Section: Business News, Communications, Smartphones 
The Nokia Oro, or Nokia Gold, is a new Symbian-powered smartphone that is definitely not for everyone. This is a phone for someone who doesn’t mind spending around $1,125 for a phone with an operating system that’s about to become irrelevant. The software isn’t the selling point here. The materials that make up the Nokia Oro is second to none. The phone is made up of 18-carat gold with a sapphire crystal as the home key. On the back, the Nokia Oro is made up of premium leather from Scotland. It’s being marketed to people in Europe, Eastern Europe, China and the Middle East. It’ll be released in the third quarter of 2011. The Nokia Oro comes in two colors - white or black (pictured). Here’s a closer look at the white model. 
The phone’s specs fade in comparison to its hardware design, but we’ll talk about them anyway. The screen is 3.5-inches of AMOLED, scratch resistant goodness. It has a 8 megapixel camera with HD video recording up to 720p, 8GB of internal memory with support for a 32GB microSD card, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the envy of everyone at no extra cost. There’s also a matching Bluetooth earpiece called the Nokia J. It’s also made of 18-carat gold and has a standby time of 3 months. Via [Nokia Conversations] Full Story » | Written by Jeremy Hill for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile  Yes folks, believe it or not. While everyone of us are already anticipating Apple’s announcement for the next iPhone model, our friends in India are still awaiting for the official arrival of the iPhone 4. Lucky for them, their wait will soon be over as the iPhone 4 will be finally and officially arriving on Friday via Aircel. Now here’s the interesting part. As you all know or as you have probably experienced when you purchased your iPhone from the carriers, you probably paid just a small fee, right? And the cost of the iPhone is somewhat subsidized by the monthly service fee stipulated in the two-year agreement that you have signed with the carrier. Somehow, that MSF or the monthly fee that you have to pay for 24 months is subsidizing the cost of the iPhone 4. Interestingly in India, by way of Aircel, iPhone fans will have to pay a bigger fee upfront. Reports say that it’s around $760 for the 16GB iPhone 4 and $900 for the 32GB model. Those are definitely too much to pay for an iPhone under contract, right? So, how can our friends in India tolerate such scheme? Well, that’s when it becomes even more interesting. You see, in India, mobile phone users who get their devices via the official carriers are the ones somehow subsidizing the carrier to provide the service that you need for your iPhone 4. But the key here is that Aircel promises to “pay you back” through airtime credits during the two years that you are under contract with them. Paying you back means recovering the cost that you paid for your iPhone by 100%. Next question is then how come Aircel manage to pull this one off, that is make customers pay a bigger amount upfront? According to Cult of Mac’s reader, you can blame the proliferation of the iPhone 4 in the grey market for this. The iPhone 4 even before this official release has been available in India through grey market sellers who sourced it from neighboring country. And iPhone 4 fans who got their unit from these sellers were more than willing to pay huge amounts to get the iPhone 4 even without data plans. So in the end, Aircel’s deal is still pretty much attractive because of the promised “pay you back” scheme. Oh well, good luck to our friends in India who are getting the iPhone 4 from Aircel this Friday, then. via [Cult of Mac], product [Aircel] Full Story » | Written by Arnold Zafra for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Business News Voltage Pictures, the creators of the Oscar winning film The Hurt Locker, really has it in for BitTorrent users who downloaded their movie. In an ongoing lawsuit, Voltage Pictures is going after 24,583 people who it hopes to acquire cash settlements from. In order to track down the individuals, the lawyers for Voltage Pictures are requesting internet service providers to hand over the personal details of the IP addresses associated with each defendant. Of the list of ISPs listed in the court filing obtained by Torrent Freak, Comcast services 10,532 defendants. The other ISPs with the most defendants are Time Warner/Road Runner (1,750), Verizon (5,239), and Charter (2,699). There are several other ISPs listed, but their defendant numbers are below 1,000. Voltage Pictures’ lawyers have reached agreements with some ISPs to provide customer details, but some agreements are still pending. Charter for example has agreed to provide details for 150 IP addresses every month. 2013 is the year in which Charter is estimated to finish providing total details. Verizon agreed to 100 IPs a month, while other ISPs such as Wave, Midcontinent and Comcast have confidential agreements in place. Voltage Pictures’ lawyers expect to “serve any putative defendants whom Plaintiff wishes to pursue in this case by the end of 2013.” Via [Torrent Freak] Full Story » | Written by Jeremy Hill for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Smartphones, Mobile With the launch of the HP Veer 4G HP has a difficult problem: getting the phone into people’s hands. What better way to do that than to give them away? It seems that some lucky employees at Best Buy have been given free Veers from HP. While training employees in a Charlotte, NC Best Buy, HP decided to just give the employees free units of the tiny smartphone. The employees also got free HP printers with their new smartphones. There really isn’t much more to the story. Maybe other Best Buy employees will get the same deal sometime in the future, or this could just be for that one Best Buy. Still, great move by HP. Giving free phones to the people who are supposed to sell them is a pretty good idea. Read [WebOSRoundup] Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Business News, Web, Websites 
