Fantastic news today from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).  After a lot of hard work and mountains of paperwork, jailbreaking your iPhone is now explicitly a permitted fair use under the DMCA!

The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone “jailbreaking” — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes “App Store,” and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.

In its reasoning in favor of EFF’s jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: “When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”

The EFF also successfully renewed the existing DMCA exception for carrier unlocking. More on the ruling by the Library of Congress is here and here (and many other places, since this is huge news!). The full ruling is here, and EFF’s history with this case is here (EFF’s servers are understandably getting hammered today!).

This doesn’t mean that Apple will stop their technical attempts to thwart jailbreaking, but it does mean that our iPhone jailbreaks and unlocks are now unambiguously legal under the DMCA.

Source: Dev Team Blog

Motorola Droid X review

The original Droid made a powerful statement. Actually, make that statements, plural: for Motorola, it was the largest single affirmation that it was going all-in with Android (after having already released the far less memorable midrange CLIQ on T-Mobile) and that it could play in the very highest rungs of the smartphone elite. For Verizon, the Droid was the carrier’s very first Android device, period — announced to great fanfare in collaboration with Eric Schmidt and crew — serving as a pretty spectacular exit from the Windows Mobile / BlackBerry doldrums that the carrier’s smartphone lineup had historically suffered. By almost any measure, the phone went on to serve its purpose; it let customers (and potential customers) know that Verizon could release a “cool” phone, and they responded. The Droid’s an unqualified success. Today, Verizon’s involvement in Android has never been greater, and Motorola — by all appearances, anyway — seems to be on its way back from the brink.

Time stops for no phone, though, and we’re now halfway through 2010. Motorola’s success as a competitive phone manufacturer is ultimately going to depend not on its ability to produce a single hit, but to produce a never-ending string of hits, each better than the one before it. It’s a tall order — and that’s exactly where the Droid X comes into play. Featuring a 4.3-inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera with 720p video capture, a reworked user interface, and a significantly improved processor, this phone apes the first Droid in at least one critical aspect: its ability to immediately steal the spotlight from anything else in Verizon’s lineup. Specs don’t tell the whole story, though, so let’s dig in and see what this beast is all about.

Motorola Droid X review

The packaging isn’t as unique as the EVO’s or as elegant as the iPhone 4′s, but just as with Droid models before it, the box does an admirable job of conveying Verizon’s “scary red eye that can run apps and get things done” message (besides, if you don’t buy this phone because you don’t like the box, you blew it). And in a world where being environmentally conscious matters, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the box is small — just barely larger than the phone itself in two of the three dimensions. Of course, the downside of a small package is that you’re not getting many goodies in the box — in fact, all you’re getting is the phone, a micro-USB cable, and a charger — but it’s not like you wanted another crappy pair of pack-in headphones anyway. A generous 16GB microSD card is pre-installed, a welcome addition to the internal 8GB.

So, let’s just save you a bit of time from the outset: the Droid X is an imposing device, and it’s definitely not for the small of hands. Makes no mistake, this is a big phone designed for use by big people. Well, not necessarily “big,” but let’s just say you’re going to have a tough go of it if you’re the kind of person that struggles to find a ball at the bowling alley where you can reach all the holes. Software and hardware aside, we’d actually say the size issue is going to be a showstopper for some — but if you’ve got smaller hands and you’re in the market for a high-end Android device on Verizon, you’ve still got the 3.7-inch Droid Incredible as a compelling option.

Now, onto the meat. Comparisons to Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G are going to be immediate and inevitable — but considering that these are both 4.3-inch, best-of-breed Android smartphones, they’re surprisingly different devices in the flesh. There are several specific, measurable reasons that we say that. Firstly, even though they share a diagonal measurement, the screens aren’t the same. Like the Droid, the Droid X adds an additional 54 vertical pixels to the normal WVGA formula for a grand total of 854 x 480; in other words, it’s a longer, narrower display than the EVO’s (16:9, like most widescreen televisions, as opposed to 5:3). To an extent, that makes the Droid X easier to hold since the body is nearly a millimeter narrower, but even with our relatively large hands, we found it considerably more difficult to reach the upper parts of the screen while gripping it normally than we did on the EVO, presumably because the Droid X is a good deal taller.

Second, the EVO is a couple millimeters fatter, and it’s curved in places that you can definitely feel while you’re holding it. The Droid X, by contrast, is totally squared off — not surprising, considering its heritage — which makes it marginally less comfortable for long phone conversations, though it’s not nearly big enough of a deal to become a deciding factor in your purchase. Besides, we’re big fans of soft-touch plastic around here, and the Droid X has more of it; in fact, every square inch of the phone is done up in soft-touch with the exception of the screen (obviously) and the buttons, whereas the EVO’s got glossy edges. Unless you coat your fingers in Crisco, you likely won’t be dropping this thing.

Third, you’ve got the buttons — for some, this could be a bigger deal, but it’s strictly a matter of personal preference. Unlike the maligned capacitive buttons on the Nexus One, the EVO’s are actually quite good, so for us, dealing with physical buttons again on the Droid X after using those other two phones for months came as a bit of a shock to the system. It’s not that the Droid X’s buttons are hard to press or are dodgy in any way, it just takes some time to get used to the fact that merely brushing against a button won’t trigger an action. What we liked less, though, was the fact that Motorola arbitrarily changed the order of the buttons from the original Droid. This seemingly insignificant oversight is a microcosm of a problem Android has faced on a pretty big scale — in fact, it’s actually difficult to find any two Android phones with the same button layout, which means you’re hitting Home when you mean to hit Menu for a solid four days while your brain rewires itself. It’s not clear if they just keep second-guessing the layout, they’re trying to throw off users, or what, but they need to settle on something they like and stick with it.

Turning our attention to the display… well, it’s beautiful. Compared to the AMOLED-equipped Nexus One, it’s far more usable in daylight (though still not nearly as good as something like a transflective LCD, of course). At about 228dpi, pixel density is lower than the original Droid at roughly 265dpi (and a good deal lower than the iPhone 4′s 326dpi), but it’s still high enough so that picking out individual pixels requires leaning in, straining your eyes, and searching for them. Though you don’t technically get any more screen real estate than a smaller screen with the same resolution, there are definitely tangible benefits to moving up to 4.3 inches.

