Author: Greg Kumparak

Bluetooth controllers? Meh. Why reinvent the wheel when the tire just needs new treading?

Take the Motorola Droid. With its big ol’ physical QWERTY keyboard, it has plenty of buttons for gaming (read: playing ROMs) — it’s just that they’re not very conveniently placed. Enter the GameGripper, a snap-on accessory that converts your Droid’s old, boring keyboard into a full fashioned game pad.

Here’s whats going on: You slip the GameGripper over your Droid’s keyboard, and the buttons on the GameGripper line up with those below it. It’s only going to work for those games where key mapping can be redefined — but given that key mapping support is pretty much standard for emulators (which I’d imagine will be the most popular use case), that shouldn’t be an issue for most.

The GameGripper will set you back $15 bucks (plus $5 for shipping) — which, given that it appears to be a fairly independent operation (read: Guy. Garage. Go!), seems plenty reasonable. Not touting a Droid? Don’t sweat it. Plans are in the works to make GameGrippers for the BlackBerry Bold, Moto Devour, and Palm Pixi, and they’re open to other devices if enough people request it.

Check out the GameGripper here.

[Thanks Hyrum! Good luck!]

Never ones to let Apple’s work go untested, the jailbreak community has just put to the test Apple’s claims that the iPhone 3G (as compared to the iPhone 3GS) couldn’t handle the multitasking functionality introduced in iPhone OS 4. As it turns out.. it can — but don’t prep the torches and pitchforks just yet.

As you can see in the video above, the always-so-damned-impressive hackers were able to jailbreak iPhone OS 4.0 running on an iPhone 3G, modify a .plist file – and bam! Multi-tasking support on a 3G. Watch in wonder as they switch between calculator and settings.

Warning: Things get wordy from here on out.

Here’s the catch: calculator, settings, and any other apps that can easily be tested at this point (in other words, Apple’s apps) aren’t really suited for testing this. Third party applications — especially the more intensive ones — are going to be the real determining factor here, and those sorts of apps have to be rebuilt against the 4.0 SDK before they’ll play friendly with the new multitasking system. 4.0 apps aren’t available in the App Store for obvious reasons.

You see, the way Apple is doing multitasking is a bit tricky; outside of a few select APIs (turn-by-turn nav, audio streaming, downloading/uploading, etc.), most apps won’t actually be running in the background. When the user presses the home button, iPhone OS takes an instant snapshot of the entire application and all of its data, then stores the snapshot away. When you switch back to that application, the snapshot almost instantly springs back to life, appearing as if it had never closed. It’s win-win: the user gets ultra quick application switching, and the iPhone doesn’t have to allot resources like RAM and CPU to applications that have no reason to be running.

Storing all that stuff instantly and then resuming it just as quickly is the hard part. Apple gives developers very little time to pause their applications on command — and the amount of time allotted is constantly changing, based on the resources available. The more intensive the app currently running is, the less CPU/RAM is available, the less time iPhone OS gives an app to pause in hopes of getting its resources as soon as possible. If the process can’t be paused in time, the application gets shut down.

Now remember: the iPhone 3G has less CPU and RAM than the 3GS (412 Mhz CPU/128 MB Ram vs. 600 Mhz/256 MB). Less resources from the get go = less time to pause = more apps being shutdown rather than paused. Apple’s options here: let applications take longer to pause/resume on the 3G and thus break the entire smooth, invisible pausing/unpausing system they put in place, or don’t let them pause at all.

They chose the latter for the time being. Right choice? Wrong choice? That’s up to you to determine. Let me know in the comments below.

[Video via RedmondPie]

Man, I can’t remember any phone in recent history for which details and pics have leaked as frequently as they have for the myTouch Slide. This thing’s not even official yet, but we know more about it than a celebrity stalker knows about their stalkee’s underwear drawer.

The latest bit of knowledge, added just today: color variations.

The lads over at CellPhoneSignal dug up the shots above, claiming that they’ll be some of T-Mobile’s own official product shots. Unless there’s some sort of Photoshop trickery going on here (and we’ve got no reason to believe there is), it looks like the myTouch slide will be offered up in hues of Red/Black, All Black, and White.

