I’m still scratching my head about the Kyocera Echo I just saw here at CTIA in Orlando. It’s a dual-touchscreen Android 2.2 smartphone with a patent-pending hinge that allows you to line the displays up side-by-side, so that it looks sort of like a square-ish tablet with a black line across the middle:
If you’re using iPhone tethering over AT&T without AT&T’s permission, you might get an e-mail like this.
Can you spot the catch with this $10 Nexus S over at eBay?
My friend Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies has reviewed the iPad 2′ screen, comparing it to the iPhone 4’s “retina” display. The news is mostly good–he likes the iPad 2’s display a lot and says that “retina” resolution isn’t all that important–but he also has some interesting technical quibbles which he says Apple could fix with a software update.
Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.2 for Android–the first version that supports the tablet-friendly Android 3.0 Honeycomb and which supports the performance-boosting, power-minimizing Stage Video feature–will be available on March 18th. One way or another, Its arrival will surely restart the whole “Should iOS users be distraught over Apple’s refusal to permit Flash?” debate…
That new version of Twitter’s iPhone app that I’m not so wild about? As Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle reports, Twitter is trying to fix it, or at least refine it. But Dwight also points put another aspect of the upgrade that’s really a downgrade.
Local-information service Bizzy debuted last August–and it’s been evolving ever since. It started out as a guide to local businesses that hoped the local businesses would get involved. When that proved tougher than expected, it shifted its strategy to providing a Web-based recommendation engine for neighborhood spots. Then it brought those recommendations to the iPhone and Android.
Now Bizzy is building on its recommendations with a new feature for its iOS and Android apps it calls check-outs–a sort of flipside of check-ins as seen in FourSquare, Facebook, and innumerable other places. You check in when you arrive at a location, so your friends know you’re there; you check out when you’re ready to go and have formed an opinion you want to share.
Video has surfaced on YouTube apparently showing that just like its AT&T counterpart, the Verizon iPhone can be unlocked and used with other carriers. There isn’t a whole lot of detail, but a call to *228 (the CDMA programming number) shows that this iPhone 4 is definitely on the network, and successfully able to be programmed to run on Cricket’s network.
It was only a matter of time before this happened. I’m surprised it took this long!
Backing up an iPhone, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a hassle. You do the job via iTunes, but it’s not a particularly intuitive experience, nor one that’s as automated as it should be. (The syncing that happens automatically when you connect an iPhone via USB falls very short of a full backup.) Unless you’re a lot more careful than I am about protecting your data, you probably don’t back up your iPhone as often as you should.
Enter Iomega’s SuperHero, which I wrote about when it was announced at CES in January. It’s an iPhone charging dock–it also works with the current version of the iPod Touch–that aims to make backup so easy that you’ll actually do it. Or contact and photo backup, at least–the SuperHero can’t protect apps, e-mail, calendars, and other items because Apple provides no way for third-party products to get at this data. Iomega provided a unit to me for review.
Does Android have a malware problem? After news earlier this week about Google removing 21 apps from the Android market earlier this week due to the discovery of a Trojan horse, it ‘s now being reported that as many as 50 or more apps in total have now gotten the axe.
While Android malware is nothing new, this apparently marks the first time that the problem has occurred on a larger scale. At least three different developers (if you want to call them that, since they were all basically malware pushers), have now used the same Trojan. There could be more.
