Tech QQ

A friend sent this Taiwanese animation. Even though my Taiwanese is a bit rusty these days, I still found it amusing and feel I should post it.

It's the antenna saga in animated for...

The Droid X is going on sale tomorrow, and some one is spending money on commercials.

Question is if they are trying to scare you in to buying it?

Check out the new vid below.


Happy shopping spree everyone who's going to get one tomorrow :)

Did you enjoy the recent TomTom enhancement where the dark Sith Lord himself, Darth Vader, lent his voice for your navigational pleasures?

Then you might like this one as well, not a Sith Lord this time mind you, but smaller, meaner and greener!

Check out the vid below.

Fell like getting a new bootscreen for your Android device? Feel like flaunting your views of Apple?

Go to xda-developers to download it and find out if your ROM supports it.

Interested in Windows Phone 7?

Microsoft is currently holding it's World Wide Partner Conference and in a short while Andy Lees will take the stage and discuss Windows Phone 7.

To see it live go to digitalwpc.com.

Rumors this week is buzzing about a handset codenamed HTC Ace.

The blogs are not in unison, but it's speculated it is an European version of either the HTC Evo 4G, or the HTC Droid Incredible.

Let's all join hands, chant a little, and pray it's the Evo 4G!

A very good friend of mine said he had ordered a case for his new iPhone 4, mostly cause the phone just felt very fragile with all that glass totally exposed around the corners.

But it seems you aren't safe even if you fit your great looking new iPhone 4 with one of Apple's own 29$ bumpers, but you can always enjoy the stylish upgrade while it lasts...

The current statistics graph over released Android apps looks like this according to AndroLib.com:


This coupled with the pace of new app releases means that Android Market will likely pass 100,000 apps this month!

Not bad considering the total number of available apps was around 6000 just a year ago. For reference, June 2010 saw the release of 15288 apps during that month alone!

Just had to post this as it made me chuckle.

Featuring Apple’s unibody design, iHand is precision-carved from a single piece of European beechwood. So it’s lighter than a standard medical prosthesis, yet 12x stronger. You can grip iHand either of two ways: by placing your fingers around its palm, or by grasping the aluminized Extender that telescopes from the wrist socket.

The XBox live integration on WP7 looks promising, but the avatars could be a bit more animated perhaps.

This is what the Aura project is trying to remedy. A collaboration between Carnegie Mellon university and Microsoft, the Aura project is aiming to make your avatar reflect what you are doing and reflecting your activities, be it from your calendar or social network updates.

Check out the video below.

The question is if this will be worked as an app on WP7, or if it actually will integrate with the other apps and programs. It would indeed be nice to see it, as in the demo, reflecting what you are doing based on for example your calendar info.

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More info about the project can be found here.

Rumors of a man turning in his phone to an AT&T have been reported by BGR. The reason you can see below.


Apparently the phone had caught on fire when it was being hooked up to a computer. Apple said, when in contact with the store, that it looked like a faulty port and wasn't the users fault.

Earlier this summer HTC claimed that the Desire, Legend and Wildfire would see an update to Froyo(Android 2.2) by early Q3.

Now early Q3 is here and no signs of updates. Eric Lin of HTC says in response to a question regarding if the Froyo release is in vain with the claim of Gingerbread being delivered this year:

I don’t think so. I don’t know what Gingerbread involves, but I would believe that we would be done with our Froyo updates before Christmas. And since Google hasn’t made any announcements as to when Gingerbread is going to come out, I’m not going to make that guess, it could be Q1 of next year.

The reason for it taking time is of course for HTC to change and test that all their added features a UI works with Froyo.

So eagerly skinning and changing a UI for the users added experience is a great thing, but question if the users aggravation of having to wait longer for the updates evens it all out?

Two weeks have passed and no upgrade for the iPhone 4 as promised have been delivered.

Now it seems Apple have confirmed for Gizmodo (are they still talking to each other??) that the upcoming software update won't fix the antenna issues as first stated on Apples forums.

The software fix is coming withing a few weeks they now claim, but it will only fix the erroneous bar representation of the coverage.

Too bad, so sad. With all the hopes and dreams crushedwe advice the following:

• get a couple of meters of duct tape and wire around your phone
• some band aid on your fingers (see below)
• try to cover that left corner in your favorite color nail polish

Conflipper has been at it again. This time he's dug up some XML files from HTC's own site and they collaborate the assumptions that HTC's rumored Mondrian and Mozart are indeed Windows Phone 7 handsets.

The XML files lists them as using Internet Explorer 7, which will be available for Windows Phone 7 to start off with, as it is unlikely it will be ported to the Windows Mobile 6.5 track due to Microsoft working on the successor of Windows Mobile at the moment and not investing time in Mobile 6.5 upgrades.

