Archives for August 2010

Saudi Arabia has carried through with it’s promise and has forced the three network providers to block access to BlackBerry Messaging. Yahoo! News is reporting today that a number of users over that way have confirmed that they are now unable to access the service that their smartphones were primarily designed to use.

The reasons the BlackBerry messaging service has been shut down was related to “security concerns”. Any of the three carriers now blocking the service would have been given a $1.3M fine. [Read more…]

The Samsung Epic 4G is rumoured to be arriving at Sprint as early as August 11. The information is found in what BGR refer to as the “Sprint playbook” where other information also indicates that stores will be opening up at 8am that day.

The launch of the Samsung Epic 4G jumps in just before the BlackBerry Torch 9800 and the DROID 2.

The phone it’s self is a dual-mode 3G/4G device that can work on either 3G or 4G networks depending on what coverage the user has. [Read more…]

Earlier this week the iPhone 4 jailbreak was released. The new jailbreak for iPhone doesn’t require that you tether your phone to your computer to run it. Instead, you just load up a website in Safari on the iPhone and slide a button that jailbreaks the iPhone from the browser (thanks to a PDF exploit).

To show how easy it is to perform the jailbreak, someone managed to capture a video of himself jailbreaking an iPhone 4 demo model in an Apple [AAPL] store. [Read more…]

CrackBerry managed to get hold of a BlackBerry Torch 9800 early to take a look at. Instead of just looking at what the OS is like and what the smartphone looks like on the outside, they also took it apart to see what actually makes it run on the inside.

The phone is due to be launched on August 12 in the US with a currently unknown UK launch date although we do know it’s headed to Vodafone and Orange at the moment.

The phone it’s self is the first to run BlackBerry OS 6 and has a slide-down QWERTY keyboard for text input. [Read more…]

AT&T [T] could be getting the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 towards the end of this month. The information comes from details emailed to Engadget that reveal the dealers price on the X10 as well as a few other phones.

The Sony Ericsson X10 is a fairly decent smartphone although it does lack in that it runs Android 1.6 and now 2.1 or above, and the battery lasts just a few hours rather than over a day unless you manually tweak and remove software that automatically runs. [Read more…]

PayPal has updated it’s Android PayPal app to include the popular Bump service. What the PayPal/Bump integration does is allows users to bump phones together to send money to each other.

The feature has been available on the iPhone for a few months now and provided iPhone users a simple way to PayPal money to each other without having to enter email addresses to send the cash to. [Read more…]

MacRumors recently was sent some images of what the source claims to be the front LCD and bezel of the upcoming iPod touch 4.

The parts look similar in design to the iPhone 4 although the speaker gap is missing. What we do notice is that a small hole is cut out on the top side right in the middle which could indicate that FaceTime for the iPod touch is incoming. This goes in-line with what we heard recently when some screen grabs of FaceTime being configured by email address was spotted which indicated a slightly different method is needed to activate a FaceTime call on the iPod or iPad. [Read more…]

The Motorola Droid X Android 2.2 update is coming in September. This information comes thanks to a post over on the Motorola forums where one of the staff members responded to a long thread about problems with notifications for corporate email.

His response said that a fix was incoming and would be part of the Android 2.2 update scheduled for the Droid X in September.

Some Droid X users are experiencing an issue using Exchange 2003 email. Though the email is arriving on the Droid X, no notifications are appearing. A fix for this will be included in the upgrade to Android 2.2 scheduled for deployment by early September.

[Read more…]

Apple [AAPL] has added a new section to the iPhone app store called “Try Before You Buy”. The title of it makes you think that apps will come free for maybe a couple of hours or couple of days at which point you can choose not to purchase them, or choose to purchase them.

However, it’s nothing like that at all unfortunately. Instead, what you get is just a list of “Lite” apps that give you a taster of what an app is about. These types of Lite apps have been around for a while now and simply provide a single level of a game, or limited functionality allowing you to test and then upgrade to the full version if you wish to keep it.

With that in mine, the “Try Before You Buy” section is merely a way to group all the free “Lite” apps under one list. [Read more…]

The Apple Peel 520 case is designed for the iPod touch and has been designed to turn the iPod touch in to an iPhone. The case of course is not an official Apple [AAPL] product and from what we have heard, it isn’t 100% perfect, but it does allow you to put a SIM card inside the case and make calls from the iPod touch.

Price wise, it will set you back about $57 when it launches although the product reviewed over at PCOnline is a prototype as the final models are not ready for launch just yet. [Read more…]

Last week, a ROM on the HTC site leaked out early and gave EVO 4G users the chance to upgrade to Android 2.2. The problem with the EVO 4G Android 2.2 update was that it wasn’t the final version. For those early adopters who grabbed this update, you are now left with an Android 2.2 version that isn’t final and that cannot receive OTA updates.

HTC has acknowledged this problem and is finding an official fix for this. However, if you are impatient and want an unofficial fix to return your update features to normal then check out Pojomans work on XDA Developers. [Read more…]