Today was the day that pigs flew. Seemingly out of no where (or, arguably, perfectly timed to downplay all the recent rabble rousing surrounding some new terms added to the SDK), Opera Mini has been approved for the iPhone.

It’s not going to be available in the US for a few more hours, but we were able to dig it up by tinkering around with some settings and, well, pretending we were somewhere else. I’m checking it out right this second, but I wanted to give you guys a really quick hands on demonstration, along with a few early impressions and speed tests, to tide you over until it’s available everywhere.

We’ll update this post with any impressions we’ve got, and basic Safari vs. Opera Mini load time test results.

Update – First Impressions:

• Just in general use so far, the page loads seem pretty snappy. I’m not going to play psychic and try to guess how much faster/slower it is than Safari, but I’ll have some test results on that in a few.
• Scrolling is a bit more sensitive than it is in Safari. This takes a minute or two to get used to, but I’m liking it so far; I feel like I’m getting around the page faster.
• It’s by all means first release software. The page renderer shows things in a weird way (an artifact of it rearanging text to fit in one zoomed viewing window, removing the need to scroll around) sometimes.
• The tabbing system seems really, really great. I prefer it over Safari’s, even. Unlike Safari, you can view all your open tabs without blocking the entire page. New tabs open instantly to your home page (which is a 3×3 grid of your favorite sites), and you can punch in your destination URL from there. I’m sitting here jumping back and forth between 3 different tabbed windows, and there’s next to zero delay. It’s absolutely fantastic, and how I wish tabbing was done in Safari.
• Opera Mini compresses everything on the server side before sending it to your device, which is why it (theoretically) speeds things up and allows you to use less data. Alas, this means that if Opera’s servers go down, so does Opera Mini. I’ve seen the servers go down once already for about a minute during my testing, but this was presumably due to some last minute change that required a restart. When it goes down, all pages return a “Internal Server Error”.
• There are definitely bugs. It’s not terribly broken by any means, but bug spottings are common.
• The multitouch pinch to zoom here is …weird. It’s not like Safari’s, where you’re really controlling the zoom level; you’re really just switching between zoomed and not zoomed.

Update – Speed Tests:

Our first speed tests are in.

• 3G Speed Test:

On a 3G connection, Opera Mini is consistently and considerably faster than Safari. We only saw one site (Facebook) where Opera Mini wasn’t the clear victor, and the load times there were within about a second of each other. Both browsers had clear caches and histories, and all pages loaded were their standard PC versions (rather than their mobile-optimized counterparts).

• WiFi Speed Test:

WiFi results were strikingly similar to the 3G results, with all pages loading faster on Opera Mini than on Safari outside of Facebook, where Safari wins by a hair. The difference in page load times were considerably less vast on WiFi.

After years of rumors, hearsay, and leaks, we’ve finally gotten the opportunity to play with the final product of Project Pink. These are the first real products of Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Danger, creators of the sidekick. So how are they?

Read on for our impressions

Update: Now with video of the Kin 2 in action – check it out after the jump.

Both phones:

• These are not smart phones. They’re not really trying to be. They’re fancy, flashy featurephones, aimed at people who obsess over social networks and nothing else. If you’re reading this site, these phones probably aren’t for you. If you’ve ever thought, “Hey, I wonder if I’m a power user,” these phones are probably not for you.
• The interface is pretty, albeit a bit overwhelming at first – and, unfortunately, not all that smooth. I saw a fair amount of lag when hopping between panes of the homescreen on both the Kin 1 and the Kin 2.
• For some crazy reason, Microsoft has built a whole new OS here. It’s not Windows Phone 7, but it is Silverlight based.
• There is no development SDK currently, and there don’t seem to be any plans for one. This leads to…
• There is no App Store. What you see is what you get, for the time being.
• There is no instant messaging. For a phone focused on social networking and keeping in touch, this seems like a deal killer. We also can’t find a Calendar.
• The sharing experience, “The Spot” — essentially the main feature that Microsoft is betting the entire farm on — is pretty clean. Hold your thumb on content you want to share, drag it to the persistently-there circle at the bottom of the screen, then drag over the contacts you want to share it with. If this (and pretty much only this) sort of function is all you’re looking for in a phone, you’re set..
• My favorite aspect of these phones had nothing to do with the hardware itself — it’s “Kin Studio”, the browser-based syncing backend. Snap a shot, and it’s online. Snap a video, it’s online. It’s all super slick and surprisingly fast. Theres an entire market of people out there who don’t have the damnedest idea how to pull their media off their phone – for them, this is a godsend.

