught a glimpse of its posterior last week, but Sagem’s solar-powered Puma (as in the clothing brand) Phone is now one hundred percent official.

Everything we’d dug up before turned out to be spot on. Solar panels on the back? Check GPS? Check. Video chat with a front facing camera? Checkity check check. There’s also a built-in FM radio, a 3.2 megapixel rear camera behind the 2.8″ touchscreen, and they’re packing it in what they assure us is a very “Eco friendly” box.

While we’re not able to track down a price just yet, Sagem says the phone should launch in 46 days (in Europe, with “international markets following”) – which, by our count, works out to April 3rd.

We’re not sure when HTC plans to make these videos available through their own channels, but we just got a trio of videos showing off the three handsets they just announced at Mobile World Congress: the HTC Desire, HD mini, and Legend.

Check out all three after the jump.

HTC Legend Promo Video:

HTC Desire Promo Video:

HTC HD Mini Video:

Update: More videos!
HTC Desire:

HTC Legend:

HTC HD mini:

What’s in a name? Would a Nexus One by any other name still be as sweet? Yep. In fact, it might just be a bit sweeter.

Though it lacks almost any indication as such, Google’s Nexus One is actually made by HTC. HTC reserved the rights to the hardware design, and today they’re making good use of that decision with the announcement of the HTC Desire. It’s essentially the Nexus One reflavored to HTC’s liking.

After the Nexus One launched, a good number of gadget geeks went clamoring to HTC in hopes that they (or Google) would release a compatible port of the custom user interface overhaul that can be found on nearly any recent HTC-made Android handset. Alas, it’s not going to happen – the Nexus One is Google’s phone, and thus will always be 100% vanilla Android, just as Google intended.

The HTC Desire, however, is a different story. Sure, it may look almost identical to the Nexus One – and sure, it might be an almost spec-for-spec match. But the Desire is HTC’s phone, and thus, it runs Sense. Its got everything you might expect from a Sense-enabled handset, from multi-touch all around the OS to Flash in the browser.

Like the Nexus One, the Desire runs Android 2.1 on top of a palm-meltingly fast 1 Ghz CPU. Its got the same (stunning) 3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen, and the same 5 megapixel camera. The only real physical change is the jump from a standard trackball to an optical trackpad, just as we saw with the also-just-announced HTC Legend.

While HTC’s not sharing any details on when us folks in the US can get our mitts on it, Europe and Asia should see it hit by sometime in April.

Update: We just got the promo video for the HTC Desire – Check it out here.

Only when you’re talking about a phone designed in the same vein as the massive (though drop-dead gorgeous) HTC HD2 with its 4.3 inch display would you ever call a phone with a 3.2″ display “mini” . That’s exactly what HTC’s doing this morning in Barcelona, with the announcement of the Windows Mobile 6.5.3-powered HD mini.

Given the announcement of Windows Phone 7 series, yesterday, it may be a bit hard to get the ol’ salivary glands tickin’ over a WinMo 6 phone. With that said, remember: we’ve still got at least 7 or 8 months before the first WP7 handsets hit the market, and that’s a really, really long time in the Smartphone world.

Hitting Europe and Asia (No word yet about the US) sometime in April, the HD mini doesn’t seem quite as powerful as the device from which it gets its name – in other words, size isn’t the only thing they toned down here. The 1Ghz CPU of the HD2 has been replaced with a 600Mhz model, and the 3.2″ screen is 320×480 rather than 480×800. It’s got a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, though without the flash found on the HD2.

Lowered specs aside, I still expect this to be a damn decent handset. We’ll be spending a bit of time with it (and all the other HTC handsets announced today) later for a hands-on, so check back for our impressions.

As we expected after the leaks last night, HTC has just dropped the good word on three brand new handsets at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The first up is the Android 2.1-powered HTC Legend, which is essentially a spiritual successor to the much-loved HTC Hero.

Outside of its slick new shell (which, by the way, is almost entirely one seamless piece of aluminum, similar to Apple’s uni-body Mac Books), the primary changes from the Hero to the Legend would be the upgrade to Android 2.1, the minor processor speed bump from 528 Mhz to 600, and the nifty optical trackpad that has replaced the trackball. The screen size and resolution remains the same (3.2 inches at 320×480), but they’ve bumped it up from the standard LCD to a gorgeous AMOLED screen.

Is it a massive upgrade from the Hero as it already exists? If we’re solely looking at the specs, no – but if you want something with a little more grumble under the hood, they’ve just announced one of those, as well.

Unfortunately for us folks in the US, the model they’re announcing today lacks support for US 3G. Expect it to launch in March throughout Europe and Asia.

Update: We just got the promo video for the HTC Legend – Check it out here.

Man! Mobile World Congress is all about the last-minute leaks this year. First, a tiny glimpse of Windows Phone leaked out just hours before it became official. Now, three brand-spankin’ new handsets from HTC have just leaked out, just one day before HTC’s press conference where we can only assume these devices were supposed to debut.

All three handsets leaked out in rapid fire over at Modaco.

The oh-so-glorious beast you see up top is the HTC Desire, previously known around the rumor mill as the HTC Bravo. Take Google’s Nexus One, stick HTC’s customized Sense user interface on it, replace the trackball with a nifty optical trackpad – and bam! You’ve got the Desire. It’ll run Android 2.1 on a big and beautiful 3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen packed on top of a 1GHZ processor, 512 MB ROM/576 MB RAM, Bluetooth 2.1, and a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. Alas, it appears that its only prepped for 3G in Europe and Asia at the moment.

We got word of this next one, the HTC Legend, at the same time we found out about the bravo – but words were all we had. Then Netherlandish carrier KPN came along and spilled the beans on this spec-for-spec sequel to the HTC Hero with a few itsy-bitsy press shots. Well, consider those press shots embiggened:

Coming in with a 600mhz CPU, 3.2″ AMOLED screen, and 512 MB RAM/384 MB ROM, it’s not quite as ridiculously spec’d out as the Desire – but it’s still a damn nice handset. Like the Desire, it’s running HTC’s Sense UI on top of Android 2.1 – but unfortunately also like the Desire, the version that has leaked out isn’t compatible with US 3G. Given that a number of US carriers picked up the Hero, however, I’d be damned surprised if it stayed that way for long.

Last but not least: the HD Touch Mini. It’s purportedly running Windows Mobile 6.5.3 — which, considering today’s announcement of its successor, Windows Phone, admittedly makes this one a bit hard to get too excited about. With that said, this’ll probably be one of the last Windows Mobile handsets with HTC’s dramatic UI overhauls on it, given Microsofts new policies that keep manufacturers from replacing Windows Phone interface elements.

Regardless of the politics, all signs indicate that this one will pack a 3.2″ HVGA screen, 5 megapixel camera – and like the rest of them, nothin’ in regards to US 3G.