For us, the biggest benefit of the huge display (besides the obvious improvements to browser readability at low zoom levels) seemed to be in the virtual keyboard. Motorola is quick to tout that the Droid X features multitouch support here — something that Android’s stock keyboard does not — but we had a hard time determining how much this actually helped in practice. Instead, we think that the width of the keyboard had a huge positive effect on our ability to mash keys error-free, and we noticed the improvement almost immediately. Frankly, it’s hard to use a soft keyboard on a 3.5- or 3.7-inch display after using the Droid X for a few days.

Of course, no discussion of the Droid X would be complete without touching on that hump toward the top. Ostensibly, it’s there because Motorola wanted to make the phone as thin as possible — 9.9 millimeters, to be exact — without sacrificing picture and video quality, which means they needed to add a little extra space for the camera module. Well, we’re happy to report that it’s pretty much a non-issue. It doesn’t get in your way while you’re holding it at all, which is a side effect of the fact that the phone is pretty huge and tall — you’re simply not going to brush up against it if you’re holding it normally, and even if you somehow do, there’s a gentle curve up to it so it’s not annoying to the touch. When you’ve got the phone set down on a table, the hump serves no ergonomic function — it’s not as if it helps you watch videos or anything — but it gets the rear-mounted speakerphone up off the ground so it’s plenty loud.

Camera

Speaking of the camera, we really liked the shots we were producing with this phone. By our untrained eye, the Droid X bests the EVO 4G for both still and video capture; photos were less grainy, and videos had less compression and significantly better sound quality. The sound quality is due in part to the fact that the Droid X features no fewer than three microphones — one along the bottom front, one at the top edge for noise cancellation, plus a third on back — and you can switch between them depending on your recording situation. If you want to narrate a video, there’s an aptly-named Narrative mode that triggers only the front-facing mic, but if you want to hear what you’re recording, you can trigger the rear one. There’s also a wind-cutting Outdoors mode that presumably takes the noise cancellation into account, though we had mixed success reducing the incidence of buffeting.

Motorola Droid X test photos

Below, we’ve got a few video samples — one large clip set in full automatic mode (what the Droid X calls “Everyday”), plus three smaller clips designed primarily to demonstrate the phone’s microphone modes. On the left, there’s a narrative clip, and the right two are both set in Outdoors mode; notice the occasional wind noise in the rightmost one.

Clearly, the bottom three clips aren’t designed for viewing as much as they are for testing sound quality — we took them while walking, and it shows — but you can definitely make out some “jellyvision” effect that’s typical of CMOS sensors. You’re not going to notice it in the least without herky, jerky camera action, though, so unless you’re doing a lot of high-intensity video work, it should be a non-issue for you.

Unfortunately, the Moto-customized user interface shared by the camera and video recorder isn’t quite as slick as the output they produce; in short, it’s buggy, slow, and distracting. As an obvious example, the Flash button on the right never changes, no matter what mode you select — On, Off, or Auto — so you can’t tell at a glance what mode you currently have selected without tapping it, which in turn causes it to change. In between shots, you get a black “Processing” message for a moment that takes up the entire screen — annoying and seemingly unnecessary. And changing effects or scenes (something you’ll do a lot for video in particular) takes longer than it should, since it calls up a separate screen where you swipe between options; it’s an unnecessarily slick touch. This is one place where it would’ve served Motorola well to keep things bare bones — you don’t want to be wowed with the UI when you’re trying to take a picture, you just want to take the best picture you can and move on with your life.

All that said, shutter lag wasn’t terrible — perhaps a half second between shots — and the camera app consistently loaded in four seconds or less. Autofocus was also generally pretty quick, though we found that the contrast detection struggled in some places where we thought it should’ve had an easy go of it. In our sample gallery, for instance, that macro shot we have of the Nokia N79 took maybe five or six tries before it finally locked on — it spent a lot of time hunting, shooting right past the proper focus point in both directions.

Software

The Droid X is Motorola’s first retail device to use the company’s custom UI atop Android 2.1, a skin that has been significantly restyled from the version found on Android 1.5 devices like the CLIQ, Devour, and CLIQ XT. But let’s be clear: the Droid X doesn’t use Blur. Actually, we’d initially been given conflicting answers from Motorola on whether the Droid X actually “runs” Blur, and we think we know why: as far as we can tell, the phone sidesteps Motorola’s proprietary back end entirely, which has been a source of many of Blur’s problems from day one — delayed updates and the like. Instead, Moto appears to now be taking the same angle that most of its competitors are, pushing all of the aggregation horsepower down to the phone and taking its own servers out of the equation. In practice, what this means is that you no longer have a Blur account — you just log in to your individual services (Twitter, Facebook, and the like) and the phone keeps track.

At a quick glance, the new skin — Blur 2.1, or whatever you want to call it — is cleaner, prettier, and just generally more modern than the skin it replaces, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. In fact, it feels as though Motorola heard and just completely misinterpreted the complaints about Blur to begin with, spending its energy making it less obvious that Blur is running without actually addressing any of its fundamental problems. Here’s a great example: when you add a Twitter account, all of your Twitter follows automatically puke into your contacts list, which we’d complained about way back when we reviewed the CLIQ last year. Yes, you can sort, but what Motorola really needed to do here was make it optional the same way that Twitter’s official Android app does.

Speaking of the official Twitter app, it generally runs circles around Blur’s Twitter implementation in terms of raw functionality; actually, there’s very little that Motorola’s own implementation does do other than drop your follows’ tweets into a unified inbox and involuntarily merge all of their handles into your contacts. As you can probably imagine, we were interested to see what would happen when we installed Twitter’s app alongside Motorola’s — and basically, you can do it, but you don’t want to. You’ll end up with two Twitter options when you’re setting up accounts (see above) and duplicate notifications. The solution is to simply ignore Moto’s built-in option and use the official app alone, which is what we’d recommend you do.

