iPhone Jailbreaking: A Legitimate Business?

The Washington Post’s Ian Shapira says that while Apple may frown on “jailbreaking,” some are making a legitimate business out of it. How about making an extra $50,000 a year from this simple process?

Google Yanks Grooveshark from Android Market, But Chrome App Remains

Grooveshark became a rare victim of Android Market policy on Tuesday, when Google removed the streaming music app without explanation of which policies were violated.

Unlike other streaming music services, such as Rdio and MOG, Grooveshark doesn’t license the entirety of its library. Songs are uploaded by other users, allowing Grooveshark to undercut the competiton with free web streaming and a $3 per month mobile app. Although Grooveshark has made an arrangement with EMI, a lawsuit against Universal Music Group is underway, and I wouldn’t be surprised if record labels complained. Apple yanked Grooveshark’s iPhone app last July.

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Report: 2 Million-Plus iPad 2s Shipped in March

All those “stock outs” at iPad retailers across the US (and worldwide) had to mean something right? Well, according to Taiwanese tech site DigiTimes, which cites unnamed Apple suppliers, it did. These sources claim that the company may have taken delivery of as much as 2.6 million iPads last month.

Seeing that the iPad 2 is sold out just about everywhere, it’s not out of the realm of possibly that the company sold just about all of its incoming stock. If that’s true then sales of the second generation device more than doubled sales of the first one in its initial month of availability.

DigiTimes goes on to say that its sources estimated that Apple will be able to take delivery of upwards of four million units every month as long as components remain available. Now, iSuppli had sad last month that the massive earthquake in Japan could affect supply, so we’ll have to wait and see.

I still wonder why Apple has been so silent regarding sales numbers. Typically, it is the first to toot its own horn when things are going well. Just seems a little strange, but then again all the anecdotal evidence we’re seeing indicates the iPad 2 is selling just fine.

Beige is Back: The Commodore 64 and Its Amazing Keyboard Return

It’s back! The Commodore 64 computer you may fondly remember from your youth (assuming you were a youth back in the early 1980s) has returned from the place where old computers go to die, reborn as something that looks the same, but acts very different.

The outside is still deliciously two-tone brown, with huge clickety-clackety keys that you can type on as if typing were the only thing that could save your life, rescue fair maidens from the clutches of evil geniuses, and prevent dastardly arrays of nuclear warheads from detonating in all the great cities of the world. Yeah, that kind of typing:

The new Commodore 64 features genuine Cherry brand key switches, which provide a feel much better than the original, with a lovely IBM classic mechanism and click sound. The keys are the exact same shape as the original and are color matched. No expense has been spared. This is the ultimate hackers keyboard on which to wield your key-fu.

But inside…inside it’s a different beast. The new C64 comes with a 1.8GHz Intel processor, up to 4GB RAM, runs Windows 7, and even plays back Blu-ray discs.

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WebOS Sans Tiny Plastic Keys?

You just know that HP will release a WebOS phone without a physical keyboard sooner or later. (In fact, I’m astonished it didn’t happen…well, about two years ago.) Is this it?

Dish Network Buys Itself a Bankrupt Chain of Movie Rental Stores

Satellite TV provider Dish Network wants to become satellite TV and video-rental retailer Dish Network. It announced today that its bid of $320 million ($228 million in cash) was enough to win the auction to buy Blockbuster, the venerable, ailing video chain that went bankrupt last September. Assuming that the sale goes through, Dish will get itself 1700 stores and other Blockbuster properties, such as its on-demand services for PCs, phones, and set-top boxes.

Dish’s statement was optimistic, but cautiously so:

“With its more than 1,700 store locations, a highly recognizable brand and multiple methods of delivery, Blockbuster will complement our existing video offerings while presenting cross-marketing and service extension opportunities for DISHNetwork,” said Tom Cullen, executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Programming for DISH Network. “While Blockbuster’s business faces significant challenges, we look forward to working with its employees to re-establish Blockbuster’s brand as a leader in video entertainment.”

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GameStop Mulls a Tablet, Will Soon Buy Yours

When a brick-and-mortar retailer decides to go digital, one possible strategy goes something like this: Buy a smaller digital company or two, and hope to make them big.

That’s what GameStop did last week when it acquired Stardock’s Impulse game download service and Spawn Labs, whose claim to fame is a device that acts like SlingBox for video games.

But in an interview with Gamasutra’s Chris Morris, Gamestop revealed a more fascinating wrinkle in its digital strategy. Later this year, it’ll start accepting tablets for trade-in, and it eventually wants Impulse’s download service and Spawn Labs’ streaming tech to be a part of other manufacturer’s tablets. If that doesn’t happen, Gamestop may build a tablet of its own.

