Author: John Biggs

A “market-leading gaming console company” hired a contact center provider, Alpine Access in Denver, to provide phone support. But they can’t find 200 or so video gamers who are willing to walk parents through how to pull a grilled cheese sandwich out of the optical drive near Denver so they’re going to that hotbed of excellent and stable talent: housebound Internet fans.

Their site, www.alpineaccess.com/superhero/, offers the opportunity to apply to a work-from-home job with benefits, competitive wages, and the opportunity to talk about video games.

Anyway, if you’re out of a job and you think about Bayonetta when you spend alone time, this may work. Give it a go.

Alpine Access Hiring 200 Video Gamers for Work From Home Jobs

Virtual Call Center Seeks to Fill Positions Immediately After Selection by Major Video Gaming Console Company
DENVER, May 17 /PRNewswire/ — Alpine Access, the premier provider of virtual contact center solutions and services, today launched an aggressive recruiting and hiring campaign seeking intermediate to experienced video game enthusiasts to provide inbound technical support to fellow gamers. Alpine Access was recently selected by a market-leading gaming console company to help customers resolve technical issues over the phone. All positions are available immediately and are performed from an employee’s home.
Ideal candidates are self-starters desiring home-based employment who enjoy playing video games on the latest gaming systems. In addition to being people-oriented and able to rapidly build rapport with fellow gamers, candidates must have strong technical aptitude, problem-solving skills and the ability to multi-task in a fast-paced environment. To learn more about specific employment requirements or to apply for these home-based positions, please visit: www.alpineaccess.com/superhero/
As the founder of the at-home call center model, Alpine Access has the ability to locate, hire and train people from anywhere in the U.S. With no geographical barriers, the company can employ gamers from across the country and provide them with the unique advantages that come with working from home. For example, applicants can select from full or part-time shifts and have input on setting their schedules.
The virtual employment model was a main reason the client selected Alpine Access to provide technical support to the more than 40 million users of its gaming platform. With access to the largest talent pool in the nation, Alpine Access can find applicants that possess very specific, hard-to-find qualifications. This employee-match program has proven to have positive financial benefits with better results for one-call resolution, customer satisfaction and customer retention. In this case, the unique skills and experience of video gamers make them ideally suited to help fellow gamers and quickly resolve their issues.
“A typical contact center is limited to hiring within a 30 mile radius, making it nearly impossible to find 200 well-qualified video gamers in a single location,” said Christopher Carrington, Alpine Access CEO. “Alpine Access’ home-based positions provide employees with paid training, competitive wages, access to benefits, and the freedom and flexibility to work from the comfort of their own homes. It’s a fantastic opportunity for people who play and enjoy video games.”

Well if that don’t beat all. Apple sold 8.8 million iPhones while Motorola sold 8.5 million last quarter. The crazy part is that those are all, obviously, iPhones while Motorola’s entire line consists of smart and feature phones. Including Droid and Devour.

9to5 notes:

Apple has eclipsed Motorola as the biggest mobile phone maker in the US, while fresh research tells us iPhone-driven global smartphone sales grew 50 per cent in the first quarter. Meanwhile, over half a million iPhones sold in just five months in South Korea.

Motorola is still doing OK for themselves, which is nice to know, but clearly Apple is doing something right. Like sending private detectives to the homes of 21-year-olds.

Now here’s a turnaround I never expected. According to a recent results filing, Motorola is working its way back into solvency and is turning a profit and shipping devices like crazy. The company took a slight loss in mobile sales – about $192 million – but that’s far lower than $550 million last year.

In truth, the company has only three phones on the market – the Cliq, the Droid, and the Devour. However, it’s abundantly clear that their decision to go all Android all the time was a great one and that the marketing Verizon has pushed behind the Droid has really brought the company back to life. I, for one, am glad. Motorola hitched their wagon to the RAZR for far too long and almost lost their shirt in the process. The fact that they’re able to push out a monster release and are currently popular is an amazing feat.

via Electronista

A reader, Derek, writes:

Not with a bang, but a whimper? I’m @ the VZN store with the earliest
opening time in a major metro region, and I am the line. I feel a bit
silly.

