Assuming this is all true, it's not the first time an outsourced worker in India has resorted to blackmail. It makes you wonder, however, why we continue to outsource our work to such other regions of the world, as well as about the naivete of the woman involved. In this case, Tara Fitzgerald, 48 and a mother of a 14-year-old of Sacramento,...Read more...
Apple's fans are so devoted that they have been called a "cult." A pair of researchers at Texas A&M have gone still further. The professors, Heidi A. Campbell and Antonio C. La Pastina have written a paper that says the sheer adoration and lack of fault-finding by Apple fans isn't a cult, but a religion. The iPhone, after all, has been...Read more...
Best Buy is offering the aptly named invisibleSHIELD 4fix, free, to certain iPhone 4 customers. Based on the image above, this invisibleSHIELD, unlike others, only covers the sides of the device, which would make it perfect as a cover-up to "Antennagate." invisibleSHIELD has marketed its products for various devices in the past, and they are...Read more...
The Motorola Droid X was rooted a few days ago, but that required users to follow a long and somewhat confusing set of instructions. This method is far easier: download the file, unzip, and unroot. Rooting an Android device is sort of along the same lines as jailbreaking on an iPhone. It allows you to run apps that require root access, and...Read more...
After losing a battle on Monday with the EFF over jailbreaking iPhones, which the U.S. Copyright Office clarified as legal, Apple decided it wanted to win the war. The company reminded customers that jailbreaking voids their warranty. What it didn't remind folks is how easy it is to un-jailbreak a device. Apple's official (yet unofficial)...Read more...
Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office convenes to consider exemptions to the DMCA's ban on circumvention of "technical protection measures." On Monday, the EFF, which had submitted three such exemptions for this go-round of the triennial process, announced that all three exemptions had been granted, meaning for one thing, that jailbreaking...Read more...
Short supplies of AMOLED screens have been blamed for delays in shipping enough HTC Droid Incredible devices. That could be nothing but past experience, according to HTC, because the company is switching a number of devices to a "just as good" Super LCD display. That switchover was rumored back in June, but HTC saw fit to make it official...Read more...
AT&T has begun rolling out a software fix to fix an issue in Alcatel-Lucent equipment that was causing users in some parts of the country to experience slower uploads. The company said it hoped the problem could be resolved in 2-3 weeks. Although iPhone users were the most vocal when the issue first appeared, it wasn't device specific....Read more...
This will sound outlandish, but any veteran driver of a Prius, or at least one who's worked hard to get decent mileage out of the hybrid, will tell you it's not. Toyota wants you to drive with a glass of water on your dash; it'll improve your MPG. Actually, Toyota wants you to drive as though you had a glass of water on your dash. The company...Read more...
The Samsung Galaxy S is known to be coming to all four major carriers in one variant or another, with T-Mobile (Vibrant) and AT&T (Captivate) having already released their versions. Sprint's Epic 4G will be the first 4G version of the device, and it will have a slide-out keyboard and front-facing camera as well, missing from all the other...Read more...
You may not have heard of Zynga, but you have probably heard of one of its creations, Farmville. The founder of Zynga, Marc Pincus, 44, has high expectations for his firm, aiming, the New York Times says, to become the Google of gaming. Notice that Pincus didn't say the Google of social gaming, although that's what the Zynga Game Network specializes...Read more...
CTIA, the wireless industry's biggest trade group announced on Friday that it has sued the city of San Francisco over its recently passed ordinance requiring retailers to display the radiation levels emitted from cellphones. The “Cell Phone Right-to-Know” law requires retailers to display the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) next...Read more...
Google has released an updated Google Voice has been updated on BlackBerry and Android phones. The new version will reduce the amount of time it takes for a user to make a call via the service. Google Voice is the service that Google acquired when it was GrandCentral. It allows you to receive a call on your Google Voice number, and have it...Read more...
They're gone. Google has sold out its last batch of Nexus Ones, only a few days after Google reported that they had received their last shipment from HTC, for online sale. It was a grand experiment, selling the HTC Nexus One online, but it was doomed to failure: originally, while the device was (nicely) unlocked, it could only be bought...Read more...
When an airliner crashes, the first thing authorities look for are the "black boxes," the flight data and voice recorders. There are even black boxes in cars, today. And on Wednesday, the inventor of the venerable black box, David Warren, died at 85. David Warren was a research scientist at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne,...Read more...
We suspected as much when Verizon released its MyVerizon Android app with a data counter widget, and it appears it's coming. Reports are that Verizon is set to join AT&T in dropping truly unlimited data plans. Hey, to look at it with a positive spin, it could be because they are expecting the long-rumored Verizon iPhone soon, and want...Read more...
In an obvious attempt at stockpiling them, Apple has stripped its $30 iPhone 4 bumper cases from its online store. Apple said last Friday in its press conference to discuss the iPhone 4 "death grip" issue, that it would be providing free cases to customers, at least through Sept. 30th. Right now, the cases are priced at $0, but are also marked...Read more...
AT&T was the first carrier to move to tiered, capped data plans for its smartphones, but the other big three carriers are expected to follow, someday. With the release of a new MyVerizon Android app, are we getting a hint from Verizon? The new version, 5.0, has a bunch of uses, but a new one that's been added is a handy dandy, widget to...Read more...
When Apple announced a software "fix" for the iPhone 4's "death grip" issue, it seemed to us that by saying customers were just in an area of low signal strength, at least in the U.S., they were throwing AT&T under the bus. Thus, we come to Wired's article on the contentious relationship between Apple and AT&T, which is less about...Read more...
AT&T launched the Captivate (below), its Samsung Galaxy S variant, on Sunday, as scheduled. With that, it was the third launch of a hot Android device since Thursday. Indeed, Thursday was a day with a twin set of Android device launches. On Thursday, Verizon launched the Motorola Droid X, while T-Mobile simultaneously launched...Read more...