Who’s Calling? Android App Promises True Caller ID

There have been more times than I can count where I’ve gotten a phone call and have had no clue who might be calling from the number alone. Mobile developer First Orion aims to change that with the release of an Android version of its app called PrivacyStar. For the first time on a mobile phone, true caller ID would be available. No more guessing who’s on the other end of the line.

PrivacyStar does more than just tell you whose calling — it will also allow for unlimited call blocking and the ability to report violators of the US and Canada’s Do Not Call lists directly to the proper authorities. In other words, it gives much more control over the calls you receive.

These blocking features were central to PrivacyStar when it first launched its application for BlackBerry smartphones last year. That version also did have some rudimentary Caller ID functions, but they were only available through the call log after the call completed, which was somewhat useless.

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NBA Jam for Xbox 360 and PS3 Includes a Dilemma

When I tried NBA Jam at E3, it seemed like a faithful remake of Midway’s classic two-on-two arcade basketball game from the mid 1990s, but the Wii’s limited processing power makes online play unlikely when the game arrives in October.

The announcement of NBA Jam for Xbox 360 and PS3, with their elegant systems for multiplayer, seems like great news, except it comes with a couple of serious catches.

First, the only way you can get NBA Jam for Xbox 360 or PS3 is with a free download when you purchase NBA Elite 11, EA’s more traditional basketball game.  That’s not such a bad deal, because you’d get two games for the price of one, but with that offer comes another gotcha: The downloadable version of NBA Jam is not the full game. Only the Wii version has the “Remix Tour” mode and “boss battles” against basketball legends such as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. These features reportedly add another 20 hours to the game.

EA has put gamers in an tough position, where they’re deciding not just what console they’d rather play on, but which features are more important. While I agree with EA Creative Director Trey Smith playing NBA Jam against someone in the same room is part of the classic experience, playing against someone across the country is part of modern gaming.

I’m guessing this bizarre feature split was the only way EA could get NBA Jam on all three consoles, after announcing it as a Wii exclusive in January. For Nintendo, it’s a guarantee that not all buyers will jump ship to the version with multiplayer, but for gamers, it’s a lose-lose.

Long It Won’t Wave: Google Axes Wave

Wow. Google’s Urs Hölzle has blogged that the company is ceasing development on Wave, the collaborative service which it introduced at its I|O conference last year. It may use some of the technologies in other products, and everything’s open source, so others might continue work in it. But the product which once seemed like Google’s most audacious (even arrogant) attempt to change the way the world shares information isn’t going to change the world.

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Facebook Privacy to Go

Facebook’s new privacy settings are now available in the site’s mobile version.

iPhone 4 Unlocked

Just two days after it had brought back Jailbreakme.com from the dead, the iPhone Dev Team said Wednesday that it had completed an unlock that is compatible with the iPhone 4. As before, the phone must be jailbroken before it is able to be unlocked.

The unlock, called “ultrasn0w,” works with iPhone 4 baseband 01.59 and iPhone 3G/3GS basebands 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.12.01 and 05.13.04. The download is now available in the Cydia app store which is installed upon jailbreaking the phone.

Specifics of how the Dev Team unlocked the iPhone 4 were not given, unlike the Jailbreakme.com hack on Monday. That flaw, which has to do with how the iPhone displays PDF files, has triggered Apple to look into the problem although its unknown at this time whether or not the company plans to act.

I’d guess they probably will, considering this is how hackers are able to jailbreak the device, something which is now legal according to the US government, but still frowned upon by Apple.

So now that it’s unlocked, I’m curious: does it work on T-Mobile US’ 3G network? Maybe that’s our first clue that the rumors might be true!

FlipBoard Reviewed

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo really likes FlipBoard’s “social magazine” for the iPad. So do I: It had a bumpy launch, but seems to be working well for me. It’s fun right now–I spent part of my flight from New York to San Francisco yesterday relaxing with it–and the basic concept has infinite possibilities if the app gets smarter and smarter at figuring out what content is most important to you.)

Clear Aims for Apple Users With the iSpot

WiMAX provider Clear on Wednesday introduced the iSpot, a device aimed at giving iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users 4G access. The iSpot also offers a discounted rate on service: $25 per month as opposed to the typical $40 per month plan.

There is a catch. In order to qualify for the promotional rate, you can only connect it with an Apple device — it’s iOS compatible only. Using it with other mobile devices bumps that rate back up to the typical $40 rate.

The $99 device (on sale for $29 for today only) will create a hotspot of about 150 feet around the device and allow for up to eight devices at a time. The iSpot will last about four hours on a single charge, the company says.

Apparently the device is “unlockable” to use on all platforms, but it requires that the customer get the standard rate. It should be noted that the $25 rate appears to be “promotional,” so it may not be this good for too long.

I’m curious as to whether anyone would be interested in this and why. I’ve been eyeing Clear for my home Internet as Comcast has become increasingly unreliable here, and FiOS is still not even close to being available. Don’t know about this though — especially with my iPhone bill now regularly over $100/month after taxes.

New Study: (Most) iPhone 4 Owners are Satisfied

A couple of weeks ago, we published the results of a survey of Technologizer readers–both iPhone 4 owners and prospective iPhone 4 owners–about the “Antennagate” controversy. While the happy campers outnumbered the disgruntled consumers, it did show a meaningful minority as dissatisfied, some to the point where they said they intended to return the phone.

I said that we weren’t attempting to collect data that was projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone 4 owners. Nevertheless, a bunch of irate commenters griped about the survey because…it wasn’t projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone owners. They explained to me why our methodology was meaningless. (As my friend and former colleague Ed Albro noted, you never know how many statistics experts read your publication until you publish a study whose conclusions they dislike.)