Did you wait in line? Do you want us to get you coffee?

Nokia N8 first HD video sample from Nokia Conversations on Vimeo.

After a heady excoriation of the N8 based on pre-release hardware surfaced this week, it looks like Nokia is trying hard to convince us that the N8 is still the phone to beat.

Look: I love Nokia. I would even marry it if that were legal in my state. But they haven’t made a compelling phone in years. As T. Ricker of Engasmic writes: “But Nokia, a company known for using decent optics, sensors, and flash units in its N-series devices, certainly won’t be disappointing impromptu photogs making their first jump into Symbian^3. Just imagine what Nokia hardware coupled with a killer user experience could do. Could do.”

Could do is right, young T. Ricker. Could do is right.

Every year, like the swallows returning from Capistrano or the tourists returning to Disneyworld Paris, Nokia releases a flagship phone. Sadly, the boatwrights at Nokia haven’t dropped a winner in nigh on three years now and, if early reports are to believed, their new N8 is not looking seaworthy.

The N8 looks like the Motorola Devour and has a 3.5-inch OLED, capacitive touch screen, and all of the fun things you expect like compass and accelerometer. On paper, it seems great. It also uses Symbian^3 which, again, according to early reports, its just like Symbian^1 and Symbian^2. In other words, the more things change at Nokia, the more they stay the same.

Granted Nokia sells mores phones a second than Apple sells in a year and if you’re a big Nokia fan you have reason to be excited. After all, it’s not every day that Nokia releases a phone that apparently takes design cues from the real world as opposed to the muted expectations of a surly Finn. We’re going to try to get our hands on this thing but until that day let’s just stare at her ageless beauty.

Size: 113.5 x 59 x 12.9 mm
Weight (with battery): 135 g
Volume: 86 cc
12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics
Fullscreen 16:9 viewfinder with easy-to-use touchscreen parameters
Xenon flash
Face recognition software
Autofocus
Focal length: 5.4 mm
F number/Aperture: F2.8
Still images file format: JPEG/EXIF
Zoom up to 2x (digital) for still images
Zoom up to 3x (digital) for video
Secondary camera for video calls (VGA, 640 x 480 pixels)
Internal memory: 16 GB
MicroSD memory card slot, hot swappable, up to 32GB
High-Speed microUSB to PC connectivity
Physical keys (Menu key, Power key, Lock key, volume keys, Camera key)
Finger touch support for text input and UI control
On-screen alphanumeric keypad and full keyboard
Dedicated camera and volume keys
Possibility to use capacitive stylus
Handwriting recognition for Chinese

Full Spec Sheet

Sigh. Nokia may be selling phones like hotcakes to the developing world and my father-in-law in Poland, but they can’t make a popular phone to save their life. The new N8, leaked and reviewed on Electronista is little more than a rehash of Symbian circa 2000.

Mobile-Review’s Eldar Murtazin goes so far as to jokingly accuse Nokia employees of sabotaging the company’s brand from the inside, else it might be “impossible to explain” why the N8 exists at all.

Ha! Oh, Nokia! Silly silly Nokia. Anyway, the N8 takes some nice pictures and supports HDMI, because that’s one of the things people have been looking for for in a phone.

Friends of CG Jordan Anderson and Vaidila Kungys, creators of Ride the City New York just released their first Ride the City iPhone app [download] for NYC. The app, like the service, offers safe bike routes through New York and is based on the OpenStreetMap project. It costs $1.99.

To use it, you simply enter your start and end points and then follow the route. The map takes into consideration low-traffic roads as well as dedicated bike lanes to get you from point A to a Russian bath house in the East Village.

It also works on the iPad, but it will be hard to keep one hand free to signal when you’re lugging your slate around.

