Droid X on Lockdown, But Hacks Won’t Brick It

If the Droid X’s U.S. launch had just one pockmark, it was the hoopla that transpired when one Android enthusiast declared the phone would become a brick when hacked.

It all started when My Droid World forum admin p3droid declared that a chip called eFuse was triggered to blow when the Droid X’s digitally-signed bootloader is tampered with, rendering the phone unusable. Attempts to run custom ROMs on the phone, such as Cyanogen, would likely produce a Motorola-branded doorstop that only the company could fix. MobileCrunch’s Devin Coldewey ran with the story, as did other sites, and a debate ensued on whether the phone does, in fact, have a hardware-killing security feature.

So Engadget cleared the air with Motorola, who said the phone is not rigged to blow, but it does go into “Recovery Mode” when booted with unauthorized software. This is for security reasons, and for meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements, Motorola said. Re-installing Motorola-approved software restores the Droid X to normal.

Okay, great. But I think the debate yesterday was misdirected. The problem is not that the Droid X becomes a brick when hacked, but that it cannot be hacked. While the lack of a phone-killing security feature means hackers are at a greater liberty to tinker, they won’t get anywhere. Motorola Milestone, the original Droid’s overseas sibling, has the same digitally-signed bootloader, and its security measures haven’t been broken yet. There are workarounds for loading custom ROMs on the Milestone, but they are difficult to perform, and there are other drawbacks, as explained by TheUnlockr.

Any tech topic with the word “brick” in it makes for a better headline, but I’d rather see the discussion focus on why Motorola doesn’t want its users hacking the Droid X, rather than what nasty things will happen to the phone if they do.

Will There Ever Be a Nexus Two?

Google has announced that it’s received its last batch of Nexus One phones. When they’re gone, they’re gone–and since Google announced back in May that it had decided to shutter its online phone store, the company will be ending its experiment in direct sales to the masses when the last N1 goes out the door.

One question which I think remains unanswered: Does the imminent death of the Nexus One signal the end of the concept of the Googlephone–if “Googlephone” is defined as an Android handset for which Google is the maker of record and the sole company responsible for the software experience? When Google decided to wind down direct sales of the phone, it said it would work to sell it through retailers. But I don’t think it ever addressed directly what it intended to do once the Nexus One was discontinued. Will it be content to let phone makers do with Android as they will from now on? Or does it still want the opportunity to make a phone that fits its vision of what an Android handset should be as closely as possible?

Apple’s Antenna Response is Online

Apple has made a Web replay of this morning’s iPhone 4 press conference available on its site–plus a page that walks through its tests of the iPhone 4 and other phones and how holding them near their antennas impacts reception.

(One question which I don’t think Apple answered: Were these all the phones it tested? Did any fail to, um fail no matter how they were held? Apple’s explanation says that “nearly every smartphone” has issues, which suggests that some don’t.)

Consumer Reports Responds

Consumer Reports on Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference–sounds like Steve Jobs didn’t convince them that the iPhone 4 has no unique issues:

Consumers deserve answers and fairness.  Providing free bumpers and cases is a good first step toward Apple identifying and finding a solution for the signal-loss problem of the iPhone 4.

Steve Jobs: There Is No iPhone Antennagate

(Photo borrowed from Engadget’s live coverage.)

So much for the theory that Apple was going to announce a miracle cure for iPhone 4 reception issues this morning. At the press conference on Apple’s campus, Steve Jobs offered several measures to make current and prospective iPhone 4 owners comfortable with their purchase–but he defended the iPhone 4 against charges that it has unique problems with reception, and didn’t say that Apple could or would eliminate the possibility that holding the iPhone 4 by the lower left-hand corner would hurt its performance.

Jobs showed the results of Apple’s tests of other smartphones–the BlackBerry 9700, the Droid Eris, and the Samsung Omnia II–indicating that their signal strength also drops when they’re held.

