The story dropped this morning, via an announcement from the executive vice president of store operations. The letter said that the phone will be sold initially from company owned stores in the Dallas Ft. Worth and NYC areas. The nationwide rollout is expected to start in early 2010. No word yet on exactly what the value add of buying the phone from The Shack will be, but time will tell. Maybe they’ll throw in a free AA battery.

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♪It’s close to midnight and something cheesy’s lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight, you see a phone that almost makes you barf♪

Man. Just last weekend, I was looking at my boring ol’ phone and thinking to myself: if only this were covered in faux-gold and diamonds and molded to look vaguely like Michael Jackson’s torso!

Some of the main features, according to the only available pictures, are “High-definition Camera”, “Ebook”, and “Calling leave word”. SOLD.

[Shanzhai Via Engadget Mobile]

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Android Developer Challenge 2 officially began way back in May, though the actual voting didn’t begin until some time in September. The votes were split amongst Android users and Googlers (with the latter getting a 55% say), with all voting taking place in a special, custom-made application. To be eligible, applications had to be completely fresh to the Android Market (read: no updates allowed) as of August 1st, couldn’t have been a part of the first Challenge, and had to play friendly with Android v1.5.

In the end of round 1, 20 applications across 10 categories would go onto a second round of voting – and that’s where we stand today. Google’s big ol’ list of finalists has just gone live, and round 2 has begun. The top 3 winners from each category will take home $100,000, $50,000, or $25,000 respectively, with 3 overall winners walking away with $150,000, $50,000, or $25,000 in tow.

You can see the full list of finalists here, and (though we can’t seem to find it right now) play with and vote for them by downloading the “Android Developer Challenge 2″ application from the Market. Oh, and just in case you’ve ever wanted to roleplay as an ADC2 finalist (and really, who wouldn’t?), we’ve obtained a copy of the aforementioned notification e-mail:

From: ADC 2 Support
Date:
Subject: ADC 2 Round 1 Results for ‘App Name’
To:

Congratulations! Your application ‘App Name’ was selected by Android users as one of the top 20 in the ‘ ‘ category! We’re excited that you chose to participate in the ADC 2 and wish you luck in the final round as your application is evaluated by users and a panel of judges.

For full information on the challenge, please see our official site: http://code.google.com/android/adc/

Thanks,
ADC 2 Support

Update: We can’t get the voting application to work on our Droid (presumably because it’s running Android 2.0 and these apps are only tested against 1.5, so unforeseen 2.0 issues might skew votes), but we’re told that scanning this QR code with the Android Barcode Scanner app should take you right to the download:

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My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week’s iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I’ve got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it all seems to indicate one thing: people want more. We hear you.

There are a number of worthwhile topics I simply didn’t get a chance to touch on, and a few observations I’ve made since that are worth mentioning. For those, may we present: Round 2.

Before we start, I should say: these aren’t all details everyone will care about, by any means. Some of them are quite important; others are downright nitpicky. I highly recommend that you read Round 1 before you read this – it covers many of the major topics, from aesthetics and keyboards to browsers and user interfaces. Also — and I might regret saying this later — feel free to use the comments section down below to ask any lingering questions you may have. I don’t have nearly enough time to test every last minutia – but if you’re curious and I’m able, I’ll add a bit to the post about it.

Foreword: While we are expanding upon the things mentioned in Round 1, the overall conclusion remains the same. To summarize where we left off last time: both the iPhone and the Droid are absolutely incredible for their own reasons, and both have far too many merits for one to truly “defeat” the other. How happy you are with either depends largely on who you are.

With that said, lets begin.

Screens, Part 2 – the Sunlight Test:

As stated in Round 1, the Droid screen demolishes anything we’ve seen in a US smartphone to date – including the iPhone. While the iPhone’s 3.5″, 480×320 will more than satisfy anyone but the pickiest gadgeteers, the Droid’s 3.7″ 854×480 screen is, to resort to an incredibly cheesy cliche, a thing of beauty.

However, there is one place it falls very, very short: under direct sunlight. It is not alone in this, however – the iPhone, too, fails this test miserably. Both handsets essentially go blank under direct sunlight, even with the backlight cranked all the way up. I’m about as suntanned as Casper’s backside in the middle of winter, so it’s not too big of a deal for me – but for anyone who does, you know, go outside, know that you’ll probably need to turn in such a way so as to shade your handset just to make it usable when the sun’s on high.

Winner: Neither.

Ringer Volumes:

I always carry my phone in my pants pocket and rely primarily on the vibration to alert my concert-deafened ears of incoming calls. After Round 1, we got lots and lots of requests from people who carry their handset in purses/backpacks, and thus rely on it’s ability to sing.