Kin 1:

• I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but this phone is god awful ugly. The screen is smaller than the keyboard, which exposes about a 1/2 inch of white plastic each side of it. I’m not talking about Oh-you-can-see-the-lines sloppy design here; this seems very much intentional, and seems like a poor choice. It does not look good.
• While not a looker, it’s not a bad size. It fits right in your palm.
• The keyboard on the Kin 1 is average. . Sharp’s got a bit of a history building keyboards with this team (Kin was largely built by ex-Danger folks, and Sharp they built most of Danger’s Sidekick line), and it shows. The keyboard here is a bit better than most feature phones we’ve dabbled with, but not on par with the Sidekicks of yesteryear. It’s a bit playschool (for the lack of a better word) looking, but seems to function well. They’re a bit harder than any of the keys from the Sidekicks, lacking that familiar thin gel layer.



Kin 2:

• In a nutshell: The Kin 2 makes the Kin 1 look bad. It’s considerably prettier than its baby brother.
• The keyboard here is surprisingly good. It’s still not quite what most Sidekick users might be aching for – but it’s close. Keys seemed well spaced, with great tactility.

In the end: neither of these phones are for me. They’re probably not for you, either. Microsoft is sure there’s a market here, though — one that wants social networking as the main (and in a sense, only) focus. Is it worth it to bring out hardware with a whole new platform specifically for this market, rather than working to make your current software platform (Windows Phone 7) more accessible to them? They’ll have to bring the prices in low — and I mean low — to compete. We’ll just have to wait and see how many of these they can actually push.

Whatd’ya know! I didn’t expect to find a Kin 2 box laying around right after we did our Kin 1 unboxing, but sure enough: there it was, prepped and ready to be torn apart.

This one’s more or less the same deal, with a recyclable egg-carton-esque packaging wrapped around the goods. But this one’s black!

Sure, they may have just announced the Kin 1 and Kin 2 (previously known as Project Pink) — and sure, they may not have release dates or pricing for them yet. But we had the good fortune of stumbling across a Kin 1 in its crazy greeen-ish recyclable packaging, and decided to strip it apart real quick. Check out our ultra hasty gallery after the jump.

We’re live in San Francisco, where Microsoft has at long last unveiled the project previously known around the Internets as “Pink”, which they’ve now given the name “Kin”.

So what is Kin? Much like the rumor mill had projected, it’s two different social-network oriented phones: Kin 1, and Kin 2 (How very Seuss of them). Kin 1 is the phone previously known as “Turtle”, a little palm (as in the body part, not the company) sized portrait QWERTY slider with a 5 megapixel camera. Kin 2 was previously known amongst the whisperers as “Pure”, and is a landscape QWERTY slider with an 8 megapixel camera. Both phones are launching exclusively on Verizon in May.

Pictures incoming as soon as possible. Read on for all the details we’ve got so far.

The phones are very much the culmination of Microsoft’s purchase of Danger in 2008. According to three reps we asked, they are not based on Windows Phone 7, and instead use a Silverlight-based platform built from the ground up for these devices. They’re not exactly what we’d call “smartphones” – and Microsoft’s not pitching them as such. There’s no application store as far as we’ve seen. As we predicted back in October, it appears to be lacking a handful of features that folks might expect, including instant messaging and calendar functionality. Battery life “gets you through a weekend” according to a project lead.

The entire platform focuses around two features: The Loop, and The Spot. “The Loop” is your 3 pane homescreen: one pane is your news/social feed, one is your contacts page, and the last is where you access things like the phone and the browser. At the moment, the social “top contacts” supports updates from Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, and Twitter. “The Spot” is a small circle at the bottom of the screen which you use to share content with your social network; you drag things from your feed (or the browser, texts, etc) into “The Spot”, and then drag over which contacts/networks you want to share that data to.