He then quoted stats that suggest most users aren’t encountering crippling new reception issues. Only .55 percent of iPhone 4 buyers have called AppleCare with antenna- or reception-related problems; just 1.7 percent of people who bought iPhone 4s from AT&T have returned them (with the iPhone 3GS, it was six percent). According to AT&T, the iPhone 4 drops calls more frequently than the iPhone 3GS–but only by one additional dropped call per 100 calls.

Jobs shared a pet theory: Because the iPhone 4 has a new shape that requires new cases, only twenty percent of buyers leave the Apple Store with a case, versus eighty percent of iPhone 3GS buyers who did. Since it’s using the iPhone 4 without a case that reveals the reception issue, it may just be that more iPhone 4 owners have been exposed to troublesome reception scenarios.

And then he explained how Apple would respond to the iPhone 4 issue:

• He recommended that all iPhone 4 users upgrade to iOS 4.0.1, which provides a more accurate depiction of signal strength;
• Apple will provide a free iPhone 4 case–Apple’s bumper or another model, since there aren’t enough bumpers to go around–to everyone who has bought a phone or will buy one between now and September 30th;
• Customers who are still unhappy can bring their iPhone 4 back within thirty days for a full refund, with no restocking fee;
• Apple is looking into the issues that have been reported with the iPhone 4′s proximity sensor, and hopes to fix them in the next software update;
• By the end of this month, the white iPhone 4 will be shipping and the iPhone 4 will be available in another seventeen countries.

During the Q&A that followed–which is still going on as I write this–Jobs said that Apple doesn’t have a better antenna design (maybe the next iPhone will have one, he said) and that a Bloomberg story which said an Apple engineer had warned him about the iPhone 4 antenna was “bullshit.”

Throughout, Jobs talked about how hard Apple works to make its customers happy, and how much it loves those customers. He said that Apple isn’t perfect, and didn’t deny that the iPhone 4′s antenna design can cause problems.

So does this end controversy over the iPhone 4? No, I don’t think that anyone, including Jobs, believes that. But it may put the final verdict in the hands of iPhone 4 owners rather than the media or Apple. If millions of people buy the iPhone 4 and don’t encounter any unique reception difficulties, they’ll tell their friends and the phone’s rep will quickly heal. And if those millions of people do find the phone unreliable, they’ll tell their friends that, too.

(Me, I’ve found that my iPhone 4 seems to have good-to-very-good reception in most instances–except when I entered a zone of weak AT&T signal and found that how I held the phone made a huge difference.)

More thoughts to come, but here’s one aspect of all this that cries out for further exploration. In today’s press conference, Jobs showed other phones suffering from reception issues that looked a lot like those that the iPhone 4 can encounter. But when Consumer Reports decided not to recommend the phone, it did so based on tests of the iPhone 4 and other phones which indicated that the 4 has problems that other phones don’t. The “other phones” involved were different, so the conclusions weren’t inconsistent. But I’d like to see CR or another third party with the resources and know-how perform further testing of this sort.

So if you followed the press conference this morning, what’s your take on Apple’s response? Do you think the company is done addressing this?

Atari May Plunder Its Classics for Remakes

Atari’s not the company it used to be — literally, it’s been swallowed up by a succession of larger companies since the 1980s — but it can still milk name recognition and classic video games.

The company, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infogrames, is remaking the Atari 2600 classic Haunted House, and a couple of listings on Gamefly suggest that Centipede and Star Raiders remakes could be next.

Given the timing, this wouldn’t surprise me. E3 was crowded with remakes of well-known or in some cases forgotten video game franchises. Fondly remembered games like Goldeneye and NBA Jam are being brought back to life, while franchises that never really went away, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Mortal Kombat, are going back to their 2D roots. These are safe bets in the midst of a games industry slump. If Atari wants to jump on the nostalgia train, now’s the time.

The difference between Atari’s remakes and the examples I saw at E3 is that Atari’s games are so old, there’s very little to build from. Haunted House could be a great game, but it’s impossible to say whether the remake is faithful to the original, because the original is so primitive. If Star Raiders gets remade, it’ll probably resemble Wing Commander more than anything else.