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Motorola Xoom Sales “Slow,” “Disappointing,” Say Analysts

Motorola’s Xoom tablet doesn’t lack for hype. Actual sales, however, may be another matter. At least two analysts have come out in the past two days and cited “poor” Xoom sales in adjusting their forecasts for Motorola revenue in the current quarter.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue was the first on Friday, and said higher competition would put a strain on the company. He cut his Xoom shipments forecast by 25% to 300,000 units in the current quarter and called sales “slow.” This was followed by Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette who called Xoom sales (and of Motorola’s Atrix 4G smartphone) “disappointing.”

What’s the issue here? I’m going to take an educated guess and say its pricing pressures. In the case of the Xoom, it is still priced well above the market-leading iPad. For such a premium, Motorola needs to prove its worth to the consumer and I don’t think it has done that.

As Faucette notes, the Atrix’s issues may actually result from other smartphones on AT&T being priced well below the device, such as the $49 iPhone 3GS. The Atrix on the other hand retails for $199.99. While it’s the same price as the iPhone 4, if people are looking for a cheaper solution on the carrier with a decent feature set, it’s certainly there.

If anything’s obvious from this, it’s that price is king. Will this lead Motorola to reconsider its strategy? I guess we’ll find out.

Twitter’s Still Trying to Explain Itself

As any Twitter enthusiast knows, the hardest part of turning new people onto the service is explaining why they’d want to use it in the first place.

Five years later, Twitter’s still trying to nail that explanation itself. Yet another home page redesign, reportedly rolling out to some users, takes another stab at making Twitter interesting from the outside. This is the third major redesign in less than two years.

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I’m Googlecentric. And That’s Okay

Over at BetaNews, Joe Wilcox is undertaking an interesting experiment: to the best of his ability, he’s going to stop using Google services and see whether it makes his life better or worse. He says that he was inspired by recent scuttlebutt about Google being a monopoly, but that he’s not anti-Google; he just wants to see what life without it is like.

Me, I don’t have any plans to abstain from Google. I don’t feel like the victim of a Google monopoly–there’s not a Google service I use that doesn’t have multiple worthy rivals, and for the most part, I don’t feel locked into Google services. If I want to go elsewhere I can–and often do.

Still, I was inspired by Joe’s exercise in Going Un-Google to do a personal inventory of the Google stuff I use, and just how much I use it.

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Facebook For iPhone Gets “Unfriend” Feature

Has somebody made you so angry that you couldn’t wait until you got home so you could unfriend them on Facebook? If you have an iPhone, you won’t have to wait. As part of the new update to the Facebook app, an “Unfriend” button has been added to the application, allowing users to dump their pals on the go.

The functionality is not yet in the Android version, and the company has not said when it expects it to be. In addition, we’re all still waiting for an official iPad app–something that I’m beginning to think may never materalize!

All kidding aside on the unfriending front, there were also some other really nice additions to the app. You may remember my post on event check-ins from last month: the feature is now available within the app.

Users will also now be able to use a map to view the locations of friends rather than the standard list that the app has been using since Places was introduced last August. This makes the feature a lot more like Loopt, which has always displayed the locations of friends on a map — which just seems a logical move to me.

Consumers Say Verizon iPhone Drops Fewer Calls

If the latest survey from ChangeWave Research is any indication, the theory that the Verizon iPhone would be more reliable than AT&T’s iPhone is more than just a theory. That said, consumers still seem to be as satisfied with the iPhone 4 on AT&T as they do on Verizon.

82 percent of iPhone 4 owners on Verizon are satisfied with the device versus 80 percent on AT&T. Conversely, 18 percent are dissatisfied with the iPhone 4 on AT&T, and 16 percent on Verizon. Not much of a difference, and within the margin of error.

There are definitely areas where the two carriers diverge, though, most notably in dropped calls.

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I’m Getting E-Mails From Epsilon’s Clients. Are You?

On Friday, marketing company Epsilon announced that an unknown third party had broken into its e-mail system and gained access to the names and e-mail addresses of some of the companies which Epsilon performs services for. And so, over the past few days, Epsilon clients have been sending e-mail to their customers alerting them to the breach and its potential consequences.

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Daily Downward?

How many people are reading The Daily, News Corp.’s new iPad-only, for-pay newspaper? Only Rupert Murdoch and company (and Apple) know for sure. It is, however, possible to determine how many Daily readers are tweeting from within it–and that number is going down, not up.

Google Decentralized?

Looks like Google’s new CEO–guy named Larry Page, remember?–isn’t shilly-shallying before getting down to business.

Windows Gets a Built-In PDF Reader

More Windows 8 scuttlebutt: it’ll apparently include a fancy PDF reader.