Hasta La Gadget!

A smartphone is about to boldly go where plenty have droids have already ventured–space. A team of British scientists at Surrey Satellite Technology in Guildford, England are preparing to launch a handset into space. The scientists have yet to reveal the model of the phone, stating only that it will be running a version of Android.

The idea behind the launch is, simply, to find out whether modern smartphones will work in space. The phone will be used to control a satellite, which will, in turn, be taking pictures of our home planet.

Of course, we’ve seen a number of stories about smartphones in weather balloons over the past year or so, but According to the BBC, this is the first time such a phone has gone into orbit. The business has been deemed STRaND-1 (Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration).

“Modern smartphones are pretty amazing,” Shaun Kenyon, the head of the team told the BBC. “They come now with processors that can go up to 1GHz, and they have loads of flash memory. First of all, we want to see if the phone works up there, and if it does, we want to see if the phone can control a satellite.”

The phone, Kenyon said, will remain intact. “We’re not taking it apart; we’re not gutting it; we’re not taking out the printed circuit boards and re-soldering them into our satellite – we’re flying it as is. And, in fact, we’re going to have another camera on the satellite so we can take a picture of the phone because we want to operate the screen and have some good images of that as well.”

Spin calls the reissue of the Flaming Lips’ 1997 album Zaireeka “unconventional.” My question, however, is: if nothing the Lips do is conventional, shouldn’t the unconventional be the unconventional?

I mean, consider the original release of Zaireeka–the album was a four-disc set with all four intended to be played on different CD players at the same time. I tried to listen to the record with a group of friends in college once, but given the different start rates of players, it was nearly impossible to sync the things up, despite the ample syncing tones at the beginning.

Perhaps this reissue will make matters easier. The band is re-releasing the record on cell phones. Says lead singer Wayne Coyne, “We’re trying to get together as many people with phones to cram into a bathroom and play it. It’ll be a cool experience.”

The record is arriving in the next week or so, so you’ve got that long to find three friends as dorky as you to try it out. The test starts now.

Video of the new Zaireeka after the jump.

If Batman has taught us anything, it’s that sidekicks always come back. Sometimes they look different and act different–heck, sometimes they’re different people altogether–but they always come back. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the much-beloved, dearly-departed Danger Sidekick will return for an encore performance.

Phillipp Humm, the CEO of T-Mobile USA told a crowd today that a 4G version of the once popular messaging phone will be hitting his network “soon,” adding, “Everybody knows the Sidekick, and we’re going to relaunch the Sidekick and bring it as a 4G device, Android based, into the market.”

After Microsoft bought Sidekick maker Danger back in 2008, the handset line mostly went away. In its place, the software giant produced the Microsoft Kin, a crippled smartphone that failed to regain any of the Sidekick’s former glory.

I hate to be the one to utter the “f” word here, but it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the signs of fragmentation in the Android world these days. According to new numbers from the Android Developers blog, a mere 0.4 percent of Android device owners (handsets, tablets, et al.) have the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system–2.3, Gingerbread–installed.

That version’s predecessor–Android 2.2, Froyo–is far and away the most widely installed version of the operating system, at 51.8 percent. Due to hardware limitations, manufacturer delays, and other reasons, however, a full 35.2 percent of Android owners still have Android 2.1 installed. The number drops significantly for Android 1.6 and 1.5, at 7.9 and 4.7 percent, respectively.

The above numbers were arrived at by monitoring the devices that accessed the
Android during a two week period ending January 4th. Given the relative recent explosion of Android devices on the market, perhaps these numbers ought be regarded as something of a cautionary tale for Google and the manufacturers about the direction the operating system is going and where it ought to be headed.

Admit it, you were getting a bit sick of those little slingshotting fowl. Well, a new champion has arisen, taking the much-coveted top spot on the iTunes free apps list. The game Bubble Ball follows a pretty simple premise–the user place a series of simple machines in strategic spots on the screen, in order to roll a ball to the finish line.

But where many of the titles that have snagged the top spot have been the work of a team of experienced programmers and game designers (like, say, Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds), Bubble Ball is largely the product of a single designer–Robert Nay, a 14-year-old eighth grader from Utah.

Nay did most of the game development using a few tools like Corona DSK, a $349 program that lets the user create a game and publish it to the App Store. Nay also got a little design help from his mom.

The 14-year-old started work on Bubble Ball back in November, launching it on December 29th. Since then, the app has been downloaded 1.5 million times. Over the weekend, it beat out the free version of the incredibly popular Angry Birds.