So you just took home a new Samsung Instinct and a new two-year contract from Sprint and was somewhat unsatisfied by the phone. Interface might be slower than expected or multitasking is not what you understood from the ads. If you think the Instinct could be better, you’re not alone. Sprint may be releasing a new software update real soon. Check it out.

“I apologize for your disappointment regarding some of the software. We will have a software upgrade available 6/30/08. You can request a software update on your phone on that date. Press the home icon and tap main. Tap settings, then tap general, scroll down and tap update software.”

[via crunchgear]

In a bold move unheard of even in the mobile world, Nokia has bought the remaining shares of Symbian and set up an open-source foundation for developers. Nokia is already the principal owner of Symbian and it dished out $410 million for the remaining shares effectively reducing ten-year-old Symbian to a memory. Symbian will have passed 200 million sales this year and leads all other mobile OS by a wide margin taking 60 per cent of the pie. Other mobile entities will be contributing. Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics, , STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, AT&T and Vodafone will all be contributing. They are scheduled to release their first phone in 2010. There will be three benefits of making Symbian open source: 1. Nokia will not have to pay licensing fees, 2. it will drive innovation and 3. platform consolidation could speed up product line. All for profit’s sake, I suppose. A super-sleek operation on the platform side is also the best defense against Google’s upcoming Android. But where does Linux Mobile fit in after Symbian becomes fully open source?

[via moconews]

Only available for jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch, VLC media will give your apple devices a little bit more multimedia range. No lengthy conversion for iPod Touch anymore but almost instantaneous playback of MPEG and AVI with further support for VCD, DivX, etc. in the future. Interface is easy drag-and-drop, a worthy app for a jailbroken iPod Touch and iPhone.

[via boingbong, gizmodo]

Simplify Media lets you take your music collection with you anywhere you go. Sounds like an old advert for the portable media player, but it’s quite literally what Simplify Media does. Now, even a 32GB iPod Touch does not offer enough storage for your entire music collection, but with Simplify Media, any WiFi HotSpot would give you access to your Mac or PC at home. Simplify Media supports Winamp and iTunes and WMA, MP3, AAC and Apple Lossless.

[via gmp3]

The iPhone Dev Team has sold out to the highest bidder - well, not exactly, they were “pressured.” The PWNED tool for hacking the iPhone was scheduled for distribution yesterday but due to unnamed criticisms over its “validity” the team had to pull it out and take an undetermined offer from an unknown party. The Team also hasn’t given any leads as to the identity of the private purchaser. So, alas and good-bye iPhone Dev Team.

Update: Engadget is saying it could be an April’s Fools practical joke.

More Update after the break.

[via tuaw, photo: cellphones] (more…)

Besides their recent iPhone 1.2.0 hack, the iPhone Dev Team will soon be releasing their PWNED, another breakthrough in iPhone hacking. PWNED patches bootloader and lets user load any firmware image, even those that aren’t signed by Apple. Jailbreak has never been easier. Patches can now be downloaded via iTunes. This new development is almost surely a precursor to the actual 2.0 patch. For more information about the theiphoneproject, click the link below. Excerpt:

Full independence from Apple’s vision on what the iPhone (and iPod Touch) can and cannot do. Currently it will allow you to restore to a jailbroken and unlocked state, and if you can figure it out - some extra cool stuff like Installer, Cydia, and other applications. You will eventually be able to backup your entire phone and restore to a state exactly the way you like it, restore straight to jailbroken state with installer, or even potentially install other OSes like linux (see iphonelinux.org) to your phone.

[theiphoneproject via engadget]

This news comes from controversial Chinese site CNMO.com, the same site that brought us the news/ fan art of the Meizu M8 user interface. As Microsoft makes more profit on Office than it does on its current Vista OS, they’d want to make the software widely available in man different platform. Like the last Meizu Mini One news, this makes sense too, but I’d rather hear it from Apple and Microsoft directly. Again, it makes a lot of sense. MacBooks run Microsoft Office and Apple does  not really have a product that can compete with Office and may never be able to develop one.

[via cnmo]

The Jailbreak of the unreleased iPhone 2.0 software is here, and iPhone Dev Team takes full credit. Now, why jailbreak an iPhone that will already open its doors to third-party software via App Store and soon even Java is a mystery except for the fact that many iPhone users might want their apps for free. Yes, it’s difficult to please these iPhone (and iPod Touch) users.

Even better news for iPhone cheapskates, the 1.2.0 (technical-word for iPhone 2.0) jailbreak is a true jailbreak in the old-fashioned sense, unlocking the 1.20 iPhone for any network. Says the iPhone Dev Team: “the hacked 1.2 firmware works with anything. AT&T and others, it’s pwned. And Apple will not really be able to patch it this time… somehow :-)” Well, wow! This is the most stable iPhone jailbreak ever!

Update July 12, 2008: The most popular iPhone jailbreak I know is the ZiPhone jailbreak. This is for those people who’ve been emailing me about an easy way to unlock the iPhone EDGE-only and iPhone 3G.  It’s a software unlock and I know they give online support (you can ask them for help).

Download page of the iPhone 2.0 unlocker.

(more…)

Sun has announced it will have Java ready for the iPhone and iPod Touch shortly after the June SDK release. Though pple never seemed very interested in Java, Sun is going to offer the Java Virtual Machine based on Java Micro Edition. Java on cellphones is popularly associated with games, but it will also bring enterprise applications like ERP or CRM. “We’re going to work to make sure that the [virtual machine] offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible,” says Eric Klein VP of Java marketing

Sun came to the conclusion it could make a JVM work on the iPhone after taking 24 hours to look at information on Apple’s SDK. Sun saw nothing in the public statements preventing the JVM from being one of the applications enabled on the iPhone, said Klein. Apple released the SDK in conjunction with the beta release if its iPhone 2.0 software; the general release of iPhone 2.0 is scheduled for June.

The future of Java on iPhone will not be limited to JVM and could include Java Standard Edition (SE) and JavaFX. With that iPhone 2.0

[via infoworld, photo: intomobile]

Apple officially introduced the iPhone SDK, which they are going to release in June. The software is going to be free, unlike the iPod Touch upgrade from not so long ago. SDK allows third-party developers to develop applications for the iPhone and Apple already has some of the bigger names in software announcing the iPhoneapps they have developed. EA, the gaming software company has developed Spore, a game that maeks use of the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer. Salesforce.com has some jazzy stuff for sales people (big ? here for me), SQLite, AOL’s AIM now on iPhone, SEGA with “Super Monkey Ball.”

All iPhone 3rd-part applications will be sold via the App Store. This is the new only way iPhone users will get their new applications. You can buy them , is what is meant by “get.” You’ll get an electronic certificate from Apple, which means anything the new app does to your iPhone should probably be covered by the Apple warranty. Porn is illegal in the iPhone.

SDK is available the iPod Touch, too, of course.

[via computerworld, engadget]