Similar to the Sidekick series, just about everything you do on the phone is auto-synced to the cloud, from pictures to videos to text. This cloud backend is browser based, and as such should be completely cross platform.

The website where you’ll be able to see all your images and video (unlimited storage, login via Windows Live ID) in a timeline is Kin.com, which is up now. Sharing, feeds, and functionality are similar, but bigger. There is a browser-based Mac sync client whereby you can sync music and media (yes, iTunes stuff), but this is NOT related to Zune and will not work with Zune devices. It is totally separate.

Another day, another liveblog. We’re live in San Francisco, where Microsoft’s mobile team is expected to finally pull back the curtains on their long rumored, oft-leaked Project Pink. We’re expecting them to unveil at least two new pieces of hardware today (previously known as “Turtle” and “Pure”), though we’re not sure if they’ll be running Windows Phone 7 or… something else.

The show is scheduled to begin at 10:00 A.M sharp. We’re in our seats, batteries charged and WiFi pumping — join us after the jump for our up-to-the-minute liveblog.

We’ve been reporting for about a week now on a couple of rumors indicating that various companies are circling around Palm with possible intent to buy, and it looks like it all might be coming to a head.

Bloomberg is reporting that Palm has officially put it self up for sale, with their sources confirming the previous rumors that both HTC and Lenovo are considering making the buy. Another name mentioned: Dell — but according to the same sources, Dell has already backed out.

This next week should be mighty interesting for the folks in Sunnyvale. Stay tuned for more as we hear it.

If AT&T gets a bad rap for having poor signal quality in any city, it’s San Francisco. Part of this is due to the sudden influx of iPhones in the Silicon Valley that began in 2007, putting an almighty strain on the network; of the roughly 800,000 or so people living in San Francisco, we’re estimating that around 10 million of them (or 1,150%) are carrying iPhones. Throw in ridiculous topography and monstrous buildings, and it starts to get tough to properly blanket the entire area in radio waves.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that San Francisco is one of the first cities to be getting AT&T’s cell-tower-in-a-box, the 3G MicroCell. AT&T just hit us up to let us know that we should start seeing the little router-sized, broadband-powered signal boosters on the shelves in their San Francisco stores beginning today.

If you’re in a dead zone or if the ridiculously sized buildings around your home are causing your calls to fail on the regular, you might want to consider picking one of these up. It’ll set you back $150 bucks up front, but there’s no monthly fee — that is, unless you want unlimited minutes whenever you’re connected to your MicroCell. That’ll set you back $20 bucks a month.

We just got our hands on one of these things this evening, and we’ll be heading up to the city later this week to give it a spin. Check back for a hands on report some time this week.

As they do with any major new iPhone OS release, people have been tearing apart the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK from the very second it was available. Almost immediately, someone noticed that bits and pieces of iChat had found their way into the new software.

By itself, it didn’t really make sense. The iPhone has plenty of incredibly solid third-party IM applications — some of them being amongst the App Store’s best sellers. Why would Apple be sneaking any parts of iChat onto the iPhone? Then the first mentions of a front facing camera were unearthed, and it all started coming together in the form of two little words: video chat. Alas, there was no concrete proof that Apple was following the same train of thought.. until now.

You see, much of iPhone OS’ underpinnings can be revealed through tricks called “class dumping” and “string dumping”. Through class dumping, you can take a peek into which frameworks and APIs are being used by any given application. (Ever heard of an application using “unpublished” APIs? This is how the developers found those APIs in the first place — and how Apple caught them, for that matter.) Through string dumping, all of the various bits of text pre-programmed into an app can be ripped out and displayed.

When the guys over at 9to5Mac started using the above techniques to explore the innards of the new SDK, it all came spilling out. There they were, in good ol’ plain English: references to video chatting, ranging from inviting users to terminating calls. More digging unveiled that Apple appears to be testing video chat on four servers: three privately located on Apple’s own intranet, and one which is (currently) open to the world (albeit mostly useless).

