Section: Apple, Gaming, Mobile, Web, Web 2.0 / Social Networking Well it definitely took them long enough but Farmville is finally planned for release to an iPhone near you. Maybe they were just waiting for Jobs to give in and allow Flash on iDevices. But anyways, today at WWDC, Zynga took the stage to show the first public images of one of Facebook’s original addicting games, Farmville. It will be nearly identical to the flash-based version and you will be able to sync your farms with your Facebook account so you can never escape your guilty pleasure. One bonus of having an iPhone version is having a “Your crops are about to die! Stop what your doing and come harvest them” push notification. Ok, I doubt it will be just like that but you know, something similar. You will be able to also make in-app purchases at the Farmville marketplace in case you ever need some extra cash. As an added bonus, you get a free Snow-Leopard when you purchase Farmville for iPhone. Image via [Engadget] Full Story » | Written by Greg Billetdeaux for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Mobile, Web, Web 2.0 / Social Networking  Nokia will begin selling their latest phone dedicated to social networking starting on June 18 in the online Nokia store and it will sell for 109 Euros (or $130). Available SIM free, the C3 is available in three different colors including hot pink, slate grey, and golden white. The phone boasts a full QWERTY keyboard and quick access to Facebook and Twitter. Basic functions such as posting, commenting, and updating your status will be available easily from the home screen. Using Nokia widgets, access to email, calendar, music, and chat only takes a few clicks. Unfortunately, the C3 only has a 2MP camera, but still allows for easy photo and video upload over WiFi or GPRS network connection to your favorite social networking websites. The phone will be available exclusively via Vodaphone on June 22 for only a month, and will begin selling with O2, The Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U by August. Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile For Android lovers, photography enthusiasts, and plain old smartphone junkies, Motorola recently announced its latest Android smartphone that is sure to please you no matter what kind of phone you crave. The Motorola MILESTONE XT720 features an 8MP camera complete with Xenon Flash as its headline feature. The Motorola MILESTONE XT720 features 10x digital zoom, records video in 720p, and the Xenon Flash is designed to take pictures from a farther distance with a clearer resolution. It even comes with an HDMI cable in the box, allowing you to capture HD video and view it immediately on a nearby HDTV. It comes with 8GB of on board storage, but it is expanded to 32GB. Expansion will probably be necessary for those who will take advantage of its sweet camera and video capture. Other specs include a 3.7 inch touch screen, runs Android 2.1, has five customizable home screens, Motorola’s MOTONAV GPS software, and advanced mobile office support. Like I said before, any Android lover will love the latest Motorola smartphone, any photography enthusiast will definitely find the camera awesome, and any smartphone junkie will surely appreciate the high-end specs of the Motorola MILESTONE XT720. No word on availability or pricing as of yet. Below is a television ad of the phone on YouTube. Read [Motorola]  Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Video, Content, Portable Video, Video Providers, Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile  One of Verizon’s popular services is V Cast Video. Unfortunately, up until now, it has never been available on an Android smartphone but has always been an option for other Verizon users. Today, Verizon rolled out its native video service to the Android Market for Android smartphone users to download and enjoy. Verizon customers who own the Motorola Droid, the HTC Droid Eris, the Motorola Devour, the HTC Droid Incredible, and the LG Ally can finally use the V Cast Mobile Video app.
The Video app contains videos of “top rated entertainment, news and sports programs on demand” which includes the 2010 FIFA world cup. It was great timing to release this app to Android owners as the World Cup is set to start later this week. In fact, Univision Interactive Media will even offer live streams of the 64 soccer matches that will take place during this year’s World Cup. Overall, it contains nearly 230 full length programs in its database. Simply navigate to the dedicated Verizon section of the Android Market and search for the Verizon V Cast Video app. However, keep it mind it requires a $10 monthly subscription fee and could charge even more depending on your data plan. Full press release is below: DROID DOES VIDEO: V CAST VIDEO ADDED TO ANDROID SMARTPHONES FROM VERIZON WIRELESS Live Sports Events, Including FIFA World Cup, and Hundreds of Popular Entertainment, News and Kids Programs Now Available BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – DROID doesn’t compromise on entertainment, and watching popular television shows and sporting events just got easier for Verizon Wireless smartphone customers. Verizon Wireless said today that V CAST Video is now available on the company’s impressive family of Android smartphones. Univision Interactive Media will provide live streams of all 64 of its Spanish-language broadcasts of the 2010 FIFA World Cup soccer matches from South Africa exclusively to V CAST Video customers’ mobile devices. The soccer tournament is just one of hundreds of live sporting events – including college football, college basketball and NHL Hockey – available on V CAST Video throughout the year. With V CAST Video, Android customers can now enjoy a wide variety of top-rated entertainment, news and sports programs on demand, whenever they want on the large screens on their smartphones. V CAST Video recently added programming from AETN, including A&E, Lifetime and the History Channel, and Spanish-language content from V-me. V CAST Video currently features more than 230 full-length programs from more than 40 leading providers. Beginning today, V CAST Video can be found in the Verizon Channel in Android Market™ on all Android smartphones from Verizon Wireless: DROID by Motorola, DROID ERIS™ by HTC, Motorola DEVOUR™, DROID Incredible by HTC and LG Ally™. V CAST Video on Android devices is available for a $10 monthly subscription in addition to a smartphone data plan. For more information about V CAST Video, including how to subscribe, visit www.verizonwireless.com/vcast. For more information about Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Gadgets / Other  Foxconn workers in China will be receiving another pay raise in the coming months in response to recent suicides. Workers in the plant located in southern Chinese city of Shenzhen will be seeing a 2,000 yuan (roughly $291) raise this October. All other workers in China will get their raises in July.
