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Nokia Pledges To Support MeeGo For Years

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 03:05 PM PDT

MeeGo, once a highly anticipated OS intended to go head to head with iOS and Android, now finds itself on just one phone, and although it hasn’t been said outright, it seems unlikely there will be many more — if any at all. Still, those of you rocking MeeGo's only host, the Nokia N9, are "not to worry." OS updates and hardware support are still on the table.

Klas Strom, Nokia's head of portfolio management in marketing, today tweeted, "We will support #NokiaN9 for years AND release several SW updates… #nottoworry :)."

[Twitter via MobileBurn]

Motorola (Re)Posts Droid 3 Tutorial Videos

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 01:54 PM PDT

Where have we seen this video before? It was released today, but is still… oddly familiar.

Oh, that's right, it was leaked about a month ago, and then abruptly pulled by Motorola. The star of the show, Motorola's Droid 3, made its way onto the market this morning, officially going live on Verizon's site for $199.99 on a two-year agreement. Motorola then graciously re-posted the tutorial video, along with a truck load of other helpful videos to help you get acquainted with Motorola's third-gen Droid.

We’ve pulled together a few of the videos we found most interesting (including one detailing the new media gallery with social media integration we mentioned earlier), but click through to the YouTube channel below to check out a treasure chest of Droid 3 footage. Topics include texting, using the media gallery, video recording, browsing the web, and more.

Tips and Tricks:

Media Gallery:

Web Browsing

[YouTube via PhoneArena]

iOS Hacker Begins Porting Swype To (Jailbroken) iPhones

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 10:52 AM PDT

When it comes to Swype and their crazy drag-through-letters-to-type alternative keyboard of the same name, there’s only one problem: it’s really, really tough to give up once you’ve gotten used to it. Alas, I’ve gotta deal with the withdrawal symptoms each and every time I jump from an Android device back to my iPhone, due to restrictions inherent to iOS.

While Swype was purportedly working on something for iOS in June of last year (and, as the rumor mill had it, trying to convince Apple to make it official) all word of it went silent pretty quickly.

The mission has been revived, it seems, albeit with someone else behind the charge: Andrew Liu, developer of the “DreamBoard” theming hack for jailbroken devices, has begun to “port” Swype to iOS.

Early this morning, Andrew released the first build of his Swype project, following up a few hours later by uploading it to a public Cydia repository.

There are a few catches:

  • As you may have guessed from all this talk of Cydia (and the fact that it involves modifying the iPhone’s keyboard), your device will need to be jailbroken.
  • A number of behaviors that Android Swypers will have grown accustomed to (such as the blue line that is drawn from letter to letter as you trace) aren’t implemented yet. This is the first release, and is pretty barebones.
  • The hacked keyboard currently only functions in Apple’s pre-installed applications and a very small handful of third party apps. Liu says he’s working on a fix for this.
  • It’s a bit buggy, as is to be expected from a first release

We put “port” up above in quotes, by the way, as it’s not quite clear how much of this is actually Swype and how much is from-scratch code written to recreate Swype’s behaviors. While Andrew is calling the project Swype (which… probably isn’t the best idea, in the long run), it also seems like a lot of it is being built from the ground up rather than ported from one platform to the other.

The guys over at iPhone Download Blog threw together a quick video demonstrating the psuedo-Swype running on iOS. Check it out below:

This Case Lets You Attach An SLR Lens To Your iPhone

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 09:33 AM PDT

Hello friends! Welcome to this week’s edition of Because You Can!

Why would you want to take a super huge telescoping SLR lens and attach it to your iPhone? Because You Can!™©®

Well, you can now that this crazy iPhone SLR Lens mounting kit exists.

Sure, the tiny sensor in your iPhone can’t really take advantage of all of the benefits of a high quality lens — and sure, the size difference between a kit with an iPhone and a kit with a proper body is relatively small once you’ve brought any decent-sized lens into the picture.. but hey, lets see your SLR upload your awesome Desert Safari pictures to Dropbox with nothing but an EDGE connection and a prayer.

The lens mount comes in two flavors: one for Canon EOS lenses, and one for Nikon tubes. Both can be found for the sticker-shock-tastic price of $190 $249 over at Photojojo.

