Hasta La Gadget!

You might be familiar with firmware impresario Conflipper by now, a man who’s earned a reputation tearing apart ROMs — often for unreleased devices — and pulling out the juicy bits for everyone to see. Turns out the dude runs a site called Shipped ROMs with… yes, you guessed it, a bunch of shipped ROMs for a wide variety of phones on it, and it seems HTC’s legal cats in Taiwan have taken issue, saying they’ve got “very strong reasons to believe that the HTC Intellectual Property was illegally obtained by fraudulent means” in a strongly-worded cease and desist letter sent to him earlier today. We reached out to HTC’s US branch for comment and got back the following:

“While HTC tries to take a hands off [approach] about the modder / ROM chef community, this site’s sole purpose [is] to make HTC’s content available for download from a source other than HTC. That content is not just the open source parts and kernels of Android but all of the software that HTC itself has developed. This is a clear violation of our copyrights and HTC needs to defend itself in these cases.”

In other words, these guys are just really against hosting official ROMs on unofficial servers. Anyone can dump a ROM from a phone and flesh it out, so we can’t imagine there’s any competitive concern — and no first-party site makes so many firmware builds available for so many devices in such a concise, well-organized way as Shipped ROMs is doing. Ultimately, it’s HTC’s property — it seems like they’re probably in the legal right here — but the unsavory PR effect with some of the company’s staunchest enthusiasts makes the endeavor more trouble than it’s worth, we’d argue. Tread carefully, HTC.

HTC slaps phone firmware site with cease and desist letter originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pandigital rolls out Novel firmware fix following recall originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nexus One, EVO 4G, Droid and Dream sure, but the Acer Liquid? Yes, the underclocked Snapdragon slate that never made it stateside has just received its own Android 2.2 port. Though still in early alpha with no Wi-Fi or camera functionality and plenty of bugs to boot, the freshly frozen yogurt has the Liquid turning tricks already — with very playable-looking framerates in Raging Thunder II and Flash video support. Early adopters note that the phone isn’t terribly stable at higher CPU frequencies, so don’t expect to push that processor much higher than stock, but even 768MHz is reportedly nice and snappy when you’re running Android 2.2. Video proof after the break, and you’ll find the unfinished ROM at our more coverage link if you’re the adventurous sort. [Thanks, Miroslav]

Continue reading Acer Liquid gets early Android 2.2 ROM, unstable CPU unlock (video)

Acer Liquid gets early Android 2.2 ROM, unstable CPU unlock (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC and Sprint are moving fast to fix a storage card-related bug that left some early users of the Evo 4G smartphone frustrated.

As Wired reported Thursday, a problem with the 8-GB MicroSD card that ships with the HTC Evo returned error messages to some people when they tried using the phone’s camera app. The bug also prevented some people from saving files and documents to the card.

HTC has started pushing out a software fix to current and new Evo users, the same day the phone goes on sale at all Sprint stores.

HTC spokesman Keith Nowak confirmed that the updates started streaming out Friday morning so “anyone who currently has an HTC EVO 4G and people who are lining up to buy it today should not experience the issue.”

HTC and Google gave about 5,000 of the devices to attendees at Google’s developer conference two weeks ago, which is how many early users discovered the problem.

The Evo has been a much anticipated phone because of its position as the first 4G smartphone. HTC and Sprint unveiled the Evo in May. The feature-packed gadget has a huge 4.3-inch touchscreen, 1-GHz Snapdragon processor, a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video conferencing and a 8-megapixel camera for shooting photos and videos. (Evo’s MicroSD card has been manufactured by SanDisk.) Evo runs the 2.1 version of the Android operating system, and costs $200 with a two-year contract. Despite poor battery life, the phone has gathered positive reviews.

See Also:

• Wired Video: HTC Evo 4G Dissected
• HTC EVO 4G $200, on Sale June 4
• EVO 4G Hacked, Rooted Before Arriving in Stores
• Strapped to Android, HTC Takes a Dizzying Ride to the Top

Photo: (closari/Flickr)

In its day, the HTC Hero with its brand new Sense UI and browser with Flash Lite was a breakthrough, multitouch Android handset. As such, it quickly became a big seller for HTC and the carriers that sold it. Now one year later, owners of the GSM variant are still waiting for their chance at the latest Android 2.1 update. As a harbinger of things to come (we hope), the Hero 2.1 update just landed in HTC’s home country of Taiwan. Unfortunately, this will likely be the last update Hero owners receive… via official channels, anyway.

[Thanks, Lee]

HTC Hero (GSM) Android 2.1 update finally arrives… in Taiwan originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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