An application was recently approved by Apple [AAPL] that acted as a flashlight. The app was called Handy Light and from a quick look at it, it appeared to be a flash light app that simply lit up the iPhone so you could see better in the dark.

Nick Lee, the developer of the Handy Light app, managed to sneakily insert some code that enabled tethering on the iPhone. The app cost $1 and by tapping a sequence of colours on the screen a hidden function enabled the tethering features of the iPhone.

The reasons we believe it was pulled was not only for sneakily adding code in and pulling the wool over Apple’s eyes, but it also allowed users to access tethering which would normally cost those on AT&T [T] an extra $20/month. [Read more…]

Apple [AAPL] last week revealed in the press conference that they were to provide a free case to all iPhone 4 owners and all those who plan to buy an iPhone 4 up till September 30. At that point the situation will be re-evaluated.

On the earnings call yesterday a question was asked about the free case and the impact it will have…

“Any way to quantify the impact of the free bumpers on next quarter?”

To which an answer came…

“Two impacts. We will need to defer revenue for the iPhone 4s that we’ve sold where we’ve not delivered the bumpers and we haven’t heard from the customers. Our estimate is $175 million. We will expense the cost of the bumpers when we ship them to customers. Our most important objective is to take care of every customer and delight them.” [Read more…]

Since the iPhone 4 has launched we haven’t come across too many apps that use the built-in gyroscope.

However, today we came across Acrossair. Acrossair is an augmented reality app that allows you to search for things with an augmented reality overlay on a live camera feed. The iOS 4 compatible app when running on the iPhone 4, makes use of the built-in gyroscope to add a more silky smooth layer on top of the video feed. Previous versions for the 3GS etc… were a little jerky whilst running. [Read more…]

T-Mobile has announced that it’s HSPA+ network is now able to deliver 4G speeds in the US to 85 million people.

The company is moving forwards and continuing to expand it’s network to 100 metropolitan areas that will by the end of the year, cover 185 million people.

“The aggressive pace of our HSPA+ network rollout means our customers can enjoy a better mobile broadband experience on more devices in more places today-but we’re not done yet. Our first HSPA+ smartphone is coming soon and our footprint will double between now and the end of the year.”

[Read more…]

Yesterday, we saw a few reports that the Motorola DROID X had problems in some cases with it’s screen. The problems caused flickering and banding across the screen on some devices.

Verizon [VZ] and Motorola [MOT] have both confirmed that there has been problems on a few of the DROID X devices. The numbers revealed indicated that one-tenth of one percent of the devices have the problem.

If your Motorola Droid X has the flickering screen problem, or problems with banding across the screen then Verizon recommend you contact either Verizon or Motorola to work things out. [Read more…]

Droid-Life has managed to get hold of a picture of the Motorola DROID 2. The image (larger below), came from a reader who managed to spend some time with the DROID 2 over the weekend.

There’s a number of things we don’t currently know about the DROID 2 as we have only seen a few leaks so far. These revolve around the hardware of the phone, the Android OS version running on the phone as well as pricing and official release date details.

The image and the testing of it does answer a few of the questions though which now reveal that the Droid 2 runs Android 2.2 Froyo. We also hear it has a 1GHz processor inside and a combination of these makes it run very fast. [Read more…]

Yesterday, the BlackBerry Storm 3 was spotted in a document. Today, we noticed over on Engadget that they managed to get hold of a screen shot of a training manual that shows the smartphone is getting a few upgrades. The upgrades that will appear on the Storm 3 indicate that it will be more capable of running BlackBerry OS 6.

The RAM on the Storm 3 will be double that of the Storm 2 giving it 512MB to work with. The camera will increase to 5 megapixels and wireless connectivity is bumped up to 802.11n. Another decent feature is the ability to make the Storm 3 in to a wireless hotspot although that is listed under the “coming soon” banner which we assume will not be available at launch. [Read more…]