Some points from their announcement:

As on the website, the iPhone app steers you toward routes that maximize the use of bike lanes, bike paths, greenways, and other bike-friendly streets. Routes avoid high-traffic streets and steep climbs.
You can select your preferred route sensitivity: direct, safe, or safer. Or you can change them on the fly.
The directions are displayed on the map with an easy-to-read scrollable screen – perfect for double-checking your trip when taking a break.
Find the nearest bike shops (and get directions to one) with just one touch.
We’ve placed a Report an Error button prominently on the map so you can provide instant feedback to report a mistake on the map or to suggest a better way around.
As on the website, Ride the City utilizes a CloudMade basemap that is sourced from OpenStreetMap, the volunteer community mapping project that is making a free map of the world.

The app was built by developers at Door3.

Gruuuuubeeer! Why do you force us to listen to your reasoned, intelligent arguments explaining the odd language in the new iPhone SDK guidelines outlawing outside iPhone compiling methods, including .NET and Adobe’s own Flash-to-iPhone tools? If we follow Godwin’s law to its obvious conclusion, we can only say that you are a collaborator with enemy forces!

For those of you not following along, the story is this: Apple’s new SDK guidelines state, in no uncertain terms, that you can only use Apple tools to compile and submit iPhone and iPad apps. Nothing else is allowed. To many this is an affront to the general dignity of man and a call to arms. To others, and I suspect many others, it’s not a really a BFD.

Gruber writes:

IPHONE DEVELOPERS: No change. If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule. You’re already using Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit. If you’re an iPhone developer and you are not following Apple’s advice, you’re going to get screwed eventually. If you are constitutionally opposed to developing for a platform where you’re expected to follow the advice of the platform vendor, the iPhone OS is not the platform for you. It never was. It never will be.

(And, in one sense, this is good news for existing iPhone developers: their skill set is now in even greater demand.)

He also points out “Microsoft’s mantra was (and remains) ‘Windows everywhere’. Apple doesn’t want everywhere, they just want everywhere good. The idea though, is to establish the Cocoa Touch APIs and the App Store as a de facto standard for mobile apps — huge share of both developers and users.”

In short, Apple is like a car repair place with an open hiring policy. Anyone can come in and become a car mechanic. Heck, you can even get rich doing it. But Apple Car Repair doesn’t want some dude walking in with a rubber wrench and weird screwdrivers stripping the heads off of oil pan screws and breaking more than he’s fixing. Even Steve Jobs, in an email to a developer, admits this. He writes:

We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.

In short, if you don’t like his tools, get out of his garage.

The problem here is the ascription of malice to what is, in the end, a business decision. While you have plenty of tools for programming in Windows, you also have plenty of tools for programming under OS X. However, to allow a multitude of frameworks for mobile devices is asking for trouble, especially when Apple’s goal, in the end, is to offer a superior mobile experience on their devices.

Heck, even Windows Phone is limited to a few frameworks and tools. Whereas an operating system can survive some junk programs now and again, to have your phone BSOD is a horror. I actually experienced this on a long drive two weeks ago. I was running a navigation app and it crashed. The iPhone wouldn’t start up and I reset it, while driving, multiple times. Finally, I let it sit, charging, and after almost forty minutes the silver Apple logo disappeared and the phone booted. A phone is a device designed for 24/7 access (AT&T’s network notwithstanding) and letting just anyone come in and pound out some apps is a recipe for disaster.

As a corollary, this control also offers a superior experience for the consumer. Until the iPhone, I never purchased a single mobile app on Symbian, Palm, or Windows Mobile. Ever. Period. Now I buy apps like mad and am looking forward to apps on the iPad. I think this behavior is a massive step forward in a word where mobile programming was often relegated to second tier.

In short, learn Apple’s tools or hire someone who knows Apple’s tools. Just because you like Flash/.NET/C#/COBOL/Pascal/LOGO doesn’t mean Apple has to like it. As horrible as it sounds, Apple is doing this for your own good.