The good news about this skin — perhaps the best news, in fact — is that it’s pretty easy to ignore. You don’t need to log in to Blur and you don’t need to use it for your social networking and photo accounts, because it appears that it doesn’t block any other Android app that integrates with the platform’s core functionality from working properly (Twitter being a prime example of that). The included weather widget is another good example: it’s bare-bones simple, not particularly pretty, and doesn’t follow your location automatically, but it’s easy enough to install your own. Ultimately, about the only thing you can’t ignore is the home screen, which uses large white silhouettes to represent the dialer, the app drawer, and your socially-aware contacts list in much the same way Blur 1.5 did. When you swipe between home screen panels (there are seven of them, by the way), you’ll get a pop-up display at the bottom of the screen that conceals the dialer, app drawer, and contacts icons to show you what screen you’re currently on; it takes about a second to go away, which is momentarily annoying if you want to tap on any of those three icons.

Verizon bundles a 3G Mobile Hotspot app which will run an additional $20 per month for 2GB worth of usage, a business model not unlike AT&T’s — but the critical difference is that on-device data usage is still unlimited with the Droid X; you only dip into your 2GB bucket if you tether. The app is simple enough and worked very well in our experience; you can choose from the usual variety of encryption schemes including WPA2, set your own SSID, and even choose your WiFi channel which is convenient if you’re in a particularly WiFi-congested area. As speed goes, it’s fast — but it’s not Sprint WiMAX fast:

Performance and battery life

The Droid X is among the first phones to employ a TI OMAP3630 processor, which is basically the ultimate execution of the OMAP3 line of cores — the next step up is OMAP4, and that’s not ready for prime time yet. After using the phone for a few days, we’re really encouraged by this processor and what it can do — it feels like it’s at least a small step above and beyond Snapdragon, and certainly a noticeable leap over the OMAP3430 used by the Droid, Nokia N900, and Palm Pre. The UI generally felt fluid and lag-resistant, though we saw some stuttering when opening the notification and app drawers — something we’ve observed on literally every Android phone we’ve ever tested. The most exciting sign, though, is the stock browser, which absolutely flew — scrolling and pinch zooming were both silky smooth activities, something even a Froyo-equipped Nexus One can struggle with at times. Linpack consistently yields results above 8 MFLOPS, nearly double an Android 2.1-equipped Nexus One; that’s good news for when the Droid X gets Froyo later this year, which runs circles around Eclair in many operations.

We were able to easily and consistently make it through a single day (meaning morning to evening) on a battery charge, though we chatted with a Verizon spokesman who’d been using the phone for a while and he said that he typically struggled to make it through a typical weekday without a midday fill-up. It could be that our battery was fresh and new or we just weren’t beating up on the battery hard enough, but at any rate, your mileage will vary. Pure standby time was easily over three days, and we were able to get about two hours worth of consistent hotspot usage with roughly 40 percent battery drain — in other words, in-line with what we saw while using the EVO’s hotspot functionality.

Wrap-up

After seeing a string of midrange devices like the CLIQ XT, Devour, and Flipout go by, we were beginning to wonder when (or if) Motorola would make another grandiose play at the Android crown the same way it had with the Droid the first time around — but with the introduction of the Droid X, we’re happy to say that they finally have. Problem is, this isn’t the same marketplace that Moto was dealing with back in late 2009; high-end Android gear is easier to come by than ever before (Samsung’s massive four-carrier blowout with the Galaxy S series is powerful evidence of that), and most of it is… well, really quite good. This isn’t about taking candy from a baby anymore and waltzing into unmet demand for a type of phone that hadn’t existed before — it’s about competing really, really hard. It’s about forgetting the Droid’s success, just as the company has struggled to forget the RAZR’s.

Cast in that light, the Droid X becomes a much less magical phone than the Droid was. It’s good, and it’s a pretty enjoyable execution of Android 2.1, but it’s not a must-have phone — especially in light of the Droid Incredible and the upcoming Droid 2. From a hardware perspective, this phone is pretty much a bang-on execution of what a high-end mobile powerhouse should be, but Motorola clearly still has work to do in order to play in the same software league as HTC does with Sense. If it can get there — or heck, if it can just offer this phone with stock Froyo — you’ve got perhaps the best Android phone ever made.

Source: Engadget

If you’ve been following the ongoing saga of Dell’s Streak, you’ve probably already read our review of O2 UK’s version — thing is, the British perspective can be very different from the Yankee one (we didn’t see eye-to-eye during the War of 1812, for instance). To that end, we wanted to circle back now that the gargantuan Android beast is finally coming close to a US release and get another quick take.

As a refresher, this thing matches or exceeds the specs you’d expect to find on any modern high-end smartphone in most respects, starting with a 1GHz Snapdragon core, a 5 megapixel camera with dual LED flash, 850 / 1900MHz 3G for use on AT&T, Rogers, Bell, and Telus, and 2GB of internal storage coupled with a bundled and pre-installed 16GB microSDHC card. Where the Streak sets itself far, far apart from the crowd, though, is with an absolutely enormous 5-inch capacitive touchscreen at 800 x 480 resolution. Needless to say, it’s a polarizing feature — and for many, it’ll singlehandedly determine whether the phone is a buy or a no-buy.

Our original review ultimately concluded that the Streak was a promising device in need of an update from Android 1.6 to Froyo. On second look, does our American reviewer agree? Read on.

Dell Streak review redux: thoughts from the New World

The Droid X is an extraordinarily imposing device — so for us to be able to say that the Streak dwarfs the Droid X is making one hell of a statement. It’s clear that Dell expects you to generally hold it in a landscape orientation (more on this in the software section), and in that respect, it works fine for users of any hand size; if you imagine the way you’d normally hold a PSP (a real one, not a Go), you’re on the right track. Be that as it may, there are definitely times when you’ll want to hold it portrait, and for that Herculean operation, you’ll need the hands of a yeti. Actually, that’s a bit of an overstatement — we’d consider our hands just a little bigger than average, and we were able to get a comfortable grip on it, though trying to reach every corner of the display with your thumb is a tricky affair at best.