We spoke to our own sources, many of whom were tight-lipped on the matter. Of those who did pipe up, they were able to confirm 9to5’s findings, along with at least 30 other references to video chat support that went unmentioned. All of them — and us, for that matter — seem to be wondering the same thing: why the heck did Apple leave this in (semi-private) public view? Apple’s known for shrouding even the most minute details in secrecy; here, it’s seems as if they’re almost intentionally throwing many dozens of hints about an unannounced feature in a place where tinkerers were almost guaranteed to find it. Is Apple learning to love the rumor mill?

My current educated guess based on everything that has been whispered to me so far: I don’t think iChat, as an IM client that would compete with the third party apps, is coming to the iPhone — but that Apple will be using bits and pieces of the iChat core to power their video chat service. I’ll keep my ear to the ground for more.

Two days ago, something crazy happened: after spiraling downward for almost a year, Palm’s stock finally started to climb thanks to a rumor that Lenovo was considering snatching the injured company up. We expected things to level off pretty quickly — and they did, at a growth of right around 20% with a going price of about $4.60 per share.

Today, even more fuel has been thrown on to the fire.

Early this morning, a Chinese economics/investing site threw another name into the mix of possible suitors: HTC. Given HTC’s many recent successes, that was bound to get the investors excited – and it did. Jump forward to right this second, and Palm’s sitting at right around $5.20, or a 33% increase over what they were at before the climb began.

They’re still nowhere near the $17.39 peak they were at earlier this year, but they’re inching closer and closer to the $6.14 mark they were at before they started warning people that their Q3 results weren’t going to be too hot.

What do you think: did the rumor mill light a long lasting fire beneath the butts of Palm investors, or is this just a temporary spike?

Palm’s Stock Ticker on Google Finance

Late last night, we put up a post debunking the idea going around the Bloggerdom that the iPhone OS 4.0 Beta had already been jailbroken, because, well, it hadn’t.

But now it has.

MuscleNerd, a member of the notoriously wonderful iPhone DevTeam, pushed the above video out to YouTube this morning. What you’re looking at: that’s a VNC server running on iPhone OS 4.0, allowing MuscleNerd to remotely connect, view, and control it via his computer. Even with iPhone OS’ new found multitasking abilities, that’s something the iPhone just can’t do by default.

There’s little reason to doubt the authenticity of this video; MuscleNerd is amongst the most established members of the iPhone hacking community, and isn’t really known for messing around.

While it’s exciting to see, remember: this is Beta software. Apple’s presumably leaving whatever security holes they know about open in the Beta for the same reason the development team isn’t releasing the details of their most recently discovered exploits (including this one) until iPhone OS 4.0 is available to all: it’s a game of cat and mouse. The mouse doesn’t want to tell the cat where he’s hiding his cheese, and the cat doesn’t want the mouse to know whether or not she already knows.

We can’t say for sure whether this is an actual leak or the work of an overly talented individual with just the right amount of time on their hands. Either way, the above render is the most gloriously high resolution look at the Verizon-bound HTC Incredible Android wunderphone that we’ve been blessed with so far.

I got to see this thing in person for an oh-so-fleeting moment a few weeks back, under a “Look with your eyes, not with your hands (or your camera), before I put this back in my pocket and pretend I never had it out” agreement. From what I recall, this render is more or less spot on. The only discrepancy I’m spotting: the model I saw had a ring around the optical trackpad, similar to the ones found on the HTC Desire and Nexus One. If the final Incredible ends up not having that same ring, I’d be pretty surprised.

[Via AndroidAndMe]

This’ll be a quick one, because we want to nip this little rumor in the bud before it takes off.

A handful of blogs around the vast Internets are reporting that the just released iPhone OS 4.0 Beta has already been hacked to pieces, with a jailbreak solution already being discovered. This is inaccurate.

The truth: it’s all just a bit of miscommunication. When asked (via Twitter) when he would start working on a 4.0 jailbreak, well known iPhone hacker ih8sn0w responded “I already have. :)” Short story shorter, this was misinterpreted as “I’ve already jailbroken it” rather than “I’ve already started”, blog posts were written, and the rest is history.

