Hasta La Gadget!

For $40 (plus $20 per year), MagicJack’s USB VoIP dongle will let you make free unlimited telephone-to-telephone calls, but this week the company’s announced MagicTalk, a piece of software for internet-connected phones and computers that will waive even those upfront costs. The Associated Press tracked down one of our favorite ruthless salesmen, MagicJack CEO Dan Borislow, who described a service much like Google Voice and Skype, number portability and all — except it adds the whole allowing-free-calls-to-regular-ol-telephones bit by charging the companies that carry incoming calls. The service will reportedly be available on Windows and Mac next week, with iOS, Blackberry and Android by October, but speaking of promises, Borislow said plans for the company’s legally-ambiguous femtocell are now on hold — the device can’t legitimately muster up enough power without a cellular carrier on board.

In other news, NetTalk announced last week that its pair of competing VoIP boxes now support free video calls. We imagine the timing (and naming) of MagicJack’s new service isn’t making ’em feel too good.

MagicJack announces software for completely free internet-to-phone calls, places femtocell on hold originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So, Apple was none too pleased with that potentially malicious PDF exploit found inside iOS 4 and pretty quickly released an update to fix it. There’s just one problem: the patch left iPhone 2G and iPod touch 1G users still vulnerable. As is anyone with a jailbroken device. Cue Jay Freeman, or Saurik to the online / IRC community. In an odd twist of fate, Saurik has finished what Apple didn’t, releasing a PDF Patch that’ll fix the very vulnerability you used to jailbreak that device in the first place. In fact, it works on every device, so you don’t have worry about updating just yet. It’s available now in the Cydia market. And hey, be safe out there.

iOS PDF exploit patch available on Cydia: have your jailbroken cake and safely eat it, too originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last quarter we reported on some pretty stellar growth numbers for Android in the global smartphone marketplace. Back then, Google’s OS had a 9.6 percent slice of the pie, but today that’s ballooned to a robust 17.2 percent, meaning that in terms of end-user sales over the last three months, Android has nearly matched RIM’s BlackBerry sales. That’s quite the feat when you consider that a year ago the latter was shifting ten times more units than the former. This extraordinary growth rate has narrowed down Symbian’s lead at the top, in spite of Nokia’s favorite OS actually shipping on more phones this year, while the big loser of the quarter has to be Windows Mobile, which contracted both in terms of market share and actual shipments.

Overall, smartphone sales were up by 50 percent year-on-year, according to both Gartner and IDC, while Gartner adds that mobile devices as a whole grew at a tamer 13.3 percent pace. In terms of phone manufacturers’ global share, Nokia and Samsung have held on to their top positions, LG, Sony Ericsson and Motorola have experienced some uncomfortable shrinkage, and HTC, RIM and Apple have capitalized to expand their portions. Looking over to IDC’s smartphone share data shows, again, that all smartphone makers are growing remarkably well, but it does highlight HTC (129 percent) and Samsung (173 percent) as really improving their presence in the sector. The reason? Android, Android, Android.

Continue reading Gartner and IDC agree: the Android invasion’s accelerating around the world

Gartner and IDC agree: the Android invasion’s accelerating around the world originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rumors have it that Apple TV is about to get redesigned and rebranded as “iTV,” with a new architecture based on iOS4 and an A4 processor, just like the iPhone 4 and iPad.

The good news? The new iTV, expected this fall, will cost just $100 and will be able to run apps from Apple’s iTunes App Store, according to Engadget.

The bad news: It won’t be able to handle 1080p or even 1080i video: 720p is the best you’re going to get. Engadget’s sources suggest that the limitation is because of the A4 chip.

Apple TV has been something of a flop for Apple, sticking out among the company’s string of recent consumer product success stories like a sad, bedraggled kitten in the middle of a bunch of LOLcats. At $230, it’s a pricey TV accessory, all the more so given that it doesn’t have a Blu-ray or even DVD player, integrates poorly with cable TV shows, and can only be made to work with Hulu and Netflix movies via workarounds.

Apple TV doesn’t get top billing on the company’s website, has been called a “hobby” by CEO Steve Jobs, and currently hovers around the 400-something position on Amazon’s list of bestselling electronics.

The new iTV may not address all of these problems, but at $100 it would be much more reasonably priced, and would presumably have access to at least some subset of the 200,000 titles in the App Store, as well as a small army of developers. That might be enough to move Apple’s television efforts from “also ran” to “not dead yet.”

Engadget via Gizmodo

Photo Credit: Niall Kennedy / Flickr

See Also:

• Rumor Repeat: Apple TV to Gain iOS-Based Overhaul
• Rumor: New $100 Apple TV Takes Aim at the Cloud
• Logitech Google TV Box Embarrasses Apple TV
• Boxee Beta, Now On Apple TV
• Why Apple TV Must Evolve to Avoid Extinction
• What We Want in an Apple TV

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Apple’s pushing out iOS 4.0.2 for iPhones and iPod Touches and iOS 3.2.2 for iPads, an update that patches the previous versions’ PDF exploit and wipes out your iPhone’s unlock and nice new jailbreak. More »