Hasta La Gadget!

You’ve heard that it was en route, and you’ve seen the preview. Now, it’s time to enter the wild, wacky world of Android 3.0 for yourself. Honeycomb’s SDK is now available for all developers to download, with the API’s being deemed final and able to withstand new apps that will target the fresh platform. We’d bother spilling the beans on the added features, but we know you’ve already torn your left click button off in a frantic race to the source link. Simmer down, son — the URL ain’t going anywhere.

Android 3.0 Honeycomb SDK now available to all, API level literally cranked to 11 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That the Atrix got itself rooted before it was even available made us wonder just how… receptive it would be to the caresses of the hacker community at large. Sadly we’re finding it’s perhaps a bit more frigid than its friendly demeanor might have lead us to believe. User adlx.xda over at the xda-developers forums has found that the phone’s system files are not encrypted, but they are signed. This will make the process of replacing them and loading custom builds and the like rather more complicated — but surely not impossible.

[Thanks, chaoslimits]

Motorola Atrix root found to be signed, hacking might not be so easy originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon has just turned on its Prime Instant Video service, letting paid Prime subscribers (sorry, students) in the US (sorry, foreigners) stream any of 5,000 movies and TV shows directly to their machines free of charge — well, free beyond the $79 Primers already pay. Jeff Bezos has confirmed that there will be no extra charge going forward for this service and that Prime itself will not be getting more expensive to pay for all these bits and bytes. Right now the selection is limited, particularly if you already have a Netflix subscription, but we just had to try it out. Click on through for our impressions on a variety of devices.

Continue reading Amazon Prime Instant Video hands-on

Amazon Prime Instant Video hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung apparently decided it’s made Epic 4G owners wait long enough and beat Sprint’s planned OTA release schedule to the punch by a few hours, posting the EB13 build that will update their phones to Froyo on its support website. Click the source link for a .exe to run from a connected PC and upgrade over USB (for rooted and unrooted devices alike, running any earlier software build) or select the Mac link for an update.zip file that can be run directly from the phone’s SD card (stock devices running the most recent DI18 build only.) You’ll be restoring the device to a blank slate with the former so make sure you’ve backed up any important SMS’s beforehand. So far impressions from early upgraders on XDA-Developers suggest a noticeable performance boost, but other forum posts indicate some pesky bugs like Time Without Service battery drain are still hanging around, peep the full release notes after the break.

Continue reading Samsung Epic 4G’s Froyo update now available, no need to wait for OTA

Samsung Epic 4G’s Froyo update now available, no need to wait for OTA originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s a story going around the past couple days that HTC’s Inspire 4G for AT&T — a phone that you would assume to be wicked fast on both uploads and downloads in light of the name — doesn’t support HSUPA, a critical element to offering reasonable uplink speeds. Turns out it’s not quite that simple. Here’s what we’re hearing from trusted sources:

• Contrary to AT&T’s official line — which is flatly that the Inspire’s specs don’t include HSUPA — the hardware most certainly does support it.
• For some reason, HSUPA has been disabled in the current firmware, but could be easily enabled in a future update if HTC and AT&T were to agree to do so. For what it’s worth, we’re not even aware of an HSPA+ chipset that lacks support for HSUPA, so that definitely sounds right.
• We’ve also been told that AT&T’s network may simply have HSUPA disabled in 4G areas. That doesn’t necessarily make sense since other HSUPA-compliant devices on AT&T (like the iPhone 4, to name an obvious example) can regularly hit HSUPA uplink speeds, but we suppose it’s possible that there’s some specific incompatibility between the infrastructure and the chipset used by the Inspire. An eerily-similar incident has happened in the past, after all.

We’ll keep our ear to the ground as we get more on this situation, but the bottom line is that hope is not lost for heavy uploaders with Inspires — we just need to find out what it’s going to take to get HTC to push an update.

AT&T’s HTC Inspire 4G can do HSUPA, has it disabled for some mysterious reason originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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