To be completely candid: We do not have a scientific way of testing this. To be completely candid for 99% of other gadget blogs, neither do they. Our completely unscientific test involved putting each handset exactly 5 feet from a microphone with the speaker in roughly the same place, recording their default ringtones into Audacity, and then comparing overall loudness. I also tested it by putting it in a backpack and pretending my ears were sensitive enough to unquestionably decide.

Winner: Droid, in both tests. Its default ring appears to be about at least 30% louder at its peaks than any of the iPhone ringtones we tried, and it was audibly louder in my bag.

Camera:

We weren’t ready to make a final decision with the Droid camera in Round 1, considering that we’d only taken a handful of pictures. We’ve taken a bunch more since, and our final verdict: it’s average at its best, and terrible at worst.

Droid photos are on the left, with iPhone 3GS photos on the right:

The main issue is with the auto-focusing system, primarily because it just doesn’t work. More times than I care to count, I’ve seen the Droid auto-focus, lock on as clear as day for about half a second, and then immediately blur. This happens at short range, at long range, at medium range.. it’s just really, really bad at focusing. This can presumably be fixed in a software update, so all hope is not lost.

The one strength the Droid has over the iPhone in the camera department is its flash – but it’s probably not all you’d hoped for. It’ll up the quality of your drunken bar shots a bit, but the vignette effect caused by the LED flash is almost unbearable for anything else.

Android 2.0’s camera user interface is a bit more messy than the iPhones, but it also offers up considerably more: flash settings, white balance, color effects, etc. They tucked all that stuff into a slide out drawer that .. doesn’t like to slide. Pro-tip: Tap the drawer, don’t slide it. It’ll work a bit better.

Winner: The iPhone, if only because it focuses when I ask it to.

Video Quality:

I shot the same video on both phones whilst holding the two phones as closely together as I could without blocking either phones lens.

Droid:

iPhone:

How is it as a phone?:

There are a number of points to touch on on this matter, so we’ll break it down thusly:

• Call Quality: We got a surprising number of questions about this. Turns out, people wanted to know how well this phone served as, you know, a phone. We’ll keep this one simple: The Droid, in combination with Verizon’s network, is an absolutely shining example of how call quality should be. Both the earpiece and the speakerphone go all the way up to 11 without fidelity failures.

  To compare sound quality, we called a handful of people back-to-back. The Droid’s incoming sound quality was noticeably better in each call, to the point that we thought we were doing something wrong. I switched locations and tried again on a different iPhone (note: a 3G, rather than a 3GS) – same story. The Droid’s incoming call quality is simply superb.

  The difference in outgoing sound quality wasn’t nearly as clear cut. One of our callers thought we’d just called back on the same phone. Four of the five callers thought we sounded better on the Droid when we were in a semi-loud environment (by that, we mean a crowded coffee shop – not a construction site), but only one felt they noticed a difference when we were in a more standard environment.

  Winner: Droid, because it completely floors the iPhone on incoming voice quality.

• Visual Voicemail: We hate, hate, hate the traditional voice mail system around these parts, so Visual Voicemail is a plus. The iPhone does it out of the box – the Droid doesn’t. You can pay Verizon $2.99 a month for the feature — which is a crock of nonsense — or use Google Voice, for free. I’ll probably have to argue with my TechCrunch colleagues about this for the rest of the night, but Google Voice isn’t enough. It’s a great alternative, but it’s just that: an alternative. At this point, the Droid (and all smartphones) should do this, for free, out of the box.

  Winner: iPhone.

• Phone Interface: The phone interfaces on both are very, very similar. You’ve got the Keypad/Phone, Call Logs/Recent, Contacts, and Favorites on both, and the aforementioned Visual Voicemail on the iPhone (which we won’t count against the Droid here, as we counted it separately above). These interfaces are so damned similar, we were just about to tie it, but…

  Winner: Droid. The default contacts system on the Android 2.0 is outstanding. It pulls everything from Facebook, constantly syncs profile photos to contacts, and shows Google Chat online status. It’s polish, but it’s polish we appreciate.

• Carrier Signal: I live in an interesting area of California when it comes to testing phones. We’re mostly blanketed in 3G on both AT&T and Verizon, but we don’t have a big enough population that it ever strains either network. I don’t see the same dropped call rate my iPhone-carrying colleagues in the Bay Area and New York see – in fact, I rarely drop a call. However, I do regularly see my iPhone’s signal go from full to empty in distances of a few feet. At the top of my entryway, for example, I’ve got full 3G and can make a call – if I take two steps down, I lose everything (including EDGE) and calls fail immediately.

  I’ve only been testing Verizon’s network for a week now while I’ve been on AT&T for two years, so to directly compare my experiences would be unfair. I can say, however, that I’ve yet to find any dead zones — and trust me, I’ve looked — and the spots where my iPhone fails, the Droid has no problem. It’s two entirely different networks (and radio technologies), so this is to be expected – but I must say that, at least for little nook of Central California, I’m mighty impressed by the coverage. Winner: Unable to fairly determine; while the Droid hasn’t shown any faults yet, it’s going up against 2 years of AT&T experience.