Basically, I feel the same way about Atari’s games as I do about the upcoming surge of movies based on very old video games. They won’t necessarily be bad, but they’re just blank slates with recognizable names.

Fifteen Years of Amazon (and Eleven and a Half Years of Amazon and Me)

According to Esquire, today marks the fifteenth anniversary of Amazon.com’s first sale. (Wikipedia says the first customer bought a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, a book which Amazon still sells–hey, it’s even available in a Kindle edition.)

Esquire is marking the anniversary with a slideshow that pays tribute to a dozen e-commerce sites that didn’t make quite as big an impact as Amazon. (Poor Beenz is always in these retrospectives, but Flooz escaped this time around.)

Me, I thought back to the first time I bought anything from what was to become the Web’s biggest merchant. When you log into your Amazon account, you can get a very, very thorough recap of your past purchases. In fact, as far as I can tell, it’ll show you everything you ever bought, back to the very first item.

Continue reading this story…

Okay, What’s Apple Going to Do This Morning?

I think of you guys as being at least as good at making Apple predictions as most of the people who get paid big bucks to do so. But when I asked you to figure out what Apple plans to discuss at its iPhone 4 press conference this morning, you didn’t come to a consensus. For all the possibilities I provided, the overwhelming majority of you said that they wouldn’t happen. Either most of you are wrong, or something really surprising will happen in Cupertino in about an hour.

Me, I’m still not sure what the news will be. But here’s an interesting possibility: Some of the latest scuttlebutt says that it might be possible for Apple to fix the reception issue through software alone.

Hands on With the Samsung Galaxy S

Samsung’s making a splash with their new, high-end line of Android ”Galaxy S” handsets. And while they’ve already launched overseas, the US variants with custom enclosures and functionality, started rolling out yesterday:

• Sprint Samsung EPIC 4G
• AT&T Samsung Captivate
• Verizon Samsung Fascinate
• T-Mobile Samsung Vibrant

As part of the launch festivities, I was provided a stock Galaxy S to evaluate. Media outreach and spec sheet highlights have led with Samsung’s 4″ 800 x 480 Super AMOLED screen. And while I initially found it oversaturated, even garish (combined with Samsung’s Touchwiz skinning), I’ve landed somewhere else entirely. In fact, I’ve concluded that the Galaxy S utilizes the most pleasing mobile display I’ve encountered — striking an excellent balance of resolution, size, and vibrancy. The Galaxy S obviously isn’t as high res as Apple’s iPhone 4 pixel-dense “retina display” … but with uncorrected sub-20/20 vision, it’s not like I’ve been bothered by aliasing at 18″. So, ultimately, I find myself in the same camp as Harry:

if all other phone features were equal, I’d take more square inches over more pixels

Continue reading this story…

Google News’s New New Look Looks Like Its Old Look

A couple of weeks ago, Google did some serious surgery on Google News’s interface. Some folks–a noisy minority, as far as I can tell–hate the new look. Now Google is throwing them a bone, tweaking the new look to be slightly more familiar, and letting users opt for a two-column format that roughly approximates the old layout.

Firefox Home: Half a Web Browser is Better Than None, I Suppose

Firefox has arrived on the iPhone–sort of. Mozilla’s Firefox Home, which is now available in Apple’s App Store, brings your Firefox search history, bookmarks, and tabs to the iPhone. It does so courtesy of Firefox Sync, an add-on for desktop versions of Firefox that synchronizes multiple copies of the browser so your bookmarks, settings, and other customizations are the same in every browser you use.

Firefox Home lets you get at search history (courtesy of the Awesome Bar–just start typing and it’ll find places you’ve previously gone), bookarks, and tabs from within the app; you can load Web pages in the program, where they’re rendered by an embedded version of Apple’s Safari, or open them in Safari itself. It’s handy, but it’s nowhere near as handy as a full-blown version of Firefox for the iPhone would have been. You can’t open a new URL, or bookmark a new page, or type search queries into the address bar–it’s strictly for going back to pages you once visited on a desktop copy of Firefox. Which means it neither feels like Firefox nor is able to replace Safari as a workaday Web browser.