At 10mm, the Streak is among the thinnest smartphones around, but the effect of that thinness is amplified by the device’s surface area. In other words, it feels even thinner than it actually is. As we’d noted in our review, as long as you’re not wearing tight pants (or pants with unusually small pockets), it’s totally pocketable without too much drama or bulge; a good rule of thumb is that if the 4.3-inch Droid X or EVO 4G fit for you, the Streak should fit, too, particularly thanks to the curved edges and glossy, slippery surfaces. It’s a good thing that it’s so easily concealed, because it’s a serious conversation piece when it’s out — a testament to the fact that there’s seriously nothing else quite like it in the market today. Seriously, strangers of all types will come up to you and want to know what the heck it is you’re tapping on, so be prepared for that.

Talking a little bit more about the Streak’s materials and construction, we can’t overstate it: it’s a simply gorgeous phone, truly one of the prettiest we’ve ever seen. Dell has done a magnificent job of blending the Gorilla Glass display almost completely flush with its surroundings in such a way that it appears to be a solid, uninterrupted sheet of curved, glossy blackness — an effect similar to that achieved by the Palm Pre, but with far more reassuring levels of construction and quality here. In fact, the Streak really feels more like a computer than a phone in some respects, a testament to Dell’s traditional comfort zone. That said, we did have a couple concerns; first, the plastic caps that sit on either side of the display had a tendency to creak when pressed, particularly the top one where the earpiece and front-facing camera are located. That’s not a big deal since you don’t really have a valid reason to be pressing too hard on these parts of the phone, but a bigger concern lies with the display itself: pressing on it with anything more than a light touch causes some LCD rippling around the edges, a sign that it’s taking more stress than it should.

Controls and ports on the Streak are fairly standard for an Android device with a couple notable exceptions. The capacitive buttons below the display (or to the right side of it, depending on the orientation) are capacious and work really well. Strangely, though, there’s no dedicated search key among the trio, a strange omission for any Android phone, let alone one with this much room across; we thought “no big deal” at first, but we did actually find ourselves regularly missing it. More importantly, though, the Streak eschews the nearly universal micro-USB port for a wacky custom one — it kind of resembles an iPod connector, but without the ubiquity or the availability of hundreds of compatible crappy alarm clock docks. Apple, of course, can get away with pretending micro-USB doesn’t exist because it’s cultivated its own widely-popular standard over the last decade, and by now, most people have an iPod cable or three lying around. Dell, however, can’t get away with it. The fact that we couldn’t use our already-connected cables to charge the Streak or transfer files to and from our PC drove us nuts, never mind the fact that you’re stuck buying accessories and spare cables — likely at jacked-up prices — straight from the source or from whatever relatively small third-party ecosystem develops to support this phone. Of course, the advantage to the proprietary connector is that you can purchase an awesome dock for the Streak that features HDMI-out and a USB port, and that’s totally fine, Dell — just give us a micro-USB port on the phone, too.

The Streak’s display is fantastic. It’s not quite as vibrant or bright as an AMOLED device or an iPhone 4, but it’s exceptionally usable outdoors and has some of the best touch sensitivity we’ve ever experienced — there were actually a couple cases where we had to prove to ourselves that we were even making contact with the display with our fingertips when taps were being registered (turns out they were, but just barely). Dell makes great use of the screen’s real estate, too; even though its 800 x 480 resolution is no higher than, say, a Nexus One, the Streak uses lower-resolution screen elements (icons and the like) so that you can fit far more on the screen at one time — and because it’s five inches across, you can really take advantage of it. Sure, you can make out individual pixels in some of the fonts and icons, but so what? We’ll take being able to see twelve Gmail items on the screen at once with message body previews (pictured above on the right, versus a Droid X on the left) any day over higher pixel density.

Mirroring our British colleague’s sentiments, we were a little underwhelmed by camera performance and disappointed that video capture tops out with VGA. Shots were generally oversaturated, seemed heavily compressed, and just generally looked like they came off a cheap sensor with poor optics; the standard-def videos didn’t fare much better, hampered by mediocre sound quality. That all may not be an issue for many users — especially since a phone as big as the Streak doesn’t really make for the most convenient camera — but considering that many modern smartphones like the Droid Incredible, EVO 4G, iPhone 4, and N8 are all delivering high-def video capture and superb stills, it’s still a bummer. We also had some strange issues with the automatic white balance delivering stratospherically high color temperature indoors (check out our sample shot of the iPhone 4 in the gallery), and were confused to see that the phone offers no automatic flash control — you’ve got to trigger the dual LEDs yourself if you think you need them.

Dell Streak US camera samples

Software

Herein lies the true tragedy of the Streak. Glancing at the downright mean-looking hardware, you assume that this is an extraordinarily powerful, full-featured computer that could replace a laptop or netbook in many cases. In some respects, that’s true — Android is arguably the most powerful, flexible mobile operating system on the market today — but we came away feeling like the thing was gimped in some significant ways that arbitrarily limit its appeal.

First, and most obviously, the Streak is launching with Android 1.6. Froyo and Flash 10.1 are promised in an update, but the fact remains that Dell is releasing a high-end smartphone in the middle of 2010 running a platform that is now three major revisions old. And that’s not just a meaningless number, either — there are some very practical implications to the version gap. For example, Google Maps doesn’t support pinch-to-zoom here, even after you update the built-in app to the latest that’s available, version 4.3 — that especially sucks considering how great it looks on a display this large! You’re also denied access to the “official” Facebook and Twitter experiences for Android, instead being stuck with half-assed clients that Dell has baked into the firmware.

Then, there’s the skin. We see what Dell tried to do here — we think — but it didn’t work out. It seems they sought to make Android just a little more MID-friendly by adding capabilities geared specifically toward taking advantage of the 5-inch display; the pop-up app menu and notification window, for example. In doing so, though, they’ve left a trail of questionable design decisions that left us yearning for stock Android (or Sense… or really, anything) at virtually every turn. Here’s an example: you can’t swipe down from the top of the screen to get the notification drawer, which is arguably one of Android’s most brilliant gestures. Instead, you’ve got to tap a surprisingly small gray area in the status bar, which in turn pops up a bubble listing your current notifications. Dell has also managed, against all odds, to not have room to show the time in the status bar when you’re in portrait orientation — an impressive feat, considering we’re talking about a 5-inch WVGA display.