• Multi-tasking while talking on the phone: Background processing is one of Android’s much touted strengths, but in the case of the Verizon Droid (or any other CDMA phone), it has one fault: you can’t make a call and use the data connection at the same time. On a call with your sweet one and need to look up the address of the restaurant you’re meeting at tonight? If you’ve got a WiFi connection, you’re golden – but if you’re relying on 3G, you’ll get a big ol’ error alert. It’s not an issue that comes up for me a whole lot, but it’s something we hear VZW customers rant about on the regular.

  However, it’s worth nothing: if WiFi is available, Droid is definitely the superior multi-tasker. Even if you don’t have a need to pop into a specific app, being able to check all of your incoming notifications at a glance is incredibly helpful.

  Winner: If WiFi isn’t available, iPhone. If it is, Droid.
  

Start-up time:

We got more than a few e-mails about this, so for good ol’ comparison’s sake:

• iPhone 3GS: 30.2 seconds
• Motorola DROID: 38.6 seconds.

This was measured by recording both on video, starting each phone from a completely powered down state, and then determining the time based off the videos. Both handsets have e-mail configured, a few dozen apps, and plenty of usage on them.

Winner: iPhone, by a bit over 8 seconds.

Notifications:

Background notifications are like a godsend for iPhone users and developers alike – but it’s still a tacked on solution. Apple didn’t really go about developing the iPhone OS with the idea that such things would be necessary, and so the solution isn’t optimal. You get a maximum of one at a time, and they’re fired at you like a baseball to the crotch in an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

I absolutely prefer the Android notification system. They’re thrown into a slide-out drawer rather than into your face, and can be pulled out, viewed, and cleared at almost any time. This also lets them throw in reminders, such as Birthday alerts (pulled from Contacts/Facebook) and calendar items.

Android is also the only one of the two that allows you to turn off notifications without diving into the settings, via the fourth icon on the “Power Control” homescreen widget. When you’ve got 5+ apps constantly firing off bleepy-bloopy noises, being able to stifle them with a single click as opposed to four or five is a nice – if very small – touch.

With all that said, Android’s system notification may be a bit much for the lay user. We’re not trying to underestimate the lay user here, but additional layers of complexity tend to.. well, complicate things. If I handed this phone to my mom and asked her to “slide out the notification drawer and check for new emails”, she’d probably respond with “So wait, I open my Google?” It’s no sweat for even a fledgling geek, but it might bewilder anyone who’s new to the smartphone scene for a day or two.

Winner: Android/Droid. Its notification system is a bit more complicated, but far more capable.

The Smudge Test:

Here’s one you don’t see in reviews very often, but it’s important if you actually plan on using the phone. Any phone can be gorgeous when it comes out of the box – but carry it around in your lint-filled, sandy pockets for a few hours, and it’ll look like its seen wars.

I’m not exactly a dirty person. I wash behind my ears and, outside of the days where I get to stay at home in my pajamas, tend to dress well enough. I ..can.. not.. keep my iPhone clean. Specifically the backside. After I lug it around for a full day, it comes back looking like it spent the afternoon in someone’s mouth. It’s inexplicably gunky and covered in fingerprints, to the extent that I’m convinced someone is stealing my iPhone and putting crap all over it. The Droid’s admittedly less exciting matte backside does a far better job of keeping prim and proper, in that I’d gladly hand it to someone without having to rub it across my pant leg first.

The tables turn slightly when you start talking about the front side, though. While the Droid screen does just as good as the iPhone 3GS’ much touted oleophobic screen (in fact, we think the Droid screen might have an oleophobic coating as well), there is a gap around the edge of the screen that is juuuust big enough to pick up random particles of whatever crap you have in your pocket, but not big enough (as with the iPhone) that most of it falls right out.

Winner: Tie. The Droid does a better job of keeping its backside clean, but the iPhone tends to have a neater face.

Media playback:

Considering that Apple spent six years making the iPod prior to launching the iPhone, it’s no surprise that the iPhone’s iPod functionality is damn near flawless. The UI is drop dead simple, and it’s about as pretty as things get before things start getting extraneous. The Android Media player is none of those.

The Droid music playback interface is all over the place, and the design is a sea of black. It’s not unusable by any means, but it lacks any real sign of polish or grace.

The Droid video playback interface.. doesn’t exist. Even in Android 2.0, Android lacks out-of-the-box video support. You can download video apps from the Market, but we’ve yet to find one – be it free or paid – that is really up to snuff. We’d recommend the free Video Player app over anything we’ve seen so far; the interface is very bare bones, but it’ll play 3GPP and H264 videos.

The Winner: iPhone.