You already know where this story is going. The Hacker News again reports that the Sony Ericsson Canadian eShop website was hacked by a Lebanese hacker who goes by Idahc. Just like the Sony Music Japan and Sony BMG Greece website hacks, Idach used a SQL injection to obtain personal data of around 2,000 customers. Idahc, just like the previous database hackers, posted the contents of the database on pastebin.com. At this time, the contents of the database are no longer on the website. The stolen customer information includes email addresses, names and hashed passwords. In a statement to CNET, Sony Ericsson said, “We can confirm that this is a standalone website and it is not connected to Sony Ericsson servers.” Well that’s refreshing. It’s really just a game to hackers at this point for hackers to infiltrate anything with Sony’s name on it. We’ll start counting the hours before the next Sony-got-hacked story crosses our paths. Via [The Hacker News] Read [CNET] Full Story » | Written by Jeremy Hill for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Computers, Software / Applications, Web, Web 2.0 / Social Networking Twitter announced today that it has officially acquired the popular TweetDeck app. The team behind TweetDeck will join Twitter, though they wil continue to focus on the platform that many of us know and love. Unlike the Twitter acquisition of Atebits which created the official Twitter apps for iOS and Mac out of Tweetie for both platforms, TweetDeck will remain the same for the foreseeable future. Both TweetDeck and Twitter label the platform as being great for brands, marketers, and power users in general, which TweetDeck certainly is. So it sounds like TweetDeck will continue as sort of the “professional” brand for Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see what changes come to TweetDeck going forward given the commitment to the platform. Promoted tweets would seem like an obvious change. Hopefully the support for other social networks continues in the platform, it’d be a shame to lose Facebook support in TweetDeck. Hopefully now the app will have the option to keep your place in the timeline like the official Twitter for Mac app. For those of us who like Tweetdeck, but can’t give it 100 percent of out attention, that would be a great option to toggle. Read [Twitter] and [TweetDeck] Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Computers, Mobile Computers, Hardware Asus is preparing ahead of schedule for the upcoming Computex 2011 happening in Taipei from May 30 to June 4. A couple of days ago, the company unveiled a Facebook post containing teaser which says “Break the Rules.” Included in the post are schedules for the teaser of Asus’ upcoming products which are all scheduled to be unveiled during Computer 2011. So Asus started with a teaser on a new portable device which could be in-between a Pad or a Phone. This could be referring to a new tablet device which would be smaller than your usual tablet and yet bigger than a smartphone. For their second teaser, Asus has partially unveiled a new netbook, which the company claims is the next evolution of the Eee PC. From the small image of the Eee PC in silhouette, the said Eee PC looks very thin. Italian site Netbook Italia managed to unearthed an image of an Eee PC which exactly matches the image posted on the Asus Facebook Page. True enough the Eee PC was ultra-thin and could be mistaken for a MacBook Air, if not for its white design. We shall see what else Asus has in store for us before the start of Computex 2011. There are two more new products to be unveiled, one on May 27th and the other on the 29th. Via [Asus Facebook Page] and [Notebook Italia] Full Story » | Written by Arnold Zafra for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellular Providers, Mobile With Verizon expanding up it’s LTE network rather quickly AT&T is just about to start rolling out it’s own. AT&T will start lighting up LTE starting in five markets this summer. Those five markets are: Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio. Those five markets will be joined by at least 10 more markets by the end of this year. By then AT&T should have a total of 70 million people covered by an LTE network. That’s not bad, but it’ll be much smaller than Verizon’s LTE by the end of the year. Verizon will also likely have the advantage of more devices. AT&T has only said that “some” of it’s planned 20 4G smartphones will use LTE in addition to HSPA+. Given the relatively small network, “some” would likely be only a handful, unless AT&T wants to keep the phones around for a while. Hopefully AT&T can be a bit more competitive with this LTE network. The network isn’t too popular among users, particularly those in big cities. Maybe LTE can help improve that, giving users more reliable data at the very least. We’ll just have to wait and see, and also hope that AT&t brings LTE to the Northeast and West coast in the next rollout. Read [SlashGear] Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Computers, Mobile Computers, Netbooks 