Why didn’t Mozilla write a full-blown version of Firefox for the iPhone, akin to Fennec, which is available for Android? Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch says that Apple wouldn’t have accepted it for the App Store. I’m not so sure that’s the case: Apple didn’t have a problem with Opera Mini landing on its phone, and I can’t imagine a just, consistent policy which would accept Opera Mini but prohibit Firefox.

But if Mozilla didn’t want to risk writing an iPhone browser from scratch that Apple might nix, there was a (relatively) easy workaround: It could have built one which relied on Safari for rendering, as Firefox Home does–but with a far higher percentage of the trimmings we’re accustomed to in desktop Firefox. All evidence says that Apple doesn’t reject these pseudobrowsers, such as the outstanding Atomic Web Browser.

Maybe Mozilla can’t bring itself to release a Firefox that’s really a gussied-up reworking of Safari. Or maybe it intends to nudge Firefox in this direction over time. I just know that I like the idea of syncing my iPhone browsing experience with Firefox, but am a lot more excited by the idea than I am by Firefox Home the product.

Google and Government

The New York Times thinks that maybe the federal government should have some sort of oversight over Google’s algorithm. Which gave Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan an idea that sounds about as sensible.

Jolicloud Netbook OS is All Grown Up in Version 1.0

If you’ve got a netbook, you might want to take a look at Jolicloud. The free Linux-based operating system tries to combine the best of cloud and local computing, and next week version 1.0 will roll out to longtime users.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Jolicloud for about a year now, but never tried it, and wondered what would become of it after Google previewed Chrome OS. Both operating systems are driven primarily by web apps, with an emphasis on storing things online and syncing to the cloud so it doesn’t really matter what computer you’re on. Judging from a company blog post on the latest version and video preview by Netbook News, Jolicloud has not given up the fight.

The key difference from Chrome OS — aside from the fact that Chrome OS hasn’t launched yet — is Jolicloud’s all-encompassing approach to both downloadable and web-based apps. While the OS makes use of web apps like Facebook and YouTube, it also allows for installed software such as Skype and Boxee, all through a storefront that right now has more than 700 free apps.

There are some other neat features as well, like an HTML5 launcher that you can manage through a web browser on any PC, and a social stream that lets you geek out with fellow Jolicloud users. Users who dual-boot with Windows can even access the Windows file system.

If you don’t have a netbook, just take Jolicloud to be another sign of PC appification (the fact that I didn’t coin that term is yet another sign). Jolicloud is among the first to make the PC look more like a smartphone, and with Android netbooks surfacing periodically and Microsoft possibly considering an app store for Windows 8, it certainly won’t be the last.

Windows Phone 7 Supernegativity

InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman provides the pessimistic view–the very, very pessimistic view–on Windows Phone 7.

Ford Improves Sync, Adds 10,000 Commands

When Microsoft and Ford first debuted the Sync platform three years ago, it was quite rudimentary. About 100 commands were supported which only allowed the user to navigate the menu structure of the system. In other words, it was cool but almost hopelessly basic.

Not anymore. The US carmaker on Thursday released an update that increases the available commands to over 10,000. Ford’s intention here is to make the whole system easier to use. This would allow somebody who may not be familiar with voice recognition to learn to use the system much easier.

Continue reading this story…

iPhone 4: The Fix is In(side)?

TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz is reporting that analyst Ashok Kumar has learned that Apple has figured out how to resolve the iPhone 4′s lower-left-hand-corner reception glitch. The fix supposedly involves an internal component that will insulate the antenna from interference. Kumar also told MSNBC’s Wilson Rothman that it might be retroactively applicable to iPhone 4s that have already been sold, via a service job akin to replacing the battery.

I’m not assuming that the report is true–the Mortiz/Kumar team has a track record that’s, um, spotty, very spotty. But if Apple can greatly reduce or eliminate the problem, it’s surely in its best interest to do so. And it seems unlikely that it would invite journalists to its headquarters if its gameplan was mostly to argue there isn’t a real problem here.