App Storage:

Google made a fairly huge mistake in the design of Android, and they haven’t fixed it with Android 2.0. You see, the Droid only has 512 MB of internal memory. This is made okay by the fact that it supports microSD cards up to 32GB, and comes with a 16GB card. But here’s the catch: you can’t use that microSD card for app storage. In fact, you can’t even use all of the 512 MB of internal memory for app storage – you’re limited to 256 MB.

Many Android applications are just 500 KB to 3 Megabytes, so you can squeeze dozens of them into memory without any issue – but that doesn’t mean everything is okay. On the iPhone, applications have free reign over whatever storage space is available on the internal hard drive, opening the door for rich 3d textures and high-fidelity voice/sound files. As a result, many iPhone applications are in the 40-50 megabyte range, with some (such as Myst, or Secret of Monkey Island) reaching up into the hundreds of megabytes.

There is one solution: developers can make the application they host on the marketplace only a few megabytes large, and then have the application download the rest of its media onto the SD card after installation. From a user experience standpoint, however, this is a fairly terrible solution – once you’ve downloaded and installed, it’s time to play.

Google needs to fix this as soon as possible, or its applications will be forever stunted. You can argue that mobile applications shouldn’t need to be hundreds of megabytes large, but I won’t be able to hear you over the awesome voice acting in Monkey Island.

(Note: I am well aware that you can save apps to microSD if you root the Android device. We didn’t count jailbreak-only stuff in Round 1, so we definitely won’t count root-only stuff in Round 2)

Winner: iPhone

Conclusion:

I stand by our original conclusion from Round 1 – heres the important bit:

With Android 2.0, we’ve come to a very difficult crossroad. No longer can we recommend one handset over the other simply by its feature set. At this point, it’s all about the person who will be carrying it. For you, dearest TechCrunch Network reader: Yes, I’d probably recommend the Droid over an iPhone. Would I recommend it for your mother, father, or little sister? Nope. If you want a phone that just works and does damned near everything you could want and don’t mind Apple’s closed garden: by all means, get the iPhone. If you can handle a bit of complexity for the sake of flexibility and don’t mind having to tinker a bit: by all means, get the Droid. At this point, I honestly feel that either choice would make any sane person incredibly happy.

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Another week, another truckload of Samsung devices dumped onto the shelves. This week’s Samsung shipment brings two new TouchWiz-based touchscreen handsets: the Mythic, and the Flight.

Before we dive into the specs, we gotta give Samsung some grief for the names. Not because they’re bad – in fact, I really, really like both of these names. So much that I wonder why the hell Samsung is giving them to two random TouchWiz handsets. I mean, come on: LG has to resort to calling one of their best selling phones “Cookie“, and you throw away Mythic? For shame!

Anyway, on to the handsets:

Samsung Mythic:

• TouchWiz core (in other words, it’s not TouchWiz on top of WinMo/Android. It’s just TouchWiz)
• 3.3″ touchscreen
• 3.2 megapixel camera
• SMS/MMS
• AT&T Nav (subscription required)
• 4.49″ x 2.06″ x .5″
• A2DP Stereo Bluetooth
• Dimensions: 4.49″ x 2.06″ x .5″
• Weight: 3.8 oz

Samsung Flight

• 2.0 Megapixel Camera
• A2DP Stereo Bluetooth
• Dimensions: 4.17″ x 2.2″ x 0.5″
• Weight: 4.8 oz

Both handsets seem quite overpriced compared to the competition, launching at $199 and $99 respectively. Both will be available beginning Nov. 8th.

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There’s a silly study, conducted by Retrevo, making the rounds that purports to analyze how iPhone users fare in the dating world. I know, right? One stat to whet your beak: one in three iPhone owners have admitted to breaking up with their significant other via text message. Amazing.

Other fun stats:

• One in three iPhone owners say that owning old gadgets would turn them off from a potential significant other

• One in five iPhone owners have admitted to viewing porn on their iPhone

• One in four iPhone owners have broken up with a signifant other because they spend too much time on their mobile device

• iPhone owners prefer people who own “cool gadgets” over a college degree

I’m just going to stop right here because my brain hurts typing this out.

A comment on the Retrevo blog pretty much eviscerates the study, and I’ll highlight one (mind the sics):

“iPhone owners prefered cool gadgets over a college degree three to one.”
In my experience, the majority of iphone users are male… also in my experience, most males couldn’t give two $hits whether a chick possesses a degree or not (results from MY study here of course ;-). Anyway, if you asked football fans who they would find more attractive between a college graduate and a girl (or dude) who loves sports, who do you think they would choose? Exactly. Retrevo is basically stating that iphone owners like cool gadgets. Duh.

I’m sorry for wasting your time.

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The HTC-built DROID ERIS will go on sale tomorrow at Verizon stores for $99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and two-year contract agreement. Equipped with HTC’s “Sense” user interface, the ERIS “offers customers the opportunity to customize a seven-panel wide home screen with a wide variety of widgets designed to bring the most important information to the surface.” On sale tomorrow at Verizon’s retail stores and website.