Short Version: Pity the poor HD2. It’s one of the most amazing phones I’ve seen all year but like some ultra-evolved dinosaur at the end of the Cretaceous period, it was born just as a cataclysmic asteroid (Windows Phone 7) was about to change the entire ecosystem. Still, for someone looking for a great media phone and one of the best Windows Mobile Phones I’ve ever seen, you could do worse.

Features:

• Tethering enabled
• Striking 4.3-inch screen
• 1GHz processor
• 5-megapixel camera with flash
• $199 with 2-year contract

Pros:

• Amazing screen
• Great media features
• Thin and light

Cons:

• Windows 6.5 with no current upgrade path
• A bit big
• Includes two Transformers movies

The Device
The best thing about the HD2 is that it looks nothing like a Windows Mobile device. For years Windows Mobile has popped up in interface and usability elements like herpes at Studio 54 – it’s always been there, you just have to press the right buttons and you’ll see it. For example, viewing emails used to dump you into Windows Mobiles’ sub par email browser and when you hit the “Start” menu you’d see an ugly list of apps. Somewhere in there was a task manager and a few other vestiges of 1990s technology that Microsoft stuffed into the device.

Windows Mobile 6.5 repaired some of these problems by making most menus icon-based and HTC took things to their obvious conclusion by overlaying their excellent Sense UI over the entire thing. Now you get photorealistic weather icons, easy access to media and messaging functions, and a great experience overall.

The device itself is mostly screen. It has a beautiful 4.3-inch 480 X 800 WVGA touchscreen with a set of buttons for calls as well as Windows, Home, and Back keys along the bottom. There is a full sized headphone jack on the bottom and the phone comes with 16GB of storage. It als includes Blockbuster on Demand access as well as free access to mobiTV for a month. As I mentioned above, T-Mobile included Transformers and Transformers 2: Let’s Try to Make More Money. Obviously these movies are easy selling points for those with light brain damage.

The Good
The central metaphor is a taskbar that appears along the bottom of the screen that contains a number of activities including Home – showing a set of icons including camera, Facebook, YouTube, etc. – as well as Messages, Mail, Browser, Photos, Stocks, Twitter, and Search. The Weather screen is actually quite striking and shows the current time and weather appear in a very cool animation across the screen. Cloud days get delightful clouds while sunny days get, obviously, sun. HTC does this sort of thing well. Their design is beautiful and they do an excellent job of mixing photorealism with readable text to make a great UI.

Going past these initial screens you delve deeper into Windows Mobile 6.5 and, ultimately, despair. Everything works as it should and, in theory, this is more an app phone than a smart phone. It has a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, Bluetooth stereo support, as well as tethering. Generally it has all the right pieces in all the right places. But then we come to the elephant in the room: Windows Phone 7.

The Bad

The HD2 is a great phone. If you’re in the market for a nice media phone and have to have Windows Mobile for work, get this one. It’s one of the best. If you don’t, then you may want to wait. As far as we know, as of this writing, this phone will not support the new version of Windows Mobile (Windows Phone 7).

Again, if you upgrade every year or eight months, do what you feel. This is a good Windows Mobile Phone and on par with the iPhone in terms of media features. However, the idea that this phone will soon be extinct is disconcerting.

Bottom Line
If you want to future proof your phone investment, you need to rethink the HD2. It’s such a great device – slim, sexy, and plenty of power – but it is like buying the last Palm OS phone just before the Pre is launched. In a few months this phone will be vaguely outdated and in a year it will be obsolete. I do not envy T-Mobile and HTC in their damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t position, but I want to make it clear that buying this phone, while not a gamble per se, puts the owner in an odd position: they will love the phone but will be very jealous of Windows Phone 7 when it drops.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe WP7 will slip onto here like a pat of butter on a good steak. Only time will tell.