Speaking of portrait orientation, Dell really doesn’t plan for you to be using it very often — which, depending on your style and your hand size, may or may not be a safe assumption. The home screen doesn’t work at all in portrait, though some elements of it — context menus, for instance — can occasionally be coaxed to do it. Virtually all apps, of course, are more than happy to work in portrait — so when you’re using the phone that way, you might find yourself getting used to using the home screen sideways to launch apps you’re trying to get into. We were also surprised to see that Dell killed the concept of the trash can on the home screen, so when you want to delete an icon or a widget, you’ve got to hold it until you “pick it up” then drop it again; it’ll stay highlighted red, indicating you can press the Menu button to get a delete command. Awkward and unnecessary.

We were also unimpressed with the keyboard, which Dell has made as full-featured as possible (to take advantage of the display size, we think) at the detriment of usability. In portrait mode, they’ve tacked on punctuation keys and a dedicated Caps Lock key in the letter rows, which we were accidentally hitting almost constantly (though the dedicated numeric row at the top is a neat addition). In landscape, they’ve inexplicably put a full numeric keypad to the right of the letters, which means you can sock away any dreams of typing with two thumbs unless you want to learn how to effectively do it off-center. Considering our extremely positive experience with the Droid X’s keyboard, we’d come into the Streak assuming that we would do even better — bigger is almost universally better when it comes to screen size and soft keyboards — but it’s just not the case with the Streak. Needless to say, we’d love to try the stock Android keyboard on this display in portrait mode and see what kind of typing speed we could achieve.

There are bright spots in the Streak’s software, though. We really liked its home screen panel system, which is user-configurable in real time — just by tapping in the status bar, you can add or remove panels so that you don’t have to swipe through five if you don’t want five. The browser has also been customized from the stock Android 1.6 app to add in pinch zooming, which is a major usability issue for some users (though interestingly, the Streak’s screen is just large enough so that you can totally read some full websites completely zoomed out). It seemed a touch slower than it should’ve been considering the 1GHz processor, but not to the point of annoyance.

Wrap-up

For many, high-end browsing and messaging capabilities have overtaken the importance of voice calling in a phone, and that’s a philosophy that giant handsets like the Streak embrace with open arms. It’s an exciting, young segment of the smartphone market where we think we’re going to see a lot of growth and innovation over the next few years — and in many ways, Dell’s 5-inch monster is at the forefront of that charge. What makes the Streak such a heartbreaking device for us, though, is that the types of folks it’s most likely to appeal to — power users and road warriors who value sheer capability over portability — are the very same people who are least likely to appreciate Dell’s heavy-handed and generally unhelpful UI tweaks.

“What’s this?” a girl at a party asked, as I handed her my phone. She touched a square, and everything flipped away. “It’s Microsoft’s brand new phone. Kind of like a fresh start,” I explained. “Oh. It’s… neat.”

That’s the most apt way to describe Windows Phone 7, really. It’s a fresh start, and it’s neat. It’s a clean slate that Microsoft can use as a foundation to build something entirely new, and it’s not like any other phone you’ve used. It manages to do something that’s sadly rare for Microsoft, which is to leverage all of these different Microsoft products and services—Bing, Xbox Live, Zune to name a few—and seamlessly bring them together in a single, polished product. Which is exactly what Windows Phone 7 needs to be.

Windows Phone 7 is coming out this year, in the next few months—October, possibly—and the basic rundown of “What is Windows Phone 7?” can be found here and here. The version that I’ve been using for the last few days on prototype hardware (a Samsung phone which will never be sold) has been variously described to me by Microsoft as “beta 2,” a “close-to-release-candidate build” and a “technical preview.” Developers will be getting phones loaded with it shortly in order to have apps ready for launch. It’s representative of what the final Windows Phone 7 interface and experience will be like, though two critical parts were missing, because they’re still under heavy construction: Xbox Live and the Apps Marketplace.

The Interface

The phrase “authentically digital” makes me want to barf rainbow pixels, but Microsoft’s description of the Windows Phone 7 interface is truth: It doesn’t try to feel like anything but a flat, digital interface. There is no attempt to depict three dimensionality or any kind of real-world mimesis. No gradients, shadows, gloss or shading. Everything is crisp and flat. Everything pops, bright primary colors and white text on a black landscape. Touch a tile on the main screen, and the interface flies away like exploding puzzle pieces, revealing the app you wanted to see. Oversized text is the order of the day. (Yes, it still runs off the screen in lots of place.) It feels gloriously modern. I love it. I wonder how gracefully it’ll age.

Microsoft doesn’t treat the main components of the phone—like Music+Video, People, Pictures, Xbox Live—as apps. They’re “hubs.” Which means they’re panoramas with two or three or even four screens that you swipe left or right to move from one screen to another. For instance! In the People hub, one screen is all of my contacts. Flick to the right, and it’s recent contacts. Flick again, and it’s “what’s new,” which is a newsfeed of my friends’ updates from Facebook and Windows Live. (Well, it would have Windows Live friend updates, if I had any friends that used Windows Live, or the Twitter service was turned on yet—but more on that later.) You can get a sense of how developers will be able to expand on hubs in a way that’s more integrated than separate apps you install. Overall, the concept works really well, once you get it.

Live Tiles are what make the start screen good, and mostly eliminate the need for widgets. They’re the giant squares of, um, stuff that make up the home page. The tile for every application is dynamic, so one for my account mail will show me how many messages I have, while the tile for a person I have pinned to the start screen will show me their latest photo. Unfortunately, weather isn’t a built in app, so you can’t see what’s up at a glance—at least not with the early app that Microsoft made available in the Marketplace. But there’s a lot of potential in this concept, ridding the need to go through the motions of opening an app when all that’s needed is a shot of info.

There are three buttons that’ll be on the front of every Windows Phone 7 phone: Start, Back and Search. Start works just like the home button the iPhone—it takes you back to the start page. Back is much like Android—it shoots you back a screen. Search is contextual, which means sometimes you don’t know what it’ll bring up. In Maps, it looks up where you want to go; in People, it looks through contacts; from the start screen, it’s Bing search, which is comprised of a general web search, local listings, and news.

