Gadget Venue

Yesterday Apple [AAPL] pushed out a new update for iPhone owners that takes iOS 4 to iOS 4.0.1. The small update includes the fix for the formula to show the correct amount of bars which were previously misrepresented.

This is the only update listed in the update text which reads…

Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display

It is important to note here that the update does not fix the antenna issues and if you lost signal before by holding your iPhone 4, you’ll still lose it now. [Read more…]

The iPhone 4 antenna problem is expected to be addressed tomorrow at the Apple [AAPL] press meeting tomorrow. This hasn’t stopped a US senator from sending a letter to Steve Jobs asking for more transparency with the issue as well as a free fix rather than putting the emphasis on the users to hold the phone different or buy an iPhone 4 case.

The full letter is below and according to Gizmodo who posted it, it has been verified as real and should be publicly made available shortly. [Read more…]

Road SMS is an app built for the Samsung Galaxy S that has an augmented reality feel to make you a little safer whilst texting on the move.

The application makes use of the rear facing camera and feeds live video to the screen and superimposes a keyboard on the top of that. The result is an application that you can use to walk and text at the same time without fear of bumping in to someone.

The Road SMS app is available through the Samsung Apps download store on the Galaxy S. [Read more…]

Vlingo is launching a new app for Android based devices. The new app is called SuperDialer which is being described as an infinite address book in the cloud.

The SuperDialer is voice activated. When enabled you simply say what you want to find and Vlingo finds it for you and displays the contact details you need. The service is location based meaning that you can just say to it “Pizza” for example and it will list all the pizza places near your location. [Read more…]

Bloomberg is reporting that a top engineer at Apple [AAPL] warned of potential antenna problems early on in the iPhone 4 development phase.

The top engineer called Ruben Caballero is an antenna expert who informed management at Apple about the design’s potential to cause issues.

As well as Ruben raising the voice of warning to Apple management it is also believe at least one carrier partner also raised concerns about the new design before the June 24 release date.

Although we’ll never know for sure if Ruben mentioned this or not, it’s certainly difficult to imagine that Apple didn’t spot the problem whilst testing the device. It is also surprising that their press release about a few weeks back also didn’t accept there was an issue. [Read more…]

As well as changing the formula that calculates the signal strength and bars on the iPhone 4, iOS 4.1 also includes ACRCP stereo Bluetooth controls.

What that allows you to do is pair your iPhone iOS 4 device with headphones or a car stereo and control it from the said devices.

Previously you could play and pause tracks, but now you can use the rest of the controls such as the volume and skip track controls. [Read more…]

Androidlib track Google Android apps and growth rate of the Android Market Place. Recently their estimates indicated that over 1 Billion apps have been downloaded since launch which is a very impressive number.

Hitting 1 Billion downloads is a huge milestone to reach. This number arrives just as the Market Place is to get it’s 100,000th app approved which is expected any time now.

The download numbers are estimates though, so it isn’t clear how the numbers are calculated and how accurate they are. Either way, if it hasn’t officially passed the 1 billion mark, it cant be far away now. [Read more…]