Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve just gotten official word that the Captivate — AT&T’s rendition of Samsung’s global Galaxy S line of high-end Android phones — will be available starting Sunday, July 18 for $199 on contract with no rebate required. That pricing is more or less what we’d expected considering that T-Mobile priced the Vibrant the same way — and if rumors of T-Mobile’s launch date bump are true, the Captivate won’t be the first kid on the block. Still, all four US nationals are getting this thing pretty shortly, which is an extremely impressive Android coup for the boys and girls over at Sammy. Stay tuned for a review just as soon as we can make it happen.

Samsung Captivate coming to AT&T on July 18 for $200 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The rumored Charm has just gotten a proper unveiling from Motorola — and while it’s not getting nearly the media fanfare its Droid X corporate cousin did, it’s arguably even more unique. The phone features a full portrait QWERTY keyboard placed directly below a 2.8-inch landscape touchscreen, but for most operations, you don’t have to touch it if you don’t want to because you’ve also got a touchpad mounted on the back of the phone (the so-called “Backtrack”) much like AT&T’s Backflip. Not only is this the first widely-launched Android phone to employ such a form factor, it’s also the first to run Android 2.1 with Blur — and interestingly, they’ve carried over the old version’s general look and feel rather than going with the Droid X’s updated skin. It’s got a 3 megapixel camera (with Kodak co-branding, something we haven’t seen on a Moto in a long time), WiFi, and a noise-canceling second microphone. Pricing and availability haven’t been announced, but T-Mobile customers can expect it “this Summer.”

Motorola Charm official for T-Mobile: portrait QWERTY Android at long last originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve received a handful of tips this morning claiming something’s rotten in the state of the iTunes App Store, namely via the Book category. As of this writing, 42 of the top 50 books by revenue are from the seller Thuat Nguyen, whose company website (“mycompany”) leads to parked site www.home.com. A vast majority of these book apps were released in April, have little to no customer ratings or reviews, appear to be in Vietnamese (despite claims in the side bar that the supported languages are English and Japanese), and may or may not be infringing on copyrighted work — we’re noticing a lot of Dragon Ball art here. To give sales a sense of scope, Twilight series conclusion Breaking Dawn is hovering only at 34 right now.

So, how did these books hit the top of the charts? The other half of this story has to do with a claimed rise in iTunes account hacking, with a number of people reporting up to hundreds of dollars being spent unwillingly from their account to these specific books. Coincidence? Let’s not mince words here, something is definitely amiss, and it’s not looking good. Just to be safe, might wanna check your purchase history under Apple Account information. We’ve reached out to Apple and will let you know as soon as we hear back.

Update: We’ve yet to hear from Apple proper, but we do have an update of sorts — 9 to 5 Mac reports all the “mycompany” titles have completely vanished from the App Store. We’re not sure whether Apple decided to shut down the operation or the seller pulled them himself, so continue to keep an eye on your digital pocketbook until we know for sure.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Inexplicable rise in iPhone dev’s App Store sales connected to iTunes account hacks? (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whoa, Apple just admitted that there’s an issue with the iPhone 4’s reception, but it might not be what you think:

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

Sure, the odd way Apple calculates bars has been noted before, but what’s troubling is that this is the second time Apple has blamed signal strength / reception issues on software and it doesn’t fully explain calls dropping and data degradation when the iPhone 4 is held in a very particular (but common) way. It’s also worth noting that Apple in no way admits to an antenna design flaw. Read the full press release after the break.

Continue reading Apple: iPhone 4 reception problem is a software issue, fix coming in ‘a few weeks’

Apple: iPhone 4 reception problem is a software issue, fix coming in ‘a few weeks’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As you may have noticed, here at Engadget we’ve stepped down hard on the gas pedal when it comes to reviews. We’ve been putting a lot of time and resources into delivering more product reviews at a faster pace, so you guys can know just exactly what you’re getting into when it comes to the gear that we cover. In support of those efforts, today we’re happy to introduce our review scorecards. We wanted to find a way to deliver a snapshot of our reviews in a really simple, glanceable manner, and also make those snapshots available to sort and search through. So starting immediately, we’ll be including scorecards in any new review that goes up, and those cards will appear on our new reviews sorting page. Right now we’ve got some simple sorting options in there, but we’re working on more in-depth sorting options that will allow you to drill down on specifics, so you can find exactly the product you’re looking for. We’re also in the process of moving backwards through our older reviews and getting cards in place, so if you see a few holes here or there, don’t be surprised.

Some guidelines you should consider for these cards: firstly, the cards are based on our review at the time the post was published, meaning they’re not relative to one another (unless the products were reviewed in the same category at the same time). That means that the G1 can have a higher rating than the Droid X, even though right now it’s obvious that the Droid X is a superior phone. The Droid X is being reviewed now, and the G1 was reviewed then. Also, we want to provide a scale of what these numbers mean, so that there isn’t any confusion. A 0 rating you’ll likely never see. It means that the product was so bad we couldn’t even rate it. 1 means the product is pure crap, 2-3 means that the product has a few redeeming qualities, but is not very good. 4 is an okay product, but not something we could recommend. 5 is fair; not great, but not horrible. 6 is a decent product with a few issues, 7 is a strong product with some minor flaws, 8 is a great product with few flaws. 9 is nearly perfect, and 10 (which we haven’t handed out yet) is perfect.

As with any big addition to the site, we’re really interested to hear what you guys have to say. If you have any input, positive or negative, sound off below in comments!

Introducing review scorecards! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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