Rogers over in Canada has officially announced their iPhone 4 pricing, and interested buyers have reason to celebrate. For the first time (or as far as I can recall), Rogers isn’t following in the footsteps of their North American counterpart, AT&T, in the pricing of the iPhone 4, and is in fact, going to offer it up much cheaper. New customers can get the 16GB iPhone 4 for just $159 and the 32GB iPhone 4 for $269 on a 3-year contract basis.

They’re also offering long-time subscribers a huge discount of $480 on the latest iPhone allowing them to get it at the same price as a new subscriber would. They likewise announced the return of the $30/6GB data plan and introducing a new one, a smartphone and iPad sharing plan. Starting July 30th up until September 30th, subscribers who sign up on the $30/6GB plan will have the option to add this plan allowing them to share data connectivity between their iPhone and iPad for just $20/month. Not bad, eh?

The iPhone 4 is scheduled to arrive tomorrow in Canada, and apart from Rogers, will also be available on a number of carriers including Bell, Telus, and Virgin Mobile.

[redboard via cellphones etc]

Granted that this is still no iPad, the latest Kindle is still a pretty decent upgrade especially for those who don’t really need much, and have fallen in love with Amazon’s e-book reader.

So, what’s new here? The 2010 Kindle is 21% smaller as compared to the Kindle 2, 16% lighter, 20% faster E Ink refresh rate, better contrast ratio, has a longer battery life (up to 10 days with wireless turned on, up to a month without it), and comes with more internal memory, 4GB to be exact. The QWERTY keypad and other buttons have also been modified, and now also features an “experimental” webKit browser and voice guided read-to-me menus.

In a nutshell, this latest Amazon Kindle is basically a more polished version with no major changes but boasts of significant improvements. The new Kindle will be ready for retail by August 27th, and will be available in traditional white or the new graphite color with either WiFi only ($139, graphite color only) on-board or 3G connectivity ($189) as well. It’s also headed for the UK with a price tag of £109 (WiFi) and £149 (WiFi+3G).

[amazon via engadet]

iOS 4.1 Beta 2 is now available to developers. This new firmware reportedly comes with the necessary fix to address the proximity sensor issue certain iPhone 4 units, and also features a new baseband. Needless to say, if you rely on an iPhone unlock and plan to upgrade to this, you shouldn’t. The good news, though, is that it’s still compatible with redsn0w 0.9.5b5-5 which was proven to work just fine as a iOS 4.1 beta 1 jailbreak. Do note, however, that you may experience network problems and other issues after you jailbreak iOS 4.1 beta 2 as this particular version of redsn0w is still considered a beta. (more…)

Apple has come out with a response to the recent ruling that exempts the iPhone from the DMCA thus making iPhone jailbreaking legal. Here’s what they had to say about it:

“Apple’s goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience. As we’ve said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably.”

I’m not sure about sure about the first bit about jailbreaking degrading the whole iPhone experience, but that’s the defensive stance we were sort of expecting them to take. What is a bit alarming though is that despite the US government’s ruling that iPhone jailbreaking is legal, they go on to say that jailbreaking will ‘violate the warranty.’ So, for those wondering if the warranty will be void if you jailbreak your iPhone, there’s your answer straight from the horse’s mouth. Jailbreaking may now be legal, but it’ll still apparently void your warranty.

I highly doubt though that this will matter much to jailbreak tool developers and aficionados out there as I’m pretty sure they’re well aware of this right from the very beginning. Jailbreaking is now legal, and that’s what’s really important.

[via cult of mac]

If you’re a fan of karaoke, you’ll love Sony’s new Walkman offering, the NWZ-E450. It may not be much of a head-turner, but it does comes a pretty cool karaoke mode unlike any we’ve seen before.

It not only does a pretty good job in muting the vocals on a music track, but also gives you the freedom to select which key it’s playing on, higher or lower, to match your vocal prowess. You can likewise add an .lrc file so that auto-scrolling lyrics will be shown on its 2-inch QVGA display while the track is playing as well. It’s really pretty neat feature. Aside from its karaoke capabilities, it also comes with a voice recorder, FM radio, up to 50 hours of battery life, and 4GB to 16GB memory options.

The Sony Walkman NWZ-E450 is scheduled to arrive this August with a starting price of £70 ($108) and will be available in black, red, blue, green, and pink variations.

[via engadget]

Our friends at Move Player are announcing the next big thing on their shores: the Tablet PC. Currently, they are expecting all the big players to take on the very successful Apple iPad. Imagine LG, Samsung, iRiver, COWON, among others joining in the tablet PC arms race, all within this year. We’ll probably be seeing Android as the main OS in use and lots of AMOLED screens. Should Apple fear this development?

[via moveplayer]

The title says it all. The US government has deemed that iPhone jailbreaking is not illegal therefore allowing it to be exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) contrary to Apple’s claim that such an act violates existing copyright laws. It was back in February 2009 when we first talked about the steps being made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to officially legalize iPhone jailbreaking and exempt it from the (DMCA), and now, after more than a year of rigorous work, it has now finally paid in favor of the iPhone jailbreak community.

The group has also successfully renewed the existing exemption on carrier unlocking as well. Of course, this ruling doesn’t guarantee that we’ll soon see an end to Apple’s iPhone jailbreak-proofing attempts because that’s their prerogative, but at least now they can’t say that iPhone jailbreaking and unlocking is illegal.

[iphone dev team blog, gizmodo via redmondpie]

There are rumors floating around that the new Spirit iOS 4 jailbreak (not sure though if it’ll still be named Spirit) which is expected to work on all iDevices including the new iPhone 4 will be released today. We don’t know where this started, but we’re pretty sure, jailbreak aficionados out there especially iPhone 4 owners got excited over this bit of news. Unfortunately though, it won’t be happening. Musclenerd of the iPhone Dev Team has slammed this rumor with his recent Twitter post:

Not to make it a daily thing, but since somehow people thought it would be today: the new JB+unlock won’t be out today

There are apparently some issues that still need to be resolved with this upcoming iPhone jailbreak and some of the new features on the iPhone 4 such as Facetime before they give it their seal of approval and roll it out to the jailbreak community. Don’t worry. It’ll be released, just not today. (more…)

Here’s some good news for iPhone 3G S users out there who want to upgrade iOS 4.0.1 but want to keep the jailbreak status of their Apple mobile phone.

A PwnageTool bundle to jailbreak iOS 4.0.1 on the iPhone 3G S has just been released albeit being limited to versions running on the old bootrom. It’s also a bit more technical than the usual PwnageTool jailbreak from the iPhone Dev Team. On a good note, however, it does support both hacktivation and ultrasn0w which means you can easily unlock it once its jailbroken.

To download this iOS 4.0.1 jailbreak PwnageTool bundle for the iPhone 3G S, just click the appropriate link after the break at the end of this post. There’s also a link there for the full instructions on how to go about it. (more…)

While those who were looking forward to receiving a free iPhone 4 case already have a reason to celebrate, those waiting for the white version of the latest iPhone, unfortunately, aren’t as lucky. Though Apple did promise during their recent iPhone 4 press conference that it would be available within the month, they’ve now gone public with a new announcement saying that it won’t be ready for retail until later this year. Here’s the brief statement they released regarding the status of the white iPhone 4:

White models of Apple’s new iPhone® 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected, and as a result they will not be available until later this year. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.

So alas, the waiting game continues for this particular version of the iPhone 4.

[apple via bgr]