The devices also seem to have Bluetooth support as well as will be shipping with MMS capabilities. And they seem to be slate devices without keyboards.

Now, if we only could get to see some real pictures and specs from HTC soon...

Pew Research Center recently released their 2010 survey of cellphone usage, and it shows a clear trend.

The report is only from data collected in the US, but still shows a clear trend of increased smartphone usage.

The numbers compared between May 2010 and April 2009 shows a 15% increase in people using their phones to access the internet. A 15% increase in people recording videos on on their phones, 12% increase in using their phones for listening to music and a 9% increase in people checking emails.

Pew concludes:

Cell phone ownership has remained stable over the last year, but users are taking advantage of a much wider range of their phones' capabilities compared with a similar point in 2009. Of the eight mobile data applications we asked about in both 2009 and 2010, all showed statistically significant year-to-year growth.

Now the question is if this is indeed due to people using more of their phones capabilities, or that cellphone ownership percentage stays the same, but people are upgrading their cellphones to smartphones with more capabilities.

Looking at the sales figures for Android devices and iPhone in the US, I suspect it's more of a question of people getting their hands on better, more capable handsets.

The trend is clear though, and it will be interesting to see if this development keeps on or even picks up more momentum. I would suspect it will actually gain momentum over the next few years, as more and more people will go for a cellphone to smartphone upgrade when the time comes to swap handset.

Then there is also some demographics in this that are interesting, that shows the younger segment (aged 18 to 29) being more prolific user than those older of age in the survey. Which is often a given being that adoption of new technology is often more rapid in the younger segment. To see all the results follow the link to the original survey below.
Pew Research mobile use survey 2010

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Article about 2010 Q4 smart phone statistics here.
More articles about statistics here.

Chippy released some more info about the Aava Moorestown based handset today.

The MeeGo version on it is really early in development stage at the moment so a lot of stuff is lacking.

He did run a SunSpider(a performance test for Javascript) test though. The Aava handset got a result of about 4.2 seconds with the Firefox build that was installed. Probably it would shave off a second or two if it had a newer build of the Firefox browser, or another faster browser like Chrome.

It's pretty decent figures, about what some netbooks does. The Nexus One with Froyo installed completes the test in about 5.7-6 seconds(depending on device and Froyo build).

There's no denying that the Moorestown platform packs some punch, but it will be interesting to see what the latest dual core Qualcomm processor will do, as there is no doubt it will shave quite a bit of the Nexus One's times.

Chippy also posted a longer video on YouTube for your enjoyment.

Missing some internet content on your iPad? Annoyed to see Lego pieces instead of animations and movies?

If your answer is a resounding yes for the above questions, there is now hope. If you have a jailbroken iPad that is.

So if you ventured the risky way and jailbreaked your iPad there is now code available to help you show Flash content. For the moment it only supports games and animations, but the movie support is being worked on. The application in question is named Frash and is able to play Flash 10.1 content.

For a demo at how it looks check out the video below:



For a complete instruction how to install Frash check out this article at Engadget.

The awesome Moorestown based handset that Aava mobile showed off at Computex has now been released into the wild!


It's not widely available, but Chippy over at Carrypad has received a unit. Apparently it's a developer unit running MeeGo with a rather early version of the UI. But several features are working so more information is to be published within the next 48 hours says the temporary owner.

It will indeed be fun to see what the device can handle, as the performance mentioned at Computex certainly was impressive.

MeeGo is also the OS that Nokia is putting all their faith in for their upcoming smartphones, so it could be nice to get a glimpse of the future of that OS as well.

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You can follow Chippy on Twitter for more info.

The guys at Omio claim to have came over a large release schedule from the UK. In it are some interesting tidbits, including info about upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices.

All major manufacturers are claimed to be represented in the roadmap, and a varying setup of handsets.

The Windows Phone 7 related handsets seems to be a HTC Gold, coming out in November. And that's a bit later than the release in October that we were hoping for.

But there is also a device being released in October of which little is known, the HTC Ace. Now if we are really lucky the Ace might be their first WP7 handset. I guess all we can do is hope now...

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Check out the post at Omio here.
Check out more Windows Phone 7 handset info here.

HTC has released their quarterly figures, and they are looking good.

A few years ago HTC was just a small Taiwanese phone maker that few people had heard of. But with the rise of Android and all the good devices they have released for the platform, they are now a major force to be reckoned with. (Of course it's not only good Android devices they have made, let's not forget the mighty HTC HD2!)

This quarter the figures confirms what we already knew, HTC is doing good. The revenue reported at $1.9 billion are up by a whopping 58% compared to the same quarter last year. The net income also increased, but "only" with 33% up to $268 million.