Here’s the full press release:

Bring an Android Device Home for the Holidays with DROID ERIS by HTC, Exclusively from Verizon Wireless

DROID ERIS by HTC Debuts with Verizon Wireless with HTC Sense Experience and an Ultra-Attractive $99.99 Price

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and BELLEVUE, Wash., Nov. 5 /PRNewswire/ — Beginning Nov. 6, DROID ERIS(TM) by HTC will invade Verizon Wireless Communications Stores across the United States, bringing the power of the Android(TM) platform and the Verizon Wireless network together. DROID ERIS by HTC combines the popular Android platform with HTC Sense(TM), a user experience from HTC that makes it easy for customers to stay close to one another and create an individualized mobile experience tailored specifically to their needs.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091105/NY05661)

DROID ERIS by HTC offers customers the opportunity to customize a seven-panel wide home screen with a wide variety of widgets designed to bring the most important information to the surface. DROID ERIS by HTC also includes the innovative "Scenes" feature, which allows customers to create multiple home screens, each with different widgets and shortcuts, to transform DROID ERIS by HTC from a "work" phone to a "play" phone with just a touch of a finger.

DROID ERIS by HTC also organizes interactions by person, which makes it possible to access text messages, e-mails, phone calls and even Flickr streams and Facebook updates from a single contact card.

The unique HTC Sense experience found on DROID ERIS by HTC is supported by an array of the latest mobile features, including:

• 3.2 inch capacitive touch screen and trackball interface
• 5.0 megapixel auto focus camera
• Expandable memory with pre-installed 8 GB microSD(TM) card (up to 16 GB supported)
• Supports USB mass storage
• Bluetooth®, Wi-Fi and 3.5 mm headset connectivity
• Integrated GPS and a digital compass with a sensor that enables the phone to know what direction it is facing
• Smart dialer for simplified dialing by name, number or initials
• Full HTML browser with Flash Lite capabilities
• Seamless compatibility with Google(TM) services like Google Maps(TM), Gmail(TM), Google Search(TM) and more

DROID ERIS by HTC will be available in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online at www.verizonwireless.comon Friday, Nov. 6, for $99.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement on a voice plan with an e-mail feature or e-mail plan. Customers will receive the mail-in rebate in the form of a debit card; upon receipt, customers may use the card as cash anywhere debit cards are accepted.

For more information about Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.

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Needless to say, AT&T’s none too happy about Verizon’s “Theres a Map for That” campaign. AT&T first complained about the ads back in October, saying they were misleading. Verizon responded by adding a few extra words and an itsy bitsy disclaimer – but that wasn’t enough for AT&T. Early this morning, AT&T filed a false advertising suit against Big Red, presumably in an effort to get the ads off the air as soon as possible.

This afternoon, AT&T sent out an internal memo regarding the lawsuit, and we’ve obtained a copy.

AT&T keeps the memo about as simple as they possibly can: Yes, they’re filing a lawsuit. Yes, they feel Verizon is misleading potential AT&T customers. But if anybody asks? Use it as an opportunity to tell them how totally awesome AT&T is. When a memo is less about the details and more about how to avoid talking about the details, that’s just good ol’ fashion spin.

A copy of the memo follows:

Channels: COR, DMDR, LD, and NR Internal
Roles: Reps & Above
Markets: All
Contact: Your Manager

AT&T filed a lawsuit on November 4, 2009 against Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” advertising campaign. Independent research shows that the maps in the advertisements mislead consumers into believing that we do not offer any wireless service in the vast majority of the country. In fact, AT&T’s 2.5G EDGE network covers 1.75 million square miles of the United States, reaching some 296 million people, roughly the same number reached by Verizon’s network. This network supports popular services like e-mail, surfing the Web, texting, and voice calling, including the activities shown in the Verizon TV advertisements. In addition, our 3G service, the nation’s fastest, is available in more than 9,400 cities and towns.

We filed the lawsuit in Federal District Court in Atlanta and asked that Verizon be prohibited from misleading consumers regarding the scope of our wireless network.

How should I respond to customers who ask about the lawsuit?

While we cannot speculate on the complaint filed, it is a great opportunity to remind customers of AT&T’s many advantages that over 81 million customers enjoy, including:

• Best Network
• The best coverage worldwide (More Bars in More PlacesTM).
• The nation’s fastest 3G network and the only national 3G carrier providing simultaneous voice and data usage.
• The most devices that work in the most places including Japan and South Korea (3G 2100 MHz device required).
• The nation’s largest wireless and wireline broadband provider.
• The nation’s largest company-owned and operated WiFi network with more than 20,000 hotspots, including Starbucks, McDonald’s and Barnes and Noble, as well as access to over 120,000 hotspots around the world.
• The leading provider of local and long distance voice services.