Earlier today we posted on the rumor that Apple’s iPhone 3Gs likely won’t get the next OS update to iOS5. This seems to be classic Apple behavior in efforts to move the flock to your latest hardware. But what about the original iPad, will it run iOS5? The consensus in the tech media seems to be that we’ll see iOS 5 and likely a new iPhone in the fall of this year. Rumors persist that a new iPad will drop at this time as well, a beefed up iPad 2 perhaps. That would put the original iPad 2 model years back and that is typically where Apple’s OS cutoff lies. It’s possible that original iPad owners who’ve not upgrade to iPad 2 or the mythical iPad 2.5 won’t get all the benefits sure to be in iOS 5. It is expected that iPhone 4 will get the iOS 5 upgrade and one would expect iPad 2 to receive it as well, so current generation hardware owners can breath a sigh of relief. But older generations? Maybe not. What’s your take? Will the original iPad get the upgrade? Read: [Gadgetell] Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Business News, Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones Last week, T-Mobile introduced its trade-in program for customers. With this service, T-Mobile customers can get their old phones appraised at a T-Mobile location. Depending on certain factors, T-Mobile will provide an estimate for the phone’s value and allow you to send it to The Wireless Source for a check for the quoted amount. We had some questions about this service, so we asked T-Mobile about potential restrictions. A T-Mobile representative told us there’s no limit to how many phones someone can trade in “as long as customers use the trade in values towards the purchase of a new device.” There is a website T-Mobile set up that will give you estimated value of phones that are in perfect working condition with no liquid damage, free of corrosion and has screen that still works like new. Since you can trade in as many phones as you like, we asked if there are any restrictions regarding older phones. T-Mobile told us that “all handsets are eligible.” The same quality requirements are in place for whatever phone you want to trade in. However, don’t expect to get much cash for that old Motorola RAZR that’s been sitting in your closet for seven years. Site [T-Mobile Trade-in Center] Full Story » | Written by Jeremy Hill for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones 
At just $49, the iPhone 3GS is a pretty sweet deal, right? Maybe not, if rumors that Apple’s next update to iOS (the software the iPhone runs) won’t support the 3GS. 3G and 3GS users may be left out of the cold when Apple shows off all the new features they’ll pack into the new OS. Companies do this all the time: enhance the next version to entice consumers to snatch up the latest and greatest. We’ve seen this before with some functionality and the 3G, a phone that Apple says can’t handle the faster processing needs of things like quick app changing. Whether it’s hardware limitations or just marketing, a new rumor says we’ll see it again with iOS5. Via Twitter, “Just one comment. Apple iPhone 3Gs wont be upgradable to iOS 5.x. iPhone 4 will.”
The tweet comes from Eldar Murtazin, an analyst/editor at mobile-review.com. His predictions have been accurate in the past and this bit of info seems like classic Apple. What is Apple baking in iOS5? Better notifications? Helpful lock screen info? Card-like app switching? Read: [IntoMobile] Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Accessories, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile In celebration of the recent Droid X2 launch, Verizon has put the “essentials” accessory pack on sale. This pack includes a wall charger, car charger, HDMI cable, multimedia station and a navigation/music vehicle mount. The best part, the included items are a $145 value (if purchased separately) and Verizon is currently selling the complete pack for $19.97. Granted, while a $145 value, the pack normally sells for $49.97. In other words, you are getting a $30 savings if you buy this week. Did you catch that, this is a temporary sale and only in effect this week. Via [Verizon Wireless] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Smartphones, Mobile, Web 
Firefox 4 has only been available for a short while now, however we have just spotted an updated release of Firefox 5 for Android. Though we should point out that Firefox 5 for Android is still in beta. In fact, Android users can download, install and run Firefox 4 as well as Firefox 5 Beta at the same time if they so choose. Anyway, Firefox 5 Beta measures in at 13MB, requires Android 2.0 or later and is a free download. As for new changes, according to the what’s new section in the Android Market, those include; - Added Do Not Track option to Preferences, enabling you to tell sites if you prefer to opt-out of online behavioral tracking
- Smoother panning and CSS3 Animations
- Speed improvements, especially pertaining to page load and on 3G networks
- Important bug fixes including compatibility with SwiftKey
Via [Android Market] and [IntoMobile] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Mobile, Computers, Mobile Computers If you had been considering picking up a 3G capable Samsung Galaxy Tab and don’t mind buying one that is refurbished and from woot! then this may be the offer you had been waiting for. The tablet, in all its 7 inch Android 2.2 running glory has come available with woot! and is sporting a $259.99 price tag (with an extra $5 for shipping). Granted, this is not the latest and greatest Galaxy Tab, after all the 10.1 is getting close to being released with Honeycomb 3.1, but some may still prefer the 7 inch form factor and Froyo. Me personally, I do and in fact I just recently ordered a Galaxy Tab that is Verizon compatible myself. With that, if this purchase is for you then hit the via link below… Via [woot!] and [Phandroid] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile T-Mobile is returning this evening with another after hours sale. This time the discounted handsets will be the T-Mobile G2 and the Sidekick 4G, both of which will be available for free along with a two-year agreement. That said, if you are interested in either handset, make sure you are around and online sometime between 9PM and 3AM this evening. T-Mobile’s After Hours special is tomorrow 9pm-3am PT. Update: G2 and Sidekick 4G are the free devices. New 2yr agreement required.