This is exactly the type of money I’d want to see if my working environment lead ten of my co-workers to commit suicide. “This wage increase has been instituted to safeguard the dignity of workers,” said Foxconn chairman, Terry Gou. I don’t quite understand how you can buy one’s dignity, but I hope you’re on to something Mr. Gou. Foxconn, which employs 300,000 in Shenzhen is the world’s largest contract maker of electronics including: Apple, Sony, Dell, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard. Considering the big name companies Foxconn manufacturers products for, you would think that someone would be a tad bit more proactive in keeping the plant workers happy after the first six or seven suicides. Labor activists have stated that the working conditions are non-flexible and the employees are forced to work extremely long shifts. Foxconn has recently installed safety nets on buildings in addition to hiring more counsellors. Honestly, if you hate your job so much that you’re willing to kill yourself over it, I don’t think a safety net will stop someone from a different approach to suicide. Here’s a crazy thought: how about fixing the work environment? Via [Guardian] Full Story » | Written by Tarun Kunwar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Apple, Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile Like a promiscuous cologne commercial, iPhone 4 pops onto the screen showcasing its brand-new design that we’ve all already seen. Sleek, elegant, and beautiful, iPhone 4 has glass on both the front and back with chrome around the side. It comes with two camera, one front facing, and the back camera which now has an LED flash. But Apple did something unusual for their products, lines along the sides and top would usually distract from the beauty of the product but Apple claims they are for functionality. Mr. Jobs says that they are all part of the antenna so hopefully better… reception? Also, the device will be available in both black and white like previous models, but the white will transition to the front of the device as well, an interesting feature.   Let’s talk about the screen. Steve calls the new display “Retina Display” and it has 4 times the pixel density when compared to other iPhones. For a comparison, check out the two ‘a’s in the picture above. Bigger pixel density means more pixels-per-inch which in turn means higher quality images. 326 pixels-per-inch to be exact and according to Steve, the max our retina can even see is 300. This means that images will actually look like flowing print, curves will look genuine and not pixelated, pictures will have much higher detail, text blocks will be much more readable. The official numbers are a 960x640 display. Also, instead of an OLED display, the new iPhone uses IPS technology. For a comparison, this new display has only 22% less pixels than the iPad.   The new iPhone will also be sporting the Apple custom-made A4 chip we’ve seen in the iPad. And when combined with the new, larger battery, the iPhone’s battery life has increased a fair amount. Some bigger news is the addition of a three-axis gyroscope. When tied together with the accelerometer, compass, this creates a six-axis device which Jobs claims is perfect for gaming. The gyro adds angular velocity to the team of sensors on the device.  On to a little more about the cameras. iPhone 4 has upgraded its cameras from 3-megapixels to 5-megapixels without decreasing the pixel size so you are getting real high-quality pictures. Also, these cameras can now take HD video, 720p and 30 frames-per-second. Because of this ability to take HD video, Apple has introduced iMovie for iPhone. It acts just like iMovie for your Mac, you have your timeline at the bottom where you can add or remove both photos and movie clips. Also, geolocation technology has been added to it too. You aren’t restricted to exporting just 720p video as well, if you feel that 720p is just too high of quality for your movie, or more practically, it’s just too big of a file, you can output it in 540p and 360p. iMovie will be available in the app store for just $4.99. And as a conclusion for the iPhone 4 cameras, the devices also have the ability to make video phone calls.  That pretty much sums it up on any potentially new features about iPhone 4. I’m sure you want to know the release date though don’t you. iPhone 4 will be available on June 24th for $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB version. 3GS is now available for $99 as well. Pre-orders for your iPhone 4 start on the 15th so get your checkbooks ready. Images via [Apple] Full Story » | Written by Greg Billetdeaux for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Peripherals, Printers / Scanners  I think HP might have finally given you a reason to purchase ink instead of a new printer each time. New HP printers are going to be optimized for the internet. No matter where you are, if you have an internet connection, you will be able to print from your printer. It does this through a new innovation with outdated technology. E-mail, the interface we’ve had for so long, that arguably has become the most outdated piece of technology involved in the internet, will be the main connection between your files and your printer. Yes, your printer will have its own email address. So that means any device of yours that has email access, which is pretty much everything by the way, can print off of these printers. Basically, you just email your pictures to your printer and they’ll be waiting for you when you get home. This means easy, working iPad printing guys and gals.