Short Version:

It can be said that Motorola just got its groove back. The Droid is probably one of the best phones out there, followed by the Devour, and they’re constantly releasing a few good models every few weeks, which is better than some manufacturers can say. They’ve hit on a strong formula: build a nice phone, put Android on it, sell a few hundred thousand. Repeat. While the CLIQ XT isn’t Motorola’s best phone, it follows Moto’s not-so-secret recipe without shaming the chef.

Features:

• Two backplates
• International GSM support
• 2GB card included
• MOTOBLUR
• 3.1-inch touchscreen

Pros:

• Nice shape and size
• Better MOTOTBLUR support/li>
• SWYPE support

Cons:

• No keyboard
• Widgets are cramped in original configuration
• A bit slow when overburdened

 

The CLIQ XT is a candybar touchscreen phone with a 3.1 HGVA 320×480 pixel display. It weighs as much as the iPhone (130 grams) and is almost exactly the same size as Apple’s ubiquito-phone. It supports US and international GSM networks and costs $129 with two-year contract.

The device comes with a 2GB micro SD card and lasts about 24 hours on one charge with cautious use. Standby is 19 days, but I saw battery failure at about three days.

No so bad

In all, this phone is not so bad. It’s much better than the previous CLIQ, a top heavy abomination with a keyboard, and MOTOBLUR runs quite handily on this model, unlike the previous version. Because I’ve been reviewing so many MOTOBLUR-capable handsets I love that the device stores my email and social networking preferences in the cloud. If you rarely upgrade, you probably won’t notice this but it’s a nice feeling, akin to slipping into a warm bath of unhardened yet cooling Jell-o.

On the whole, the device performs as you’d expect it to. The networking is fast, the mapping works well, and SWYPE – a keyboard style that allows you to “swipe” letters to type longer words – works perfectly for data entry. There are four buttons on the bottom and a touch sensitive directional pad. Volume buttons are on the left side and the camera and power buttons are on the right.

I used the phone for a bit and was pleased that all of the default widgets, especially the social networking stuff, handled themselves even against the onslaught of my online social life. There was no lag in the windows and all of the Android apps worked fine.

It also comes with an purple back plate, for the fashion-conscious, which points to a teen/young adult focus.

Not so good
To be absolutely honest, I can’t find anything wrong with this phone. It’s a little mundane and a little clunky but it works. If anything has taken up the Sidekick mantle in the non-expert smartphone arena it’s been Android and this is a perfect example of what happens when you pair Android, a nice overlay, and non-adventurous hardware design. Friends, this is one of the first Android feature-phones.

Bottom line
Is this worth the price of admission? Sure. If you’re looking for a nice, standard Android phone, you could do worse. It’s a strong, if slightly unexciting, phone that would look great in a teenager’s purse.

The rumor mill is churning today as news of a CDMA iPhone running on Verizon will be manufactured by Pegatron in China while a whole new AT&T model, made by Foxconn, will also drop in the summer/fall timeframe. the Journal notes that the two new devices will be exactly the same except, obviously, the CDMA version will lack a SIM card.

We’ve seen weird leaks of an iPhone 4G screen – something longer than the current iPhone screen with a front-facing camera – but nothing concrete. We also need to take this with a grain of salt. Asian manufacturers enjoy talking up their connections with certain companies because it gives them a slight boost in the equities markets, so this could be a pump and dump.

Giz notes that this would bring 90 million people into the iPhone’s grasp, giving Apple a huge edge. Given popular opinion, AT&T numbers will probably deflate as well. Just don’t expect to roam internationally on your iPhone anymore. Here’s hoping Verizon can keep the networks up better than Cingular++.

Web video star GeoHot just did a quick demo of his untethered iPhone/iPod Touch jailbreak. That’s right – you just have to put something on your device – and not directly connect it to your computer – and it will jailbreak that heck out of it in a few minutes. It’s just like the old days when you could download an image on the original iPhone and suddenly jailbreak it.

While the video doesn’t explain anything, it’s nice to see America’s youth busily attending to the major issues of the day, especially if that issue is jailbreaking the iPad when it comes out next week.