I didn’t think to use the search button as often as I should have. Like the Zune HD, WP7 is a very list-oriented interface when it comes to displaying a lot of information or options (versus, say, a grid). The main contacts page in the people is a very long list, since it brings in all of your Facebook contacts, without a way to filter them by network. The right side of the start screen is a long list of installed apps—you get the idea. Microsoft wants you to search for things or use voice commands to quickly get to them, but the most natural reaction would be to scroll for a long time.

Notifications, like for text messages, unobtrusively show up at the top of the screen, where you can ignore them or act on them. It’s how notifications should be. Pressing the volume key neatly brings up Zune player controls too at the top of the screen too. There’s a few other quirks to Windows Phone 7′s deliberately window-less interface. The cell signal typically isn’t visible; you have to tap the top of the screen to make it pop up. The indication that it’s syncing or updating is subtle, a series of dots running across the top of the screen.

The app bar, seen here, is exemplary of Windows Phone 7′s most aggressively iconographic tendencies. It’s a small menubar that runs alongside the bottom of many, if not most apps; it’s where the buttons to do things are often located, like composing a new message in Outlook. The buttons have no labels, just hieroglyphs. There’s an ellipsis in the top right hand corner of the bar—it’s supposed to indicate “press here, or drag up,” which will reveal the app bar in its full glory, with text labels for the buttons, along with a list of other things you can do, like access settings. While app bar’s behavior will be consistent across every app—kind of like a more obvious, onscreen version of Android’s menu button—it’s something people will definitely have to learn to use. The major issue is that it doesn’t eliminate the need for long presses—pressing and holding down, like on a picture in the gallery app, is still the only way to trigger certain things, and you can never quite tell when to use it.

The touch keyboard looks stark, almost advertising that it’s a crappy experience. Tiny little letters set against unforgivingly pointy little rectangles. It’s deceptive, since in terms of typability, it’s second to the iPhone. It’s a wonderful keyboard: fast, smooth, intuitive and totally natural, even this phone’s narrowish screen. Text selection is weird, but workable—pressing and holding over editable text brings up a fat green text cursor that you can slide between the letters, sticking it wherever you need it.

Given that it’s a beta OS running on prototype hardware, the interface’s speed was impressive. It’s exactly like a Zune HD. No stuttering or slowdown, just zoomy flips and swoops, back and forth between apps and the start screen. Of course, it needs this kind of speed, since it like’s a return to iPhone pre-iOS4—there’s no multitasking for third-party apps. (No, not even Pandora will run in the background.) It seems appropriate to mention now that there’s no copy and paste. A throwback to the halcyon days of 2009, Windows Phone 7 is the only modern smartphone that’ll be left in this position. It’s clearly going to be painful. Maybe agonizing.

The price of Windows Phone 7′s modernity, its difference, is something of a learning curve—or at least, that impression was more solidified after I handed the phone to a half dozen or so people over the weekend. All of them were lost, at least for a few minutes. Then I explained things. Then most of them said some variation of, “It’s cool, I guess.”

But, day to day, Windows Phone 7′s interface does work. Well. It’s quick, fluid, clean, modern. It’s not perfect. It’ll take a day to get used to. But I think most people will like it, if not love it. I do. The question is what it’ll be like in a year, or two years, when it’s more complete and filled out, less of a clean slate.

People and Accounts

People and accounts on Windows Phone 7 is a cross between Android and WebOS. A Microsoft Live ID is the core account that ties everything together. Which theoretically, can be a lot of stuff. It’ll pull in your contacts, Hotmail/Windows Live mail, Office Live, Zune, Xbox Live avatar, Pictures, SkyDrive—pretty much all of Microsoft’s online services are tied in, one way or another, through the Live ID. The iPhone feels archaic in this regard.

Like a lot of people, I don’t use Live except for Xbox and Zune. Fortunately, Microsoft’s support for other services, like Google and Facebook is solid. Particularly Facebook, which is the privileged secondary account here. I signed in to Google and Facebook, and magically, the People hub was populated with all of my contacts from both services, neatly linked with profile pictures from Facebook. The result it’s a epic list of people, which you can jump between using letters, like in the Zune HD interface, but if you’ve got a ton of Facebook contacts, you’re either going to be tapping search a lot, pinning people to the start menu, or you’re screwed. Most recent contacts get another screen.

There’s no separate Facebook app—instead, all updates, the newsfeed, if you will, are part of the “what’s new” screen in People. If you click on a contact’s card (which you can pin to the front page for instant access), you get the same kind of experience—”what’s new” will show you everything they’re up to, from all of the services you’re linked to. Some of the Facebook experience is lost in translation, but overall, the People hub concept works. It feels natural and seamless in the way it aggregates info from multiple services. The major missing piece is Twitter, but supposedly, support is on the way via Windows Live, which’ll aggregate Twitter updates and then pipe them down to the phone. It sounds like Google Buzz, but it should be much faster. Twitter support is mission critical for this app-less concept to work—so it has to happen.

Entertain Me: Music, Photos, Video

Music and video on the phone is exactly what’d you hope: It’s Zune HD, the app, just like the Kin. And, if you have a Zune Pass, you can stream the entirety of the Zune catalog—the part that’s available for streaming, anyway—over 3G, also the Kin. A new version of the Zune app syncs music, videos and photos—it’s the only thing that actually has to sync to the phone from a computer, and mercifully, it can be done over Wi-Fi too. Pressing the phone’s volume button drops Zune player at the top of the phone, which is slick.

Every phone has to have a dedicated camera button, which launches the app and takes pictures. The interface is blissfully minimal. It’s a lot like the iPhone 4′s, actually, with a couple controls lining the side for switching between stills and video, and then a gear button for more in-depth settings, like ISO. The breadth and depth of this menu is up to the hardware maker, but they have the option to go fairly hardcore with the level of settings.