Twitter For BlackBerry Ditches The Beta Tag

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 08:56 AM PDT

If you’ve been just dying to blast out some tweets from the official BlackBerry Twitter client but were afraid that the Beta client might make your handset explode or something, two things: 1) You’re kind of a strange one, and 2) It’s go time!

This morning, Twitter for BlackBerry had its Beta tag peeled off, and it was bumped from the BlackBerry App World (BlAppWorld!) Beta Zone into the full-fledged store. This Beta-less build doesn’t bring a whole lot in terms of new stuff (the biggest features are things like color tweaks, a modification to how you access the Tweet Composition window, and local trends support in the Trending Topics screen), but hey — at least you absolutely know it won’t make your handset explode. Hopefully.

Apple Loses Preliminary Injunction In Amazon “App Store” Scuffle

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 08:10 AM PDT

Judge Phyllis Hamilton, who is presiding over the Amazon-Apple "app store" war, certainly meant it when she said she would "probably" reject Apple's request for a preliminary injunction. And that's exactly what she did. Hamilton earlier referred to Apple's proof as a "stumbling block" in its case against Amazon, noting that there isn't much "evidence of confusion" between the two stores. In an 18-page order, Hamilton explains that Apple has not proven that its App Store is "prominent" and "renowned," which I guess it has to be in order achieve the status necessary for shutting down Amazon's Appstore for Android.

The judge also remarked that the term "app store" is used by other companies as a generic term for a place to buy software and apps – basically the equivalent of the term "grocery store" being used by Kroger's, Albertson's, Piggly Wiggly, etc.. That's a pretty big blow to Apple's argument, which hinged on the notion that companies such as Microsoft and Google had circumvented the term "app store," opting for more original names like Windows Marketplace and Android Market.

It's a bit sad since Apple did coin the term exclusively back when the store launched, just over three years ago. Since then, Hamilton explains, other companies have started to use the term more generically. The judge also noted that there's a lack of evidence to suggest that Amazon purposefully used "app store" to create an association between the two stores. She even went so far as to say that there is no evidence of an association at all, which is kind of mind-blowing, since the stores do share a name.

On the other hand, you'd have to be pretty new to the smartphone scene to try and download an Android app onto your iPhone. But there are people out there who will, surprisingly enough, and Apple knows this, which is why the tech giant tried to trademark the term back in 2008. Microsoft stepped in at that point and opposed the motion, a move that many people found curiously petty during the massive PC vs. Mac showdown.

Microsoft called the term generic then, and Amazon has done the same now quite successfully. Amazon claims that its use of the term "app store" is not as a trademark, but rather a way of informing customers that the site they're visiting is, in fact, a place to download apps. Since this motion was for a preliminary injunction, Apple will get another shot to make its case in a little over a year at a trial set for October 15, 2012.

[via InfoWorld]

Motorola Droid 3 Hits Verizon’s Shelves For $199.99 On-Contract

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 06:13 AM PDT

Even though Verizon tried to pull a fast one on us by skipping pre-order altogether, we were still accurate when we originally pegged the Droid 3 arrival for today, July 7. That's right folks, the Motorola Droid 3 is available now from Verizon, and she's a beauty. Big red lists the phone for $459.99 off-contract, and $199.99 with a new or upgraded two-year contract.

We've finally gotten our hands on the official specs sheet, and just about everything we earlier reported is present and accounted for, and then some. That 4-inch qHD touchscreen boasts a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels, and the phone itself measures in at 2.5in x 4.9in x .5in and weighs just 5.9oz. The Droid 3 runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a dual-core 1GHz processor and comes loaded with the newest version of Motorola's Blur UI, along with 16GB of internal storage.

Interestingly enough, the 8-megapixel camera comes with an option to "select your masterpiece from multiple frames snapped within seconds." That sounds a lot like the myTouch 4G Slide's camera, which collects frames in a cache before the shutter button is ever pushed. That way, there is no lag between touching the button and snapping the shot. The Droid 3 camera may not have the same exact software or system in place, but that sentence leads me to believe that camera lag has at least been improved.

The camera's Connected Gallery also hooks in to your favorite social networks, including Facebook, Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, and others, so you can check out comments and aggregate all your pictures into one "connected" gallery.

[via Verizon]