Okay. ChangeWave, an outfit that does nothing but consumer research, has conducted an iPhone 4 satisfaction survey of its own. The company doesn’t detail how it found iPhone 4 owners to survey, or the demographic breakdown of respondents. (It does say that it surveyed 213 people–I surveyed 500, and several people who didn’t like our conclusions informed me that anyone who knows anything about surveys knows that was so small a sample as to be meaningless.)

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Smartphone Sales: New Stats, and a Recap

Yet another research report shows booming sales of Android smartphones: NPD, which covers the retail market, says that 33 percent of smartphones sold in the US in the second quarter ran Google’s operating system. RIM’s BlackBerries fell to second place, at 28 percent, and Apple’s iPhones had 22 percent of the market.

NPD’s analysis covers only phones, so there are millions of Apple iOS devices–iPod Touches and iPads–that aren’t part of the tally. Except for a few niche products such as Archos’s tablets and the Nook, Android is still a phone OS, not a general-purpose one; that will change in the months to come as Android tablets (and products such as Google TV) arrive.

Each company that does this sort of number-crunching uses its own methodology, and sales patterns for the rest of the world differ wildly from those for the US. So it’s not surprising that different companies are releasing varying rankings. After the jump, a quick visual recap of some recent stats.

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Microsoft Mystery Product Could Be Anything (or Nothing)

Okay Microsoft, I’ll bite.

The company’s doing a striptease of some unidentified hardware product, revealing a rendered image piece-by-piece through its Microsoft Hardware Twitter feed. The first image didn’t show much, but cobble it together with the second one (courtesy of JR Raphael at PCWorld), and you start to get a better picture — of something.

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New Hotmail Open to All

Microsoft has finished rolling out its new version of Hotmail. It’s got some clever clutter-busting features.

A Better Facebook for Android

I’m on a plane, so I’m not going to try it just yet, but the new version of Facebook for Android sounds cool.

The Phone of the Future is Broken

This AT&T computerphone (which seems to be a model that dates from 1991) at JFK’s international terminal is stuck at Windows NT’s boot loader screen. Which isn’t a huge problem, because someone’s stolen almost all the keys–including, sadly, <Ctrl>, <Alt>, and <Del>.

I wonder when it last worked, and when anyone last wanted to use it? I came across it because I was doing what seems to be the most common activity at airport pay phones these days: sitting down so I could use my laptop.

Why Fanboys Will Be Fanboys

You’ve read about the origins of the word “fanboy,” now read Andrew Groen’s exploration of their psychology.

Gaming is Blackberry Torch’s Missing Piece

Blackberry’s incoherent approach to video games never seemed like a problem before, but with Blackberry Torch and the new consumer focus of Blackberry 6, Research in Motion could soon find itself behind in the one area it overlooked.

The new trend in mobile gaming, and games in general, is social glue — the idea that a random smattering of games in an app store is no longer enough. People want to be involved in their games on another level, whether it’s the persistent beckoning of Farmville or the overarching achievement system of Xbox Live.

That glue is starting to ooze into mobile gaming. Apple sees the importance and is building Game Center, a layer of achievements, friends lists, matchmaking and leaderboards that developers can append to their games. When Microsoft launches Windows Phone 7 later this year, games will fall under the banner of Xbox Live, presumably with the same social features as its console counterpart. Google’s plans are a little murkier, but some kind of social gaming service is expected, and I’d be surprised if Android wasn’t involved.

Video games are not a trivial part of the smartphone experience. The number of smartphone owners who played games at least once a month increased 60 percent from February 2009 to February 2010, according to comScore. Games are the second-largest category in Blackberry App World, behind themes, and Compete says 54 percent of Blackberry owners have at least one game on their devices. Admittedly, that pales in comparison to iPhone owners, 51 percent of whom have five or more games installed, but maybe Apple’s extensive games catalog is one reason so many Blackberry owners are looking to jump ship.

Gaming will become a more important part of owning a smartphone, and social glue will be the factor that draws people to a platform and keeps them coming back. With Blackberry Torch and Blackberry 6 OS, RIM was so busy playing catch-up on key features, such as the browser and universal search, that it failed to see what the other major smartphone makers are working on next.

Report: Motorola, Verizon Working on TV Tablet

The Financial Times is reporting that Motorola has teamed up with Verizon Wireless to develop a Android-based tablet device that would allow users to watch television on it. While it’s not clear if this is a mobile DTV-based offering or what, it appears somehow tied to Verizon’s FiOS entertainment service.

The device would have a 10-inch screen — which is in line with Apple’s iPad and BlackBerry’s apparently upcoming tablet device — and would likely launch in the fall. That autumn release date is also what RIM is targeting, meaning it could be an all out battle royale for tablet supremacy this winter.

Motorola has made it no secret that they are lusting after carving out their own spot in the tablet market, one that is all but owned by Apple’s iPad at the moment. The television functionality, depending on how it works, could provide a crucial differentiating point in attracting consumers to the device. Also working with Verizon Wireless, who currently has the most widespread 3G network, is also a crucial selling point.

The device will also support Flash, just like RIM’s tablet, which means the iPad again stands alone as the only modern tablet device not to support the now near-ubiquitous multimedia format.

My question is now with all these competitors, is Apple itself prepared for trench warfare? Obviously the easiest way to compete with Apple is on price — the “Apple tax” is well documented. But functionality of the iPad is going to have to also increase, meaning we may see new versions of the device sooner than the typical upgrade cycle from Cupertino.

Personally, a price break is what I’m waiting for.