Read [Business Wire] and [New York Times] Full Story » | Written by Greg Billetdeaux for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Apple, Computers, Mobile Computers 
Today kicks of the first day of Worldwide Developer Conference and you know what that means, big announcements from Apple. First and foremost, Apple announced the latest figures from their mobile creation, the iPad. Despite criticism and confusion of where the product fits it, you cannot avoid the numbers like these. Since pre-orders began in March of this year sales have eclipsed 2 million and covering 10 countries and on top of that has sold over 5 million books. For those of you with an iPad, clearly Apple is listening and apparently learning along with you. This is a satisfying change. Full Story » | Written by Aaron Thacker for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Apple, Gadgets / Other, ebooks So if you have purchased a good PDF reader for your iPad, or if your a developer who has been profiting on PDF reading apps, your out of luck. Today, at WWDC 2010, Mr. Steve Jobs announced that iBooks will begin to support PDF files as well as ePub. Now, if your someone like me who isn’t a fan of purchasing apps for silly things like this, than your in luck. Honestly, this should have been built in in the beginning and if was that easy to implement, why waste developers time and consumers money by waiting a couple months to release it… Image Via [Engadget] Full Story » | Written by Greg Billetdeaux for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile Just in case you really wanted to pick up an HTC EVO 4G and were having trouble, well, its available on QVC. The EVO is priced with options to make 1 payment of $299.95, 2 payments of $149.97 or 3 payments of $99.98. And just in case you want to see the on-air appearance—that was captured and can be seen in the YouTube video below. While this is really just another phone, its still kind of fun to see our geek excitement roll over into the regular world. I just wonder how many people were watching QVC when this went live and wondered something along the lines of ‘What the hell? Its a phone.’ Product [QVC] Via [Good and EVO] and [Engadget]  Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile AT&T is now offering the Palm Pixi Plus, which is available for $0. Yup, the Palm Pixi Plus has made its debut with AT&T as a free phone. The pricing does require a two year agreement, but otherwise the discount comes online. In other words—there are no mail-in-rebates to deal with. All things considered, the Pixi Plus may not be the top dog smartphone these days, but for free its slightly harder to argue. Additionally, AT&T appears to be throwing in free overnight shipping and free activation. Product [AT&T] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Web, Websites, Google Finally taking on Bing in the aesthetically-pleasing department, Google takes it a step further and now allows you to upload your own picture to display as the background to its homepage. Personally, the only upside I could ever find to Bing was that pretty background. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of being able to put my favorite car or website as my Google background, but I begin to wonder about what could come out of this. I just picture people creating dozens of obscene Google wallpapers to download. One thing that’s really on my mind though, is when friend and fellow writer, Josh Holat, will populate his Google page with Apple logos like he has already done to his car, room, clothes, house, etc… The process is simple, just go to Google.com and click on the “Change Background Image” on the bottom, left-hand corner of the screen. Then, you can choose to either upload your own image, or select one of the public images. If you use Picasa, you get an extra little bonus and gain the ability to select any of the images uploaded to your Picasa portfolios as your G-paper. I have noticed that on occasion, Google won’t remember your picture and the site will be like normal so that is a small bug. Read [Google] Full Story » | Written by Greg Billetdeaux for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile  When Sprint stores and RadioShacks opened their doors on Friday, there were lines of people wanting to get their hands on a shiny new EVO 4G, the latest and greatest smartphone on Sprint and debatably on the market. Usually Sprint’s releases are not met with such praise, and neither are their numbers. In a press release from Sprint, it was announced that the single-day sales record for any phone ever released on Sprint was broken thanks to the EVO. There were so many new activations, however, that Sprint’s network buckled under the pressure and there was a shortage in devices as Sprint proudly states in their Press Release: “The record pace of HTC EVO 4G sales led to temporary shortages of the device at some of the 22,000 sales locations across the United States, including Sprint retail stores, national retail partners including RadioShack, Best Buy and Walmart, and indirect dealers.”
Sprint needed this victory, especially with WWDC and announcements from Apple about the EVO’s closest competitor—the iPhone. Read [Sprint PR Via Boy Genius Report] Full Story » | Written by Hunter Clarke for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
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