Greatest Value – The fairest value with Rollover® allowing customers to keep their unused minutes month to month.
Best Products - The most innovative exclusive devices such as the iPhoneTM 3GS.
Most Convenient Services

• The most customer friendly free self-service tools with *Services for checking usage, paying bills, and adding features.
• The most convenient and cost-effective way for customers to manage their accounts with Combined Billing for wireless and wireline products.
• Industry leading 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

As always, if you have an inquiry from the media, please refer them to your local media relations team member.

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Look – we’re certainly not the world’s biggest fans of Windows Mobile 6.5, but we still absolutely feel that anyone who has the opportunity to upgrade from 6.1 to 6.5 should certainly do so. If you’ve got a Samsung Jack, we’ve got good news: that “anyone” group now includes you.

Samsung just hit us up to let us know that the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade package has gone live here. It doesn’t seem like the simplest upgrade process ever — you’ll definitely want to back up your stuff before you dive in — but in return you’ll get Internet Explorer 6, the Windows Mobile Marketplace, and all of the other goodies that Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard brings along.

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So you’ve lurked the blogs, watched the unboxing, and read the coverage, and you just know: you want your Droid. You already know that most Verizon Stores are opening the doors a bit early at 7 AM to get your your fix – but what if you want it even earlier?

We just got word that a very, very limited number of Verizon stores will start peddling the Droid as soon as the clock ticks over to November 6th, from midnight to 2 a.m. The emphasis here is definitely on “limited”.

As far as we’ve confirmed so far, there’s only one store doing the midnight sale, and it’s right in the heart of New York. If you’re anywhere near the store (located at 134 W 34TH St, New York), go get your camping gear ready; there’s nothing like getting the object of your desire at midnight, excitedly playing with it for 2 minutes, and then caving to the utter exhaustion that standing out in the freezing cold midnight air will cause.

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T-Mobile today shared a few interesting Android statistics, and announced a number of ways they’d be increasing their support for the Android Market.

All of the details T-Mobile shared involve the T-Mobile myTouch specifically – it is, after all, their flagship Android phone. It would have been nice to get some more general Android usage stats, but we’ll take what we can get:

• Around 50% of myTouch users launch the Market app each day
• 80% of myTouch users launch the browser once a day, and roughly 66% launch it more than once a day
• More than 40% of myTouch users access social sites multiple times each day
• Roughly half of myTouch owners say they have “completely customized” their handsets, though that term seems a bit ambiguous

T-Mobile’s not set on just dumping out the hardware, though. It’s unarguable at this point that the App catalog on any given platform makes or breaks the experience (psst, hey Palm – pay attention), and it seems like T-Mobile realizes this. They’ve announced a handful of ways they’ll be aiming to improve the market for their customers:

• Carrier Billing is coming “soon”, allowing users to charge app purchases back to their phone bill rather than Google Checkout. This is great news for developers – I’d imagine that this streamlining of the purchasing process will cause a huge uptick in sales from T-Mobile customers.
• T-Mobile has recently refreshed their “App Pack” to include a total of 34 T-Mobile suggested apps
• By Thanksgiving, T-Mobile will have a specific section of the Android Market which users can tap into to view a list of T-Mobile’s favorites. This is a feature of the revised Market that came with Android 1.6. The Droid, for example, already has a Verizon channel – but at this time, it’s currently only listing a Verizon-friendly Visual Voicemail app

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The phone isn’t 3G so it’s up in the air whether it’s AT&T or T-Mobile bound. But as long as the European specs remained, the S40 slider should come with a 3.2MP camera, FM radio, stereo speakers, microSD expansion ports, and dedicated music keys. The X3 costs €115 ($169) unlocked in Euroland, so hopefully we’ll get a similar price.

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Don’t expect to scam Verizon on BOGO deals anymore, folks. The carrier is raising early termination fees on Novermber 15 to $350 for “advance devices” only. Clearly VZW is targeting users who were abusing the buy one get one free BlackBerry deals and those that figured out that it was cheaper cancel their current contract and pay the $175 ETF than to pay full retail for the hot new handsets like the Droid.

The leaked document doesn’t exactly spell out which devices qualify as advanced, but chances are it’s any BlackBerry, Android, or Winmo handsets. The new fee does decrease every month by $10, which is a plus. So you know what this change means, right? You have a week and a half left to scam Verizon.

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Seeing as HTC’s CEO Peter Chou sorta slipped up and mentioned this back in October, it’s not exactly, you know, news news – but just in case you were a little bit shaky on the dates, HTC has gone ahead and confirmed that the 1 Ghz, WinMo 6.5-powered HTC HD2 will be coming to the United States “with a major US carrier in early 2010. ”

Note that they specifically say a US carrier – implying that it’ll be just one, at least right off the bat. The rumor mill has endlessly pinned this one as being destined for T-Mobile, so it’s at least somewhat safe to assume that’s where its heading.