The jailbreak is all software based, and is as simple to use as blackra1n. It is completely untethered, works on all current tethered models(ipt2, 3gs, ipt3), and will probably work on iPad too.

He also notes that we should sit on our hands for now and not expect a release date. Why? Because he’s Geohot, that’s why, and his word is bond.

PureEnergy is selling their WildCharge wireless charging solution at select T-Mobile stores and will be offering a special charging pad for the MyTouch, T-Mo’s popular Android phone.

This is one of the first wireless charging solutions out there and, in addition to the Palm line, one of the first carrier-approved wireless charging solutions. Click through for the presser.

WildCharge Technology to be Available to T-Mobile USA Customers

BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PureEnergy Solutions, Inc., the leader in wire-free power with its WildCharge™ technology, is planning to bring its wire-free charging solutions to customers of T-Mobile USA, Inc. through the introduction of the new myTouch Drop and Go Charging Pad, which is planned for distribution in select T-Mobile stores in the coming weeks.

The new myTouch Drop and Go™ Charging Pad provides a charging pad and an elegant replacement back that allows for wire-free charging for the T-Mobile® myTouch™ 3G. The charging accessory comes with three versatile PowerDiscs which allow a wide variety of mobile phones and Bluetooth® headsets to be charged in addition to the customized replacement back designed specifically for charging the myTouch 3G.

“Consumers are demanding a simple, reliable, and elegant wire-free charging system that works across the board, with multiple devices. We’re moving towards that goal by making it easy and cost effective for today’s leading consumer product companies, such as T-Mobile, to license, embed and brand the WildCharge technology, and get it on store shelves quickly,” said Dennis Grant, chairman and CEO of PureEnergy Solutions. “We have significantly more product on the market, through us and our partners, than any other player in this space and continue to roll out new wire-free charging solutions at a rapid pace.”

PureEnergy and its licensees expect to have products available from various market-leading brands in retail channels by the end of 2010. Many of these companies are also taking advantage of PureEnergy’s licensing flexibility to create their own unique product designs featuring the patented wire-free power technology.

PureEnergy Solutions was the first company to have a wire-free charging solution commercially available, two years ahead of any other company in the space. Today, the company has an entire line of wire-free charging solutions for hundreds of mobile devices including BlackBerry smartphones, Apple iPhone and iPod touch, electronic readers, gaming devices, and more.

Here’s a quick look at the first US version of the HTC HD2, a really nice Windows Mobile 6.5 phone. We’ve have plenty of coverage of this phone over the past few months but now it’s available on T-Mobile for $200 with contract. It’s a really beautiful phone – and I don’t say that much – but will it take off with WinPho waiting in the wings?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes me a Mac guy as opposed to a PC guy and it seems that the Register may have hit on some very good points. Tim Anderson, the Register writer, notes that Microsoft has lost its edge when it comes to industrial design and even in during its recent MIX conference, where it was supposed to be all about design and sex, they dropped more science than art. Once upon a time abstraction mattered. Now, in an era where most programmers wouldn’t touch machine code with a 10-foot pole and most users have never seen a command line, the science has to be hidden.

The thing I hear the most from anti-Apple folks is that Windows is “open.” By open, I assume they mean that you can tweak it and install anything you want on it and if you need to you can get into DOS. The fallacies of that argument aside, it’s a fairly interesting window on Windows: geeks like Windows because it gives them freedom… until they try Linux.

But geeks are few and far between these days. Once only geeks bought smartphones. Now everyone does. Once geeks bought gaming PCs. Now everyone does. Once geeks only cared about keyboards with macro keys and numpads. Now everyone does. Powerful computing has entered the mainstream and the old ways of interacting with data are growing too complex for a vast majority of the mainstream. Hence the popularity of the iPod and the iPhone – buy device, install iTunes, put music on it. Buy device, press a button, get an app. Buy device, see a picture of your dog, send that picture to your mom. All of those use cases could be completed using an WinMo or Symbian phone, but could you give either of those OSes to your Mom and ask her to email you a photo? Nope.

So Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s return to the art of the interface. Rather than talking about Exchange Servers and MVPs, they’re talking about gaming and experience. And how do you control experience? By locking things down, by releasing product slowly, by doing what Apple did with the iPhone. Anderson notes:

Here’s what Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said during the February press launch for Windows Phone 7: “We want to lead and take complete accountability for the end user experience … have more consistency in the hardware platform, more consistency in the user experience, but still enable [partner] innovation.”

‘Partnering innovation’ is generally a disaster for Microsoft.

Ballmer makes a nod towards it as a matter of good public relations, but by locking down both hardware and software, the company is trying to minimize the extent to which OEMs can spoil the design effort.

I think the key word here is “spoil.” Microsoft is building an image around WinPho that it didn’t have with WinMo. That image is one of a powerful artifact rather than a manufactured piece of technology. Think back on the old Clarke chestnut (“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) and tell me if the concept of lockdown – in WinPho and in OS X – doesn’t help a device become less a “device” and more a magical, seamless object.

Nokia’s new flagship, the Symbian-powered N8-00, has HD video recording, a 12-megapixel camera, and a 3.5-inch capacative touchscreen. What doesn’t it have? A US release date or price.

A Chinese site has all of the images if you want to check them out but this device is definitely on the Droid track and presumably the version of Symbian it’s running, Symbian 3, will be healthier than the previous incarnations. Here’s hoping.
via UnwiredReview

Dell’s Aero is a decidedly odd duck. When we first discussed it a few months ago, it looked like it would be a non-US device. Now, however, it’s hit AT&T and it looks like a cross between the new T-Mobile CLIQ XT and a NeXT Cube. Dig those photorealistic icons!

I think the most interesting aspect of this new phone is that it runs a very specific brand of Dell Android. It seems to have all of the standard features – Facebook sync, widgets, etc. – but it adds Picasa and Flickr support and has a decided lack of a formal Android app store. No price or availability.

via AT&T

SugarSync, a file syncing product that we may have all forgotten in our rush to glorify Dropbox has been rolling out a steady stream of improvements and, as of 11am today, it will offer an API so mobile applications can use SugarSync shared storage. The API information will live at SugarSync.com/Developers when it goes up today.

The API essentially creates a “bridge between local devices and the cloud.” In plain English, this would allow a developer to offload storage to a SugarSync server – think a photo application that can upload and display public links immediately or, barring that, a sort of shared workspace that would allow disparate programs to work on the same files in locked down OSes like iPhone OS and Windows Phone 7. The apps don’t have to be mobile – it works in web and desktop contexts as well – and access to the API is free.

Developers can also make money by getting a cut of new subscribers who sign up for the service. SugarSync is also running a contest for new apps. You can check it out at the dev website. There are also a few caveats:

Can we leverage free SugarSync accounts?
Yes! While our free accounts don’t have all of the functionality of our premium version, there are still many things you can do with your app and a free SugarSync account.

Your app may create maximum of one free account per user, and it cannot bridge or connect two separate accounts. Initially, you will have access to 5000 free accounts. If you run out or believe your audience will tap those out quickly, please contact us and we’re happy to work with you.

Man, if you can sell 5000 apps and convince people to use them properly, I’m happy to work with you.

Unlike many services that “get an API,” SugarSync seems to know what they’re doing. There is a need for open, potentially free space in the cloud and because they offer a concrete “service” instead of a nebulous spurt of API hand-waving, I say good on them.

Woof. Analysts have placed a sell rating on Palm and are now valuing their stock, at least in hyperbolic terms, at $0. Quoth CNN:

Shares of Palm (PALM) plunged 19% to $4.59 a share early Friday, a new 52-week low. Investors are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the company’s future and several analysts downgraded their positions on the stock to “sell.” Two analysts even lowered their price targets to $0.

Josh Topolsky has some advice for a turnaround but I don’t think even that sprightly elf-man can help this company in distress. The dream, as they say, is dead.