Hasta La Gadget!

Nothing too exciting here–just the latest in a long line of unconfirmed reports that a Verizon iPhone is “coming soon.” According to a new story by Business Week, the long-awaiting handset could be arriving “maybe by Valentine’s Day.”

The phone, according to an unnamed source, will drop after CES in Las Vegas–which, remember, is next week. Oh course, we wouldn’t put it past Apple to flex its industry muscle during the country’s biggest consumer electronics show.

After all, Google took plenty of wind out of CES’s sails last year, with the introduction of the Nexus (though that, of course, proved to be a lot of smoke and not a heck of a lot of fire).

Rovio may have introduced its wildly successful game Angry Birds to the Android platform, but make no mistake which operating system the company prefers to develop for. In a recent interview with the site Tech Marketing, Rovio executive Peter Vesterbacka let it be known that Apple’s iOS is still the top dog in his eyes.

“Apple will be the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective, they have gotten so many things right,” he told the site. “And they know what they are doing and they call the shots. Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time.”

Android also has a fragmentation problem, according to Vesterbacka. “Device fragmentation not the issue, but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem,” he explained. “So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android.”

Not that he’s saying that Apple is, you know, better, or anything. It’s just that, in the mobile world, fragmentation is sort of a way of life,

That doesn’t mean that model is superior, it’s just important to understand that Apple is Apple and Google is Google. Different. And developers need to understand that. Different business models for different ecosystems. And wouldn’t forget about Nokia and MeeGo either, new leadership always tends to shake things up and create opportunity. And HP-Palm. And RIM. And even Microsoft. It’s a fragmented world.

Rovio’s Angry Birds was the number one paid app for the iPhone in 2010.

After the jump, we’ve got a look back at the weird year that was, including lost iPhones, sex robots, time-traveling wireless customers, and exploding cell phones.

Man, is there anything the iPhone can’t do? Police arrested a man after holding up a Connecticut-area Indian restaurant, this week. Jerome Taylor, the 20-year would-be robber told restaurant workers that he had a gun. The cooks weren’t willing to hand over the cash so easily, grabbing knives and standing up to him.

Taylor apologized, adding that the robbery was a joke and he needed money to support his kids, quickly fleeing the scene. When the cops caught up with him, he confessed to the crime–everything but the iPhone part. According to Taylor, he was actually wielding an iPhone.

If Steve Jobs were present, I’m sure he’d let Taylor know that he was holding it wrong. Officers arrested Taylor, despite the restaurant’s insistence on not pressing charges.

A number of iPhone keyboard cases have popped up lately, from the TK-421 flip-out case (which we reviewed) to the BoxWave Keyboard Buddy. We’ve spent the better part of 24 hours using an engineering sample of Nuu’s MiniKey QWERTY slider for iPhone 4 — expect “a few minor changes to be made” before actual launch — that the company was kind enough to send over. So, how’s it stack up?

Continue reading Nuu MiniKey for iPhone 4 preview: yep, another (bulky) keyboard case

Nuu MiniKey for iPhone 4 preview: yep, another (bulky) keyboard case originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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