Either way, we’ll be getting it a bit later than our overseas brethren; in the same press release, HTC disclosed that HD2 shipments in Europe and Taiwan are heading out right this second, and the rest of Asia should see it hit the shelves over the next few weeks.

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If this latest commercial is any indication, the Motorola Droid is going to be air dropped from stealth fighter planes into random locations where people have no idea what it is.

Honestly, it’s a pretty cool commercial. Complete CGI job, but very cool none the less. I’m hoping that they don’t run it into the ground, but considering that the phone comes out on the 6th, we’ll probably be okay.

I’m waiting for the inevitable, when the phone starts singing Daisy from “2001″.

[via BGR]

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Ack! Talk about bad timing. T-Mobile is just barely off the grill for their guilt-by-association connection with the Great Danger/Sidekick outage of 2009, and now they’re right back in the network-outage spotlight.

This time around, it appears that it’s their entire network – or at least, a big ol’ chunk of it – that has gone down. Voice and data are both coming up empty, Twitter is on fire with complaints, and T-Mobile has confirmed that they’re aware of the issues and have got engineers cracking away as we speak.

Tmo’s Statement on the matter:

All – We’re aware of the current service disruption. Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide further updates as more information is available.

Rapid response team, eh? I’m imagining a band of men wearing pink berets, repelling onto cell towers out of a helicopter piloted by Catherine Zeta Jones.

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When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.

Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.

We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.

Disclaimer: We are not your mom. We are also not the ones who made any of this stuff, nor do we recommend doing it. There have been reports of this process bricking (read: breaking) phones, though it seems to work just fine for everyone we’ve talked to. If your iPhone breaks, melts, or runs away, or if AT&T somehow figures out you’re tethering and charges you a million dollars per megabyte, it’s not our fault.

We’re seeing some reports on Twitter that some users are having issues with WiFi, GPS, or YouTube after unlocking with Blacksn0w. If you have any such issues, go to Settings > General > Reset> and hit “Reset Network Settings”. Once that’s complete, do a hard power cycle by holding the sleep/home button for a few seconds and then sliding the on-screen power toggle.

With that out of the way, lets begin. The entire process is drop dead simple, and should take roughly 10 minutes. This should work on both Windows and OS X. The steps below assume that you have not yet jailbroken your iPhone, and will walk you through that process.

1. Download BlackRa1n for either Mac or PC here.
2. Plug in your iPhone
3. Run BlackRa1n



4. Hit the “Make it rain” button to jailbreak your iPhone. Your iPhone 3GS will almost immediately reset, and will soon display a picture of iPhone hacker Geohot. The entire process should take about 45-60 seconds. Do not interrupt this process by unplugging the cable or tinkering with your iPhone.
5. Once your iPhone has fully booted: Congratulations! Your iPhone is now jailbroken.



6. Look for the Blackra1n icon on your iPhone’s homescreen. Open the Blackra1n app
7. Tap the label that reads “sn0w”, then hit the Install button in the upper right. This will unlock your phone for use on any SIM-compatible carrier, and reenable the IPCC hack required to enable tethering.. This part should take about 30 seconds.
8. Once the unlock is complete, open Safari. Navigate to:
   http://m.peacefulinsanity.com/Tether.mobileconfig
9. Hit the “Install” button in the upper right. Confirm the resulting prompt, alerting you that the file has not been signed. Allow the IPCC file to install, which will take about 10 seconds.
10. Close Safari. Hold the sleep and home button until your iPhone resets. This reboot may take a bit longer than normal.



11. When your iPhone resets, go into Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering. If you can successfully switch the “Internet Tethering” slider to “On”: Congratulations! Everything seems to have worked as expected.

From here, tethering is a matter of following the on-screen instructions. Enjoy your jailbroken, tetherable iPhone 3G/3GS on OS 3.1/3.1.2! If you’ve gotten this far, we’d recommend installing Cydia (just open up blackra1n and tap the Cydia label). You should also consider allowing Cydia to record the signature hashes of your device once installed; be it that Apple patches this exploit in the next release, you’ll most likely need those to get back to a jailbroken state.

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In addition to making your iPhone carriers SIM card slot play friendly with just about any SIM you can cram in there, blacksn0w also undoes some of the locks put in place by Apple/AT&T during the upgrade to 3.1. Namely, it removes the IPCC lock which prevented tethering.

I just got my iPhone up and tethering in all of a few minutes – we’ll have a tutorial up in just a bit.

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Whenever you hear about bugs and exploits being discovered in the iPhone’s browser, Safari, it’s usually the doings of some masterful meddler who devoted hours to unearthing any flaws they could find — not some user casually tapping around the application. Apple’s pretty good at keeping things locked down, and the iPhone’s got enough users that most of the nasty user-facing bugs have been flushed out. Well, except for this new one.

It’s not an incredibly common bug, and it doesn’t seem likely that it would hit most users – but for the iPhone users this newly discovered bug does affect, it could mean huge operator fees.

