T-Mobile G2 Gets Gingerbread Update

Greeeeeeat news T-Mobile G2 owners as today is a magical day for you. That’s right I’m talking about a Gingerbread OTA update that begins today and will rollout over the next few weeks to all G2 owners. This has been a great week for T-Mobile Android owners who are finally seeing a long promised Gingerbread update arrive. Let’s just get right to the meat of this and tell you what’s in store:

• Android 2.3.3
• Google Books added
• Notification color scheme is now black
• New battery indicator, phone and web icons
• Color-coded network icon and signal indicator
• Pressing the power key on a call disables the proximity sensor
• Wi-Fi improvements
• New SMS and email notification improvements
• Improvements to sending MMS from the Gallery

If you aren’t willing to wait for the OTA to come to you, you can try and go to it by using the following steps:

1. Press the MENU key
2. Tap SETTINGS
3. Tap ABOUT PHONE
4. Tap SYSTEM UPDATES

Note this line from the support document which I’m emphasizing in bold capital letters so people are sure to read it:

IMPORTANT: DO NOT CALL T-MOBILE TO RECEIVE THE UPDATE BEFORE SEPTEMBER 1. THE TIMELINE FOR RECEIVING THE OTA CANNOT BE EXPEDITED. T-MOBILE CANNOT MANUALLY PUSH THE SOFTWARE TO CUSTOMERS WHO ASK TO RECEIVE IT.

Hope you all got that last part!

T-Mobile

New iPods With Cameras, Microphones

Apple’s September events have traditionally revolved around iPods and iTunes, so it’s obvious this will be the theme of the event. But what, exactly, about the iPod? There’s a pile of evidence suggesting Apple will release new iPod Touch and iPod Nanos with cameras.

Wired.com in July received an inside tip from a well-connected source claiming Apple would soon add a camera and a microphone to the iPod Touch, which would bring it closer in line with the iPhone. Additionally, several other publications reported similar rumors about the Touch and the Nano getting cameras. And the latest iPod-related rumor comes from Taiwanese publication DigiTimes, which claims that not only will the Nano and Touch receive cameras, the iPod Classic will, too.

We’re confident the Nano and Touch will be upgraded with cameras (and, of course, increased storage). Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney had us convinced when he published a gallery of third-party Touch and Nano cases, which feature holes presumably meant for cameras. (See photo above)

However, we’re doubting the iPod Classic will gain a camera. It’s unlikely Apple would want to invest much more in this product, because its sales have shrunk considerably, thanks to the success of the iPhone. Last quarter, the iPod accounted for 18 percent of Apple’s overall revenue, compared to 55.5 percent in 2006. Also, the iPod Classic is the only hard-drive-based iPod remaining in the iPod family, and flash-memory prices are plummeting. Would a camera really boost this device’s appeal and make it worth the investment? We don’t think so.

One more thing: Because the iPod Touch is basically a phoneless iPhone that many use as a gaming device, the next logical step would be for the iPod Touch to get a performance boost to bring it up to speed with the new iPhone 3GS. We’re so confident in this prediction that we’re willing to bet a Chevy Chevelle on it.

Read More Here.

USB 3.0 Enabled PCs

Most of the news about USB 3.0—the finalization of the spec, the first drivers, the first controller—doesn't tell us much about when we'll actually get to see a product hit stores. The answer? According to Nikkei, before 2010.

Their contacts in the Tawianese PC industry predict the first machines to include the hardware will start rolling off the line by the end of the year, citing rapid development in integrated circuits and the shipment of compliant controllers to PC manufacturers. The date is a bit earlier than the "early 2010" prediction that's been bandied around recently, and inline with initial predictions of a 2009 release.

A quick reminder of what this means:

With transfer speeds of 4.8Gbps, it'll dump a 25GB HD file in about 70 seconds, and the architecture has been beefed up with extra data lanes to make for more sustained, rather than bursty transfer speeds, making it better for camcorders and the like. Even though it delivers more power than USB 2.0 to charge gadgets faster (and it'll revive a completely dead one too), its new polling architecture makes it more efficient.

Unfortunately, full 5Gbps speeds won't be reached for some time.

Read More Here

First Look at the BlackBerry Storm 2

CrackBerry's got the first photos of the BlackBerry Storm 2, the phone that hopes to set right what once went wrong. It looks thinner than the original Storm, and has a 3.2-megapixel cam on the back. It doesn't seem like there's any other info. More pics if you head over to the site.

New Apple iPod Shuffle 4GB

Apple just doubled the capacity of its iPod shuffle to 4GB while ditching the control wheel entirely. The new design keeps the clip and adds VoiceOver -- a new feature that gets around the lack of display by telling you which song is playing and who performs it at the touch of a button on the earbud cable. It'll also call out your playlists and let you navigate to others. Available in black or silver for $80 and your claim to what Apple calls the "world's smallest music player." Check the video tutorial after the break.

Read More / Pictures

New SD Card Spec Supports 2TB Capacities

The SD Association has announced a new card spec dubbed SDXC (eXtended Capacity) that can support memory capacities up to 2TB with read/write speeds to 104MB per second.According to their calculations, that would mean you could store 100 high-def movies, 60 hours of HD recording, or 17,000 fine-mode photos on a portable device.

Again, keep in mind that this is spec at this point—not an actual product. But we could see something based on it as early as next year. Obviously, there aren't many devices out there that could make full use of it right now, but a card with this kind of capacity and bus speeds could pull the industry forward.

read more | digg story

First look at Windows 7's User Interface

"At PDC today, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until now, the company has been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers are finally off, the scale of the new OS becomes clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago.

First, however, it's important to note what Windows 7 isn't. Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven't updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

While windows 7 doesn't undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn't made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won't show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working."

To read more and to view more screen shots of Windows 7 UI, please click here.

USB 3.0 ready!

Intel today sent out a press release stating that its “Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) draft specification revision 0.9 in support of the USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB” is now available. This move not only clears some confusion over claims that Intel may be withholding USB 3.0 specifications, but also indicates that we should be able to see first USB 3.0 demonstrations at next week’s IDF in San Francisco.

When maxed out USB 3.0, will offer ten times the bandwidth of USB 2.0 – 4.8 Gb/s, which translates into a massive bandwidth of 600 MB/s.

read more | digg story