Hasta La Gadget!

One of the most-hacked smartphones in the history of the mobile universe, the HTC HD2, is continuing to get its guts spun as Windows RT (tablet Windows 8) gets pushed to it with full-screen metro-style apps! This hack is a continuation of a project being run by @CotullaCode as mentioned a few weeks ago right here on SlashGear. This smartphone originally ran Windows Phone 6.5 and has since been hacked to run Android, Windows Phone 7, MeeGo, and even oddities such as First PlayStation Emulator for Windows CE.

This newest push for the expansion of excellence in the HTC HD2 has revealed the Windows UI (aka originally known as metro) version of Internet Explorer to be taking right around 6 seconds to start up. It’s also being re-realized that this user interface isn’t all that different from what Windows Phone 8 is, showing massive buttons and essentially the same text blocks all around regardless of the app. At the moment this 480 x 800 interface is functional on a base level with some limited amount of apps being able to be opened and worked with by the creator (again, Ctll), as an exercise in the power of cross-loading.

What this entire process represents is a show of convergence in our modern technologically advanced age. One computer is never more different from another than it is from a piece of electronics without a bit of silicon onboard. One piece of software can be ported from one machine to another one way or another, just so long as the person making it happen is willing to dedicate time, effort, and sweat enough to make it happen. With the HTC HD2 we’ve got a beacon of fun and entertainment as much as we have a singular device from which all hacks come.

Have a peek at the timeline below for more news from the past few years surrounding this HTC device and get pumped up about the future for Windows Phone as well. There’s also an HTC event coming up on the 19th in February you really should be watching out for – we’ll be there with bells on, you can bet! Keep your eye on @CotullaCode as well for more hot hacking action.

HTC HD2 Windows RT hack brings metro apps to WVGA is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve seen the HTC HD2 running essentially every mobile operating system from its birth till now, but nothing could have prepared us for this: hackers have ported in Windows RT! This operating system is meant to be a sort of half-way point between full-on desktop mode and mobile for the Windows tablet universe hoping to join in on the Windows 8 fun – it’s creators certainly never intended it to be worked with on a smartphone. But there it is, on the HTC HD2, no less, the most-hacked smartphone of all time, without a doubt.

What we’re seeing here is a set of users, both CotullaCode and StroughtonSmith, working together to bring this tablet-loving OS to the smartphone. This user interface is made for much larger devices and certainly wont be widely used by smartphone hackers, thus exercise thusly made real for the fun of it – or for the challenge of it, of course. You’ll see int he gallery below a set of shots of the OS working on the old HTC Windows Mobile device, with the name “LEO computer” simple to see.

At the moment we’re not being told how it was done, but our friendly source assures us that “it was helped by the EFI implementation he wrote for WP8.” This of course refers to the Windows Phone 8 hacking of the HTC HD2 from earlier this year – just near the end of November 2012, that is. You’ll see this and a collection of other HTC HD2 ports in the timeline near the end of this post.

Meanwhile you’ll want to know that this hack is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for the public. At the moment, the creators have no intent of sharing their precise method nor an instructions manual for the meek. You’ll just have to close your eyes and imagine the possibilities.

– Thanks for the tip, Steve!

Windows RT ported to HTC HD2 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

Continue reading The Daily Roundup for 11.24.2012

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Yes, we know Android is holding steady at about 52 percent of US smartphone market share. What’s interesting is just who’s driving growth as a whole. According to Nielsen, 58 percent of American teens between 13 and 17 now have a smartphone — that’s a big jump from 36 percent a year earlier and a sign that the youngest owners have a significant sway over where the market is going. Not that young adults don’t have an impact. Although the 25-to-34 crowd isn’t making as big a comparative leap, its smartphone ownership has climbed from 59 percent to a dominating 74 percent in the same space of time.

No matter how much youth set the pace, it’s clear Android is still having an effect. Among the US smartphone buyers Nielsen tracked in the three months leading up to July, 58.6 percent went Google’s direction. Most of that gain came from BlackBerry owners switching allegiances, which doesn’t bode well when RIM is counting on existing owners to fuel BlackBerry 10 demand. We’d be careful about citing a one-point shrink in iPhone sales as a shift in the balance of power, however — while it could be part of a trend, it could also represent the habitual lull in Apple’s sales during the weeks before a major iPhone introduction.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Nielsen: more than half of US teens now own smartphones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last week we found out about a new SMS security hole in the iPhone that could potentially leave users vulnerable to phishing attempts. To put it simply, this hole allows undesirable people to change the reply-to address on the texts they send you, making them appear to be legitimate and possibly convincing you to hand over some personal details. AdaptiveMobile has published a new report on the security hole, and while it may be scary for iPhone users, it appears that this flaw doesn’t affect devices running a different OS.

AdaptiveMobile’s Cathal McDaid attempted the exploit on Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices and found that it worked on none of those. The reason for this is because most handsets step around the flaw by not showing the Reply-Address at all. McDaid warns that any devices which show the Reply-Address are less secure than those which don’t, so this problem isn’t necessarily exclusive to iPhone – it’s just that the majority of the devices tested don’t show the address in the first place.

After the vulnerability came to light, Apple made a statement to Engadget, instructing texters to use iMessage instead of SMS, as iMessage is more secure. “Apple takes security very seriously,” the statement reads. “When using iMessage instead of SMS, addresses are verified which protects against these kinds of spoofing attacks. One of the limitations of SMS is that it allows messages to be sent with spoofed addresses to any phone, so we urge customers to be extremely careful if they’re directed to an unknown website or address over SMS.”

Obviously, iMessage is an exclusive feature of iOS, so when communicating with other devices that aren’t an iPhone, SMS has to be used. It’s still a bit unsettling, but really, staying secure does fall on the shoulders of the users in this case. It kind of goes without saying that it isn’t a good idea to share personal information on your phone, and if you get a suspicious looking message, it’s probably a good idea to follow up before sending off information that could come back to haunt you (for instance, call your bank and check with it if you get a message claiming to be from it). It may not be the most desirable solution to these problems, but it’s a lot better than having personal information out in the open thanks to one bogus text.

Most other devices lack iOS SMS security hole is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.