With the awesome EVO 4G not yet released world wide, one can only assume business is going to improve for HTC.

And while we are at it, let's hope the HTC engineers outdoes themselves and trumps the EVO 4G specs with their upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices!

The previous week Futurama aired a funny episode, with some nice pokes at the gadget mania going on. And a few special pokes at a certain fruit related company ant their latest phone launch.

For you that missed it, here's a clip from YouTube(embedding not allowed unfortunately).

Above, installing the eyePhone in Attack of the Killer App.

During the week that passed rumors about HTC HD3 surfaced again. The below image was spread on a lot of blogs and tech news sites.This very same picture was circulating a few months ago, like three or so. It's made by a xda-developers forum member that goes under the name of NAK(see the lower right corner of the picture?).

Question is how all those tech blogs could re-post this and claim it being a leak possibly from HTC, even if they hadn't seen this three months ago?

The clues:
1. Spelling errors
2. HTC - simply powerful
3. NAK designs
4. 800*1280 screen resolution

Sure, all blogs post rumors that turn out to be faulty at times, but when you already have published articles about the very same content over and over again?

I have been moaning a good while that my old laptop is unusable, and talking of buying a new one. Yesterday I finally made good of my promise to myself.

My old laptop was from the early 2000's. I decided to reinstall it a few months ago and put Windows 7 on it. I also got a USB memory and used it for Ready Boost(I've written about it in a very early post in this blog). But in the end it just had to little memory to be usable for anything more than one program at a time. (And if I didn't want to multitask I could just get an iPad, right?)

After thinking a lot about what to get, going from the low budget across the spectrum to the high end gaming laptops. I finally concluded that what I wanted was a rig with 4GB memory at the very least, a decent processor and an SSD drive for rapid application loading and also to help with battery life.

As I want the laptop to code on I figured I didn't need any real graphics power, and the processor I felt would be good to have at least a dual core to if I need to test any multithreaded applications. So even though it would been nice with an core i7 processor, it felt like overkill.

Eventually I ended up getting an Acer Aspire 5739G. With a dual core 2.2GHz processor, the power felt acceptable, and it has 4GB memory as I wanted. The battery life was stated to be around 2 hours, which I felt was a bit weak. So the aim was to extend on those two hours. The machine itself was refurbished, and hence cost less than 25% of the listed price!

Before I even booted it I swapped discs in it, and replaced the drive with a Kingston SSD Now V+ 128GB drive. I gave a it a fresh Windows 7 install without all the crapware regularly being installed on laptops by manufacturers. And after a session of finding out some undervolting limits, I now have an expected battery life (at low processor usage) of over four hours!

I was a bit surprised that it wasn't faster when I was installing Windows and my developer tools. But I'm surprised at how fast it is to boot the OS and to load all applications! I must say I'm very happy with the performance, and I think it's about time to get an SSD drive for my gaming rig as well.

So now that I got my machine sorted, I no longer have an excuse for working on my Windows Phone 7 app, hopefully it will be done by release time :)

In an official letter Apple announced that the antenna issues are an illusion. The illusion is courtesy of faulty software and a erroneous formula used to calculate reception strength.

The sudden drop pf 4-5 bars that some people experience when holding the phone over the small band in the left lower corner, is only due to them not having good coverage to begin with. They do admit that there is a small loss of reception when holding the phone, but that the people that see those sharp drops already has a bad reception.

In reality the reception should only show a bar or two, and the drop should be a bar or so, but the faulty formula makes the phone show 5 bars instead of 2.

I'm guessing the Steve will put some developers in the dog house now...

Rumors of Google releasing version 3.0 of Android as early as this fall is surfacing all over the net. The largest focus is said to be on the user interface, and there is talk of Google making a lot of choices that Microsoft has been doing with Windows Phone 7.

The Gingerbread build is said to be requiring a certain spec from the phones it's going to be installed on, for instance a 1GHz processor seems to be one of those requirements.

There will most likely be a minimum spec for the screen as well, to help developers a bit and not force them to cater to every screen resolution released so far. Just like Microsoft is setting minimum specs.

It's also rumored that Google want to avoid the UI fragmentation going on in the Android scene where almost every manufacturer are delivering their own custom made UI. The way to do this is by focusing on providing a better stock UI, and then prevent device manufacturers from releasing phones with customized UI's. This is the way Microsoft is handling Windows Phone 7 as well.

This is of course something that will help regarding the time to market for the newer Android builds. Because as it is now, all manufacturers have to tweak all their added software and home cooked UI's after Google releases a new version of Android, which leads to longer time to market.

Rumor has it Gingerbread will be available as soon as October. The existing Froyo build is said to still be available, but kept as an OS for the lower spec range of phones.