Hasta La Gadget!

In this week’s podcast, Brian X. Chen and Dylan Tweney discuss the Verizon iPhone, AT&T’s new tethering and hot-spot features, and News Corp.’s new iPad newspaper.

First up is our review of the Verizon iPhone, which really does have better coverage based on our tests. Suddenly, the iPhone is a phone, Brian says — although when you can get a signal, the AT&T iPhone has much faster data download and upload speeds.

We talk about the Verizon iPhone’s hot-spot feature: For an extra $20 per month, you can share your wireless connection with up to five devices via Wi-Fi. That compares to AT&T’s tethering option, which costs the same amount but only lets you connect one other device.

AT&T now offers a hot-spot feature too, but on an HTC 4G smartphone coming later this month. It has also improved its tethering plan by adding an extra 2GB of data.

We talk about News Corp.’s new iPad-only newspaper, The Daily. It will cost $1 per week or $40 per year. While the content is promising, the app is a little sluggish, and we have some doubts about the business model.

Finally, we talk about how the internet is running out of space. The last IPv4 addresses were handed out this week, and over the next few years, we may see slowdowns and glitches as companies start transitioning to a different version of the internet’s basic protocol.

—

You can listen to the audio-only version of the show here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #102
http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0102.mp3

Or download the OGG version of Gadget Lab podcast #102.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, subscribe to the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

It took Verizon only two hours of having the iPhone 4 available for pre-order to break its all-time record for first day sales of a single device. That’s in spite of the fact it only opened up pre-orders to its own subscribers and did so in the dead of night. To be clear, between 3AM and 5AM yesterday morning, more people ordered up the iPhone 4 than Verizon has been able to get through its doors on any full product launch day. Predictably, the carrier hasn’t bothered to include the actual number of devices ordered up, but judging from the server issues it was having immediately after making the handset available and the subsequent shutdown of advance pre-orders, we’ll go ahead and guess it was “a lot.”

Continue reading Verizon breaks first day sales record with iPhone 4 pre-orders — in only two hours

Verizon breaks first day sales record with iPhone 4 pre-orders — in only two hours originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s finally here, folks. The Chronic Dev Team has put out the latest version of greenpois0n that allows you to free your iDevice running 4.2.1. What’s different about this jailbreak? Glad you asked. This time ’round, the program will let you perform an untethered jailbreak — you can finally reboot the device without having to re-jailbreak. Be warned though — this build was rushed out and we haven’t tested any devices on our end. At the time of this writing, the software is only available for Mac. Oh, and unlockers, don’t update to 4.2.1 if you plan on swapping sim cards in the future. Hit the source link to get started.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Chronic Dev Team unleashes greenpois0n, untethered jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before Angry Birds mania swept mobile device users everywhere, the masses were interested in words.

The Scrabble-like Words With Friends app, that is. An upcoming new platform release for the game may prove that while pigs may be dying in droves, words are still alive and well.

Previously exclusive to iOS mobile devices, the Scrabble-like Words is coming to the Android OS as soon as next week, says social game developer company Zynga. Playing the game on an Android device will be pretty much the same as if you played it on your iPhone, the company says.

Now, people will also be able to play in the same game across both platforms. That means no more Droid lovers feeling left out while their iOS-using pals are geeking out on triple-word scores.

Words With Friends on the iPhone/iPad platform has proven its immense popularity in the past. The app boasts 2.5 million daily active users, with over 10 million downloads since its creation. Currently supported by ads, the app is free for download from Apple’s app store. A paid version with no ads displayed will be coming soon to the Android Market and Apple app store.

But releasing the app on Android is not as simple as slapping a bunch of iOS code onto your Android phone.

“We wrote Words from the ground up with Android in mind,” Zynga Senior Engineer Jason Tomlinson told Wired.com in an interview. “For instance, because there’s so many different resolutions across Android devices, screen size compatibility is a serious issue.”

Leading a small team of three or four engineers, Tomlinson and his crew worked since October writing code in Java, the primary programming language for the Android OS. Knowing software update fragmentation across devices has been a serious issue for Android users, Tomlinson’s team made the Words app compatible with hardware running the most up to date 2.3 version (Gingerbread) all the way back to 1.6 (Donut). It will also run on Google’s yet to be released version 3.0 (Honeycomb), the version of Android optimized for tablets.

Some transitions to the Android OS environment were easier than others. “The art ports over mostly seamlessly,” Words co-founder Paul Bettner told Wired.com. “Same with the sounds we use. And the same set of servers on the back end are supporting both iOS and Android users,” Bettner said.

But when Bettner founded Newtoy Inc., the developer studio that created Words, in 2008, the whole studio was focused on iOS coding, and has continued to be until last year.

“When a relatively new platform like Android comes along,” Bettner said, “it’s difficult to find coders in the beginning. Even the most experienced Android developers in the world would have only a few months of experience doing it. Once Google’s OS started growing in popularity, the requests for an Android version of the app came flooding in. That’s when we started looking for help.”

Help came in the form of Tomlinson, who has worked with Google on Android since the open-source code’s inception. Tomlinson worked with the existing engineers to help acclimate them to coding in Java rather than the Apple-preferred language, Objective-C.

“Whichever platform an engineer begins programming for, there’s always going to be a few hurdles jumping from one to another,” Tomlinson told Wired.com. “Generally, however, the learning curve for switching from Objective-C to Java is much simpler, as Java is easier to pick up.”

With the success of the iOS version of the game in mind, Zynga is preparing its servers for “the most optimistic projections” of new user adoption rates, says Bettner.

If the game takes off for the Android OS, it’s probably not a stretch to expect other big cross-platform releases in 2011.

Photo: Words With Friends running on a Motorola Xoom tablet.
Mike Isaac/Wired.com

See Also:

• 10 Apps We’re Excited to Try on iPad Launch Day
• Wired.com Readers’ Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• Scrabble Is First Paid Game App for Kindle
• Wired’s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• Google Removes Flash App From Android Market
• Google Launches Android Market Web Store, Improves Payment System …
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Malware Sneaks Into Android Market
• Android OS Now World’s Leading Smartphone Platform

We knew The Daily was to be just the first drop what’s destined to be a flood of titles with in-app purchases for the iTunes store, but we weren’t quite sure how hard Apple would be twisting the faucet — until now, that is. According to The Wall Street Journal, Cupertino will reject any newspaper or magazine app that doesn’t take subscription payments through the iTunes store. It doesn’t have to be solely Apple’s store — developers can still sell through websites in addition to the mandated in-app option. (If you recall, this is the same issue that Sony Reader for iOS just faced.) There are a few big questions lingering out there: will the 70 / 30 revenue sharing apply? Does the “rejection” apply to apps already in the store like Amazon’s Kindle? You bet your (virtual) bottom dollar we’ll be finding out soon enough.

Apple to require in-app subscriptions for periodicals by March 31st, fine print still a bit fuzzy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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