Inside the camera, swiping to the left brings you into Pictures, which isn’t just the photos on the phone, but also everything your friends have uploaded to Facebook or other connected sites in a “what’s new” screen. Photos can be automatically uploaded to Live, if you want—a nice, Kin-like touch. Long pressing will give you the option to upload to Facebook, something that’s totally not obvious enough. And yes, there’s pinch-to-zoom, which is all over the phone.

Bing, Office, Outlook and the Internet Exploder

Bing Search is thoroughly excellent here. Tapping the search button on the main page launches you into a search hub that includes general web results, local listings—complete with a live map—and news. The problem, as I stated earlier, is that you never quite know where the Search button is going to take you.

Bing Maps, naturally, is the navigation service. It’s nice. It’s not as straightforwardly easy to use as Google Maps—the icons are confusing, as is the behavior of the back button—and it doesn’t have public transit directions, but it is fully featured and has a few swanky details. When it goes to street view, the roads fade in as the fog clears away, like the fog of war fading in a real-time strategy game. Directions are ace, using a split-screen view that has a map up top and turn-by-turn directions listed below. Tapping on an item in the list shoots you to that part of the map, so you know exactly where to go at that spot. Pinch-zooming is zippy.

The Outlook app might be the best mail app on any phone. Giant black text on a white background, it’s actually kind of gorgeous, and makes most mail apps feel dated. Swiping to the right left or right takes you through all mail, unread (handy!), flagged and urgent. Unfortunately, starred messages in Gmail do not translate into “flagged” messages at all, so there’s no way to dig those out. I haven’t tried Exchange, but it’s got full support, supposedly. The major problem with mail each email account creates a tile, almost like a separate app, and there’s no unified inbox, so you have to go back to the start screen every time you want to switch accounts. The semi-saving grace is that the tiles showing live info means you know how much mail you have before you pop into each account. But nonetheless, frustrating.

Internet Explorer is surprisingly competent, and quick, given that it’s built mostly off of the desktop version of IE7. Most of the sites I went to, from Gizmodo to the Atlantic, loaded without any problems, just like you’d expect them to. A few sites rendered poorly, the browser’s IE7 DNA showing through, but for most things, it’s pretty good—just behind iPhone and Android’s WebKit browsers. My major problem with the app is that the address bar never disappeared in portrait mode, so the view of the page always felt scrunched. (In landscape, it fades away, as you’d expect.) Pinch zooming is perfect, better than Android. Overall, I’m pretty happy, especially knowing this came out of Microsoft.

Office on a phone is terribly exciting, if you wear a tie five days week. It’s also terribly basic, but slick, more focused on viewing and collaboration—comments and online services like SharePoint and Live—than on actual production and editing. Extant Office files from Word, Excel and PowerPoint render with fidelity to the original, with a table of contents so you can skip around easily. Editing is limited to the most basic of text-y functions. On the phone, you can create elementary Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, though what’s more interesting to me is OneNote, which lets you create and sync notes over-the-air—they’ll show up automatically in Windows Live, or if you’re running the OneNote desktop software, it’ll poof into there, too. It’s not like running around with Office on your laptop, but cramming that into a phone would be painful anyhow.

Apps Marketplace and Xbox Live

The Marketplace is one big hub for everything you’d buy on Windows Phone 7: Apps, games and music, which is the major distinction, that everything is unified in a single market, vs. separate stores for apps and music. It seems to make more sense this way. The music store was the only one that’s fully armed and operational, but everything seems to work pretty much like Marketplace on the Zune HD, which is just like stores on any other phone—featured things, new things, categories, top sellers—but with a swoopy Windows Phone-style interface, tied to your Live account. Apps have screenshots and ratings, music has 30 second previews. Buy them, and they download over the air and install on your phone. Nothing shocking.

The only aspect of Xbox Live that’s working at the moment is that it’s showing my avatar and Gamescore—though you can see where friend requests and the games collection is going to live. What’s interesting is that the Games marketplace is going to be more tightly controlled than the general app marketplace. Whereas apps will have an objective checklist to pass before being like into the marketplace, Xbox Live games will be subjectively approved by Microsoft, so the idea is that it’ll be more like a console experience. In a way, it’s one of my biggest unanswered questions about WP7, since it seems like one of the biggest leverage points for people under 30 who haven’t bought a smartphone yet. “Buy an Xbox phone!” I wish I knew more of what that meant.

John covered the real questions about apps and Windows Phone 7 back in March, and most of them still remain:

When Windows phone 7 launches later this year, it will face the same Catch-22 as any new app platform does: Without an audience to sell to, why would developers invest in creating complicated apps? And if a platform doesn’t have these great apps, why would people switch to it?

The answers from Microsoft have been coming into slightly less-fuzzy focus, there’s no way to tell how it’s going to shake out. I mean, look at Palm. They had a great new platform too. Granted, we are talking about Microsoft, and the box containing this phone was adorned with Developers! Developers! DEVELOPERS! But it’s quite frankly unpossible to tell what a major part of the phone’s experience is going to be like—maybe the most critical aspect that’s out of Microsoft’s control. In the meantime, most of what we do know, you can read right here.

The Big Picture

Windows Phone 7 is good. Really good. It has the raw components needed to build a great smartphone. Or at least, one from 2009. Is that enough? It’s starting a generation behind Android and iPhone, which now have tens of millions devices. On top of that, it’s behind them functionally, too, missing things that are now table stakes, like copy and paste and multitasking for third-party applications. People might not know what ‘multitasking’ is, they’ll just wonder why they can’t play Pandora in the background.

And apps? iPhone and Android both have over 100,000. (Well, close enough for Android.) Developers go to where the users are; users go to where the content is. Microsoft has to break a vicious, virtuous cycle. If anybody can do this, rebuild an empire from less than nothing, it’s Microsoft. Patience is perhaps Microsoft’s greatest virtue, but sheer greed is what it needs right now. Making Windows Phone something that people want to buy is going to require the most herculean effort the company’s made in a long, long time. Windows Vista and 7 style onslaughts for mindshare. It has to snag developers and users, by the screaming bucketful. Microsoft has to want it bad enough. Fortunately, Windows Phone 7 might just be good enough.

