You’ll need to wait until Sunday to get your hands on a Toshiba Thrive at Best Buy, but the Honeycomb slate is ready to head out Newegg’s door, with free shipping to boot. $430 nets you an 8GB tablet with two-day shipping, or you can add 30 bucks to get it overnight. That’s unlikely to mean tomorrow at this point, but if you play your cards right, you could be sliding through emails a la Swype before the weekend is out.
Update: Best Buy has confirmed that the Thrive will be available on July 10th, both in-store and online.
To call Google Maps just an app of a day is to do it a disservice. Because it should be app of the day, everyday. It’s earned Lifetime Achievement status. It’s the best app available. And it still gets better. More »
You never really know what you’re onto until you look, but who knew “looking” involved “digging through source code?” Software guru Jeff Rose had his curiosity piqued yesterday with the proper launch of Facebook Video Calling, and rather than just being satisfied with things working, he took it upon himself to see how exactly things were coming together under the hood. Turns out, the program grabs a startlingly small download link called FacebookVideoCalling.jar, which in turn uses LiveConnect to allow the Java applet to fetch a few other things. This enables the program to source your Facebook user ID (as well as an application ID), and from there, the installer has permission to use two things: a video chat plugin called “peep,” and something else dubbed “vibes.” Curiously enough, only one of those two were launched to the world, so logical skeptics are obviously opining that Facebook has a connected music service up its sleeve. ‘Course, there’s no indication that said service will actually use the Vibes moniker, but we could definitely ponder worse titles. So, Mark — three months from now, another impromptu press event, announcing something even more awesome? We’re so there.
The Bitcoin app for Android allows users to trade the alternative form of cash from the comfort of their phones. Photo courtesy Brandon Iles)
There’s a new, unconventional form of a digital wallet available for your Android phone. And it’s not the Google Wallet.
First introduced to the Android Market on Wednesday, the Bitcoin app for Android turns your smartphone into a wallet for Bitcoins, a form of alternative, decentralized currency that has been circulating the web for a few years. The app allows you to store and transfer Bitcoins from one device to another, which means you’ll be able to pay for items without having to use cash or credit, all from the comfort of your own smartphone.
When you want to transfer Bitcoins to another account, a QR code pops up on your smartphone’s screen. The other user simply scans the QR code with his or her phone, and the Bitcoins are transferred to the second phone’s account. If you happen to lose your phone, it’s not a huge deal — all of your Bitcoins are backed up with your Google account, synced to the cloud.
“Right now, Bitcoin appeals mostly to the hacker types,” said Android developer Brandon Iles, the app’s creator. “Down the line, though, it could gain traction between friends. There’s an advantage over credit card companies because there’s no fees involved in the transaction.”
The virtual currency received some small amount of attention when it was initially developed in 2009, based primarily on a paper published by developer Satoshi Nakamoto. But Bitcoins received much more attention in recent months after Gawker published a story on the use of Bitcoins to buy illegal drugs from the underground web site “Silk Road.” Since the story ran, Bitcoins have been at the forefront of the news, especially in light of Google’s own digital wallet initiative, aptly titled “Google Wallet.”
Users can transfer Bitcoins to and from each others' accounts using scannable QR codes. (Photo courtesy Brandon Iles)
Those who want to adopt the new form of currency face a number of problems, however. The market value of a Bitcoin has been anything but stable; in mid-June, the value of a Bitcoin fell from $17 USD to less than $1 in a matter of minutes, after copies of a prominent Bitcoin trading market’s user database started circulating freely online.
More recently, a Trojan Horse virus capable of stealing Bitcoins from user accounts has been circulating the web, according to virus protection company Symantec. One user claimed a theft of 25,000 Bitcoins from his account.
“It’s still very much the wild west out there,” said Iles, who developed the Android application with one other partner in his spare time. Iles’ day job is at Google.