The flaw, as discovered by Estonian Apple Site AppleSpot: If the user visits a site which uses Motion-JPEG (most commonly used for security cams and live feeds) in Safari, Safari will continue to gobble up bandwidth even after Safari is closed. Safari is one of the few apps that Apple allows to process in the background, and Motion-JPEG streams appear to continue streaming, even if the stream is in another tab or in the “closed” application. Apple gives no indication that Safari will continue to stream – and considering that most applications on the platform aren’t granted such privileges, it’s unlikely that a lay user would understand the consequences.

As mentioned, this bug certainly isn’t one that springs up all that regularly; for it to affect you, you need to not only visit one of these Motion-JPEG streams in Safari, but also be on some sort of pay-per-megabyte plan. While it’s no sweat off the backs of anyone on an unlimited package (as is the case with a vast majority of US iPhone users), it could work out to MASSIVE wallet damage for anyone traveling internationally or who are signed up on carriers that only offer metered data.

The original discoverers of the bug claim to have been able to rack up over 740 megabytes in silently streamed data during one hour of testing. If the same thing had happened to someone without a data package, they say that one hour of unintentional data usage would have worked out to roughly 30,000 Estonian kroons in fees – or just shy of $3,000 dollars. Ouch.

[Thanks Ronald!]

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Gameloft, one of the world’s largest mobile gaming development houses, has just released their numbers for the third quarter of 2009.

In the first three quarters of 2009, Gameloft has already slung $132.3 million in mobile applications. This is up roughly 18% percent from the same time period last year, during which they brought in roughly $112.2 million.

$44.2 million of this year’s sales came from the third quarter alone, as compared to $38.5 million in the same quarter of last year. Year-over-year, Gameloft saw a 15% growth in their third quarter sales.

In the announcement, Gameloft indicated that much of their revenue stemmed from Apple’s App Store, though they didn’t disclose exactly how much.

In a separate announcement, the company also announced that they’ve signed new operator distribution agreements with 10 operators in Southeast Asia, and 9 in the Middle East.

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We BLOOP dig BeeJive on the iPhone. What we BLOOP don’t dig is getting a pop-up push BLOOP notification every 3 seconds just because some of our friends like to type in fragments rather BLOOP than sentences.

Fortunately, BeeJive has recently added a new setting which lets you tweak the behavior of push notifications to be far, far less annoying. The wording they chose to tuck it behind doesn’t make things completely obvious, but it makes a world of difference.

With this setting, you’ll only receive one pop-up notification for each sender. For example: If Joe sends you a message and you don’t check it, you’ll see a pop-up alert. If he sends you 10 more messages, you won’t see 10 more pop-ups – but you will hear the alert sounds. If another friend comes up and sends you a message, however, you’ll get a pop-up alert. You still get pop-up alerts, you just don’t get hammered to death whenever someone sends you a string of IMs when you’re just trying to play some damn Tower Defense.

To find the settings:

• Go to the iPhone homescreen
• Go to the Settings app
• Go to the settings section for BeeJive
• Set “Alert Each Msg” to Off

While you’re in there, you ought to set Session Timeout up to something higher than the default of 1 hour as well.

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Well, Sprint is officially outlawing it on their Android phones and, as we know, once it’s outlawed, only outlaws will tether. Not quite sure how they’ll control it but clearly they’ll be watching throughput to confirm you’re not stealing bits.

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Not that this should surprise anyone, but Apple has sold only 5,000 iPhones since last week when it officially launched. The phrase “officially launched” is key, since people there have been able to buy the iPhone on the gray market for some time now. And it’s a superior phone on the grey market, since the official phone doesn’t have Wi-Fi. That’s right: a smartphone nearly in 2010 that doesn’t have Wi-Fi.

The phone isn’t particularly expensive, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that China Unicom and Apple have released a crippled version of a phone that had already been widely available.

Who’s gonna buy that? Apparently very few people!

Someone, and I don’t know who, expects Apple to sell as much as 460,000 official iPhone in China per year. Keep in mind that that’s still less than the number of grey market phones, so all of this is sorta silly.

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Long-suffering handset maker Sony Ericsson is all about the UX, people, and they’ve got the screens to prove it. The new system does basically what everyone else is doing and it brings all of your friend’s content into something called TimeScape (there’s another one for media called Media Scape.)

Their new UX UI looks pretty amazing – you basically drag cards all over the screen with your finger, which is quite interesting and it’s made all the better by having some lady and two dudes show you how everything works.

My worry? That the Experia X10, which look really pretty right now, will actually turn out to run like garbage. I’ve seen too many innovative interfaces in my day to trust these sexy videos to show me the truth.

I also wonder what program they use to make simulate the hand and fingers? Also, I love Italian tech blogs. They make crappy handsets so romantic and exciting! It’s like riding a Vespa!

via Android.HDBlog.IT

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