Via [Twitter @TMobile] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Business News, Gadgets / Other, ebooks  The same day that Barnes & Noble revealed the new Nook e-reader, Amazon stealthily released an ad-supported 3G Kindle. The ads decrease the price of the Kindle by $25. It is available right now for $164.
The 3G Kindle is Amazon’s second tablet with special offers and sponsored screensavers. The first Kindle with Special Offers was a Wi-Fi model for $114. Other than the ad placement on the bottom of the home screen and screensaver, the 3G Kindle has the same features as its ad-less counterpart. Access to a 3G network is completely free and works in several countries. It can also connect to a Wi-Fi network for faster downloads. The new Nook e-reader is Wi-Fi only and is $139. Site [Amazon] Full Story » | Written by Jeremy Hill for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Email / IM, Web Much as I don’t want to say it, Yahoo’s remaining service to me and perhaps for most people too is now reduced to Yahoo! Mail. Yes, I still maintain my Yahoo Mail account as a secondary webmail service, Gmail being my primary work email. And to think that I had my Yahoo Mail longer than I had my Gmail. So, it’s a good thing that Yahoo still maintains its web mail service, despite the odds and ends experience by the company. Yahoo Mail together with Yahoo Messenger continue to hold on to dear life and in fact Yahoo Mail is about to be given a breathe of fresh air as Yahoo is preparing to introduce some new features to the service - with the hope of getting back loyal users who’ve switched to Gmail and attracting possibly new userbase. The Yahoo Mail update which is about to happen in the coming days will bring in redesigned email format which Yahoo has been testing for seven months now. Yahoo Mail’s current users will be gradually switched to the new format in the coming weeks. Foremost among the changes that the update will bring will enable us to have our Facebook and Twitter updates posted within our Yahoo Mail inboxes. The update will also make the total Yahoo Mail experience, faster and will have the functionality to send large attachments - as large as 100MB. Plus some other enhancements such as better control for junk mail (finally!) and a facility to let us chat with friends and family by logging in with our Facebook accounts. So there. Hopefully those changes to Yahoo Mail will get you a bit excited and deter you from switching to Gmail. Via [Techland] Full Story » | Written by Arnold Zafra for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Communications, Cellphones, Mobile Newark police have accredited a cell phone application that helped them locate and neutralize four suspects that were involved in an armed robbery that took place this past weekend. A group of 15 young adults were having a small party in a garage when four men walked in (one of which was carrying a handgun). The four robbers allegedly forced 10 of the victims to hand over their wallets, cell phones and other personal belongings. When one of the victims refused to give away his possessions, the four men physically assaulted him and then fled the scene along with their new-found GPS enabled smartphones. When the police responded, they learned that one of the stolen phones was equipped with a GPS tracking device. Using computer software, the officers were easily able to track the exact location of the robbers. All four men, who were spotted outside of a shopping center, were immediately taken into custody. The four men were charged with 10 counts of first degree robbery, 15 counts of unlawful imprisonment and a slew of other unlawful deeds. I say it’‘s about time our stolen gadgets start fighting back. Luckily, none of the victims were seriously injured. Via [UDaily] Full Story » | Written by Tarun Kunwar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
 Section: Business News, Communications, VoIP, Web, Web 2.0 / Social Networking  Following last week’s Dow Jones report, T-Mobile has re-released Bobsled on Facebook today. Bobsled was taken off of Facebook nearly a week after it launched because it could have been mistaken for a feature created by Facebook. Bobsled used to be accessed from the chat list on Facebook by clicking a green phone icon next to a friend’s name. The new Bobsled is clearly a third-party application. T-Mobile also places a disclaimer on the Bobsled website that says,“The Bobsled for Facebook application is not developed or endorsed by Facebook.”
Instead of placing itself inside the Facebook’s chat box, Bobsled can now be found on Facebook’s left hand side where all the other application shortcuts reside. Clicking on Bobsled will take you to the application on another page. Your friend’s list is placed within Bobsled, and voice calls are placed from that page. Bobsled applications for Android and iOS are coming soon. Site [Bobsled] Full Story » | Written by Jeremy Hill for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
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