Source : Gizmodo

What sorts of airplanes will we be flying in 2030? According to Airbus, this “fantasy plane” concept is a reasonable guess, a lightweight model with curled wings and a U-shaped tail. Oh, and invisible floors.

Sure, the design itself isn’t that crazy, but some of the interior features sure are. How about “holographic projections of virtual decors, so that each passenger could transform his or her area into a workspace, a bedroom, or a Zen garden”? Or walls and a floor that can turn “invisible” so you have a better sense of the landscape below. That one sounds both amazing and absolutely terrifying. Having ridden in a glass-bottomed ferris wheel car and almost soiled my shorts, I can’t imagine how looking straight down from 30,000 feet would feel.

But hey, at least we have 20 years to sack up before having to worry about it, right? [Airbus via Inhabitat]

So, um, what the? Brazil is going to host both the World Cup and Olympics. I’m Brazilian and this is still a shock. I mean, anyone could have seen it coming in the past decade, seeing how Brazil has grown. Still, it’s like oh gawd, please don’t let anyone get shot. The point is however, if you’re going to Brazil for either of these events there is still some other stuff you can add to your itinerary which I will address now.

1. Go to the Pantanal.

Looks Wet

The Pantanal is a huge wetland in Brazil, I think the largest in the world. I’ve been there and it is beautiful, no lie. You can do loads of outdoor activities like ATVing, horseback riding, and wetland “safaris”. There are also hikes, kayaking, and some other based activities. This is a part of Brazil nobody ever really thinks about but it’s really important for all the environmental reasons and blah, blah, blah. Point is, it’s really cool and fun. Go.

2. Go to Rio

So Pretty

Yes, there’s the obvious reasons; the beaches, the girls/guys (pick one or both or neither), and the parties. But there’s something more to Rio besides a giant Christ. It’s simply a beautiful city with a lot to do. Go exploring. Go paraglide or whatever it’s called. Bike down the beach or play some volley ball with the locals. You’ll appreciate the city a lot more if you actually do things with the people there. Go to a bar and watch a soccer game with crazy fans. Have fun besides the beaches.

3. Watch A Soccer Game

These Games Get Nasty

Watch a soccer game live. It’ll probably be your best sporting event experience ever. Nothing can really compare to the intensity of Brazilian soccer fans at a game, screaming, kicking, and punching, and screaming. Especially if it’s two really good teams that are rivals. Then it gets heated. People throw flares around, small firework bombs go off on the field, bad calls are made, boos are heard everywhere. Then comes the goal and the whole stadium is uproar. It might pale in comparison to the world cup, but Brazilians are crazy, so expect anything and make sure you wear the right jersey to the game.

4. Go To A Steakhouse

Yum

Steakhouses are heaven. These are amazing restaurants where you pay a fixed fee and waiters walk around with different types of meat and cut you however many slices you want. You can get chicken, sausages, beef, palomilla, pork anything. There’s also other food so you don’t only have to eat meat, but that’s for wimps. Oh, and if you’re a vegetarian, too bad. Brazil is famous for these restaurants, in fact I think there’s a few of them in Miami that only hire Brazilian employees.

5. Be There During Carnival/World Cup/Olympics

Party Hardy

Celebrations in Brazil are crazy, regardless of what they are for. If you happen to be there for Carnival go. Everyone knows it’s an epic celebration but you have to be there to feel it. But if that doesn’t work be there for the Olympics or World Cup. I’m sure it will be just as exciting and riveting. Especially the World Cup. Definitely be there for that sporting event.

Source : brunoberry.wordpress.com

Microsoft’s locked down their Kinect pricing, availability and bundling, and it’s pretty much what everyone knew. It’s $150 on November 4 for the standalone, and $300 bundled with a 4GB version of the new, smaller Xbox.

As we found out back at E3, there’s an “arcade” version of the new Xbox 360. That will be $200 on August 3, come with 4GB of flash storage and built-in Wi-Fi. The difference between this and the big brother standard version is that the hard drive slot is empty (but it is there, for later expansion), and comes in a matte finish.

Both the $150 standalone Kinect and the $300 bundle will come with Kinect Adventures, basically Microsoft’s version of Wii Sports (but not really sports, more like outdoor activities).

Microsoft has also said that their first-party Kinect games will be $50, $10 less than the standard $60 games now. When asked about the small discount, Microsoft said that they wanted to appeal to the casual gamer more with the lower price.

I also asked about the Wal-mart retail bundles where they package a game, a $30 gift card and the Kinect for $200. Microsoft has no direct control over these, but it seems likely that Wal-mart will either lower the price or add in another game, seeing as you’re actually paying $20 more than the standard retail price for this bundle.

Source : Gizmodo

Source : Supergoodmovies

Click here to see the image in iPhone 4’s full high-res (960 x 640)

The DevTeam and others have been checking through the iPhone 4, and have noticed the baseband runs a completely different OS than on previous models. The iPhone 3G and 3G[S] both ran Nucleus OS on the PMB8878 baseband CPU (aka XGold 608), where the iPhone 2G ran the PMB8876 (aka S-Gold 2). iPhone 4 uses the PMB9800, or X-Gold 618 – running a separate OS – ThreadX, an RTOS by ExpressLogic.

After almost a week of hard work, they are now a step closer to getting iPhone 4 fully unlocked so that you can use it on any carrier you like.

Good progress on iPhone4 unlock with @planetbeing: http://is.gd/dh2WE <-injected cmd! (Akin to http://is.gd/dh2Ze on 3G)

Next step is to keep the task backgrounded like we did for 3G/3GS http://is.gd/dh7Jh. Backgrounded task is the unlock.

And here are some of the videos which shows 3G baseband tool, and persistent nucleus tasks in action.

3G Baseband Tool

Persistent Nucleus Tasks

Also, since the the next version of Spirit like all iOS device userland jailbreak is ready, it is right time to get the unlock ready too, just in time for that “Pwnage Day” release when Apple pushes the next firmware update i.e. iOS 4.0.1 / 4.1 for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and 3G. Stay tuned as will let you know whenever these new tools are available for primetime use! [via Twitter]

Source: Redmondpie