Iles expects to add more features to the app in the coming months, including a PIN for security, and in-app currency converter that can be used to equivocate established currencies (like the dollar or yen) into Bitcoin amounts, and vice versa.
The application is available for free on the Android Market for devices running version 2.2 (Froyo) and above. It comes with a disclaimer: The app is still in development and could potentially lose some of your Bitcoins, so test it with small amounts to begin with.
For a less complicated explanation of Bitcoins, see the video explainer below.
The Xperia Arc is one the best handsets we’ve seen from Sony Ericsson, but US consumers have had to sit by and watch as the thing popped up in other markets around the world — until now, that is. The unlocked AT&T-compatible quad-band 3G handset just hit Sony’s store. The Gingerbread-packing smartphone has a 4.2-inch Reality Display, 512MB of RAM, an 8 megapixel camera, and will start shipping tomorrow. The Xperia Arc will run you $600 — that’s the price you pay for contractual freedom.
After running two V12 Zagato models at the 24-hour Nurburgring endurance race, Aston Martin confirmed it will offer a limited-production run of 150 of the cars.
Remember that PDF exploit from last year that JailbreakMe 2.0 was using to unlock your iPhone with just a few taps? Well, Apple patched it. And now it’s apparently back. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple acknowledged the exploit, and is working on an update at this very moment. In addition to the JailbreakMe 3.0 hack that came to light last week, the hole can also be used for some not-so-noble efforts, like grabbing your contacts database, accessing saved passwords, or activating your iPad or iPhone’s built-in camera. And nobody wants that. For one reason or another, German authorities have taken the lead on encouraging Apple to investigate, and have also warned all users to avoid opening PDF docs from untrusted sources. And we’re happy to echo that rather solid advice, given the implications. Ironically, JailbreakMe includes a patch for the very hole that allows it to function in the first place, so if you’re terrified that rogue PDFs will take over your devices, that’s an option to consider in the meantime.
You might just think of FM radio as that thing you turn on when you forget to bring your iPod (or phone) in the car. Most of the music sucks, right? So why buy one? This is why. More »
A number of Sprint customers report difficulties receiving SMS text messages from cellular customers outside the Sprint network.
Beginning in late June, Sprint cellular customers started complaining of long delays in receiving SMS text messages — sometimes hours, sometimes days — while others said some of their texts did not arrive at all.
“We are aware of a text-messaging issue that is impacting a small percentage of incoming text messages,” wrote a Sprint representative in a statement provided to Wired.com. “We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
The issues come at a bad time for Sprint, as the company is embroiled in a war with AT&T over the latter’s possible acquisition of T-Mobile. To remain competitive in a market dominated by telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T, Sprint’s service has to be more reliable than ever.
And this isn’t the first time Sprint has faced customer ire due to network disruption. As recently as May, Sprint acknowledged downtime for both its SMS and voice services across multiple states.
The current problems seem to be isolated to inbound texts coming from people not on the Sprint network, as user reports claim messages from other Sprint users are being received intact and on time. Customers are also able to send outbound texts with no difficulty.
Still others ran into problems with 0001/0002 messages, or those that are split in half because of a 160-character limit. Users either received the first part of the message without the corresponding second part, or multiple segmented messages were truncated far below the 160-character limit, arriving out of order.
As one user described it on a Sprint message board July 1: “Sometime texts show up perfect, and sometimes I have to try to reassemble the puzzle pieces or just call the person, which defeats the point of having texting in the first place.”
The problem does not seem to be isolated to a specific type of device, as both feature-phone and smartphone users complained about disrupted service on the Sprint forums.
Two Sprint technical-support representatives confirmed the company is working to resolve the SMS issues, but as of July 6, no time frame for fixing the service has been announced.
“As already stated multiple times, unfortunately, we have not been given an ETA for the fix,” wrote Sprint.com administrator ‘ClaudiPo’ in a July 6 forum post. “All we know is that they’re working on the issue.”
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