While iH8Snow is working on a jailbreak and thinks its possible, they haven’t discovered any way in just yet.

Didn’t get into the BlackBerry Twitter beta when it was locked up tight? Didn’t feel like dabbing with leaked software when the newest version leaked to everyone a few days later? Fear not, dear reader! It’s almost your time to bask in the sweet, sweet RIM-brand Twitter client sunlight.

Tonight at 6 P.M Pacific (9 PM eastern), them fine folks up in Waterloo will be flipping all the appropriate switches to send the Twitter client into the public realm. It’s still considered Beta, but it’s at least solid enough that RIM’s ready for anyone and everyone to play with it. Look for it in the Test Center on the BlackBerry App World or, failing that, BlackBerry Beta Zone.

Let us know what you think, won’t you?

It’s that time again, folks. The day that is looked upon with excitement by fan boys and cynics alike: it’s an Apple announcement day.

Apple has already made it perfectly clear that today’s announcement will bring details about iPhone OS 4.0 – but what ever will they be? Will it multitask? Will there be interface overhauls? Will this new OS singlehandedly eliminate world hunger, disease, and flash floods?

We’re in Cupertino to find out – join us after the jump for a constant stream of updates from our live blog.

The event begins at 10 A.M. Pacific. We will be fielding questions and providing commentary/image from the Apple campus in the time leading up to the event. If you’re just looking for the main event, tune in at 10 A.M. sharp.

10:07: 250,000 iBooks on day one. 600,000 iBooks downloaded since. 3.5 million apps downloaded so far

10:06: They sold 350,000 iPads on launch day, and 450,000 total so far

10:05: He’s quoting some of the iPad reviews. Hes quoted Walt Mossberg and Ed Baig so far.

10:04: We’ve got something to share today that we’re very excited about. That’s iPhone OS 4. But before that: something we just shipped recently: the iPad.

10:03: The lights are dimming, Jobs has entered.

10:02: We’ve just been seated

10:01: Our live blogging system just crumbled under the weight of many thousands of people try to refresh repeatedly. We’re switching to manual mode for the time being, please follow along below. We’ll switch back to automatic mode if the system restores itself.

10:00:

Start the countdown, folks. Tomorrow at 10 A.M. sharp, Apple will finally be dropping the curtain on iPhone OS 4.0 – and we’ll be there, reporting live. We’ll get to the ol’ Infinite Loop bright and early, armed to the teeth with laptops, cameras, an array of 3G USB dongles, and all the other gear necessary to bring you the best liveblog around.

The event starts at 10 A.M Pacific, though we’ll probably fire up the live blog a bit early to bring you commentary and images from the front line.

Can’t get enough of the live blog goodness? Be sure to tune in on Monday, April 12th at 10 A.M, when Microsoft is expected to announce whatever it is they’ve been working on with Project Pink. It’s gonna be a fun few days – be sure to tune it for all of it!

I’m trying to keep the iPad-related posts here on MobileCrunch down to a minimum, because I figure you’re getting enough of it shoved in your face by other blogs, Twitter, and your mother after she saw it mentioned on the news and wanted to bond with you. With that said, this one gets a pass for being as much AT&T-related as it is iPad-related.

You see, most of the major carriers (including AT&T) like to pitch their data plans as being “Unlimited”. It just sounds awesome, you know? Thing is, it’s not actually “Unlimited” as in “without limits”. Once you dig into the fine print, you find all sorts of phrasing like “Unlimited.. within reason”, with the “reasonable” level generally coming in somewhere around 5 gigabytes. Go past this a few times, they’ll call and shout at you; go way past it regularly, they might nix your data plan (though I’ve never heard of that actually happening.)

With the iPad 3G, AT&T’s throwing this practice out the window.

The folks over at Gearlog spoke to AT&T’s Mark Siegel, who said, straight up: “unlimited is unlimited.” Not bad for $30 a month.

It’s kind of an odd device to make the switch with; given the iPad’s higher resolution and larger screen, it seems like more people are going to be using more data more often — but you know what? We’re not complaining.