Hasta La Gadget!

George Hotz, famously known as the first hacker to unlock the iPhone, says he’s done it again. The whiz kid on Thursday evening said he had cooked up a new hack for all iPhone OS devices, and he’s betting it will work on the iPad, too.

When the hack is released (Hotz won’t disclose a release date), it should be as simple to use as Blackra1n, Hotz’s one-click solution to jailbreak current iPhones, he said.

“It is completely untethered, works on all current tethered models (ipt2, 3gs, ipt3), and will probably work on iPad too,” Hotz said in his blog post.

It’s plausible to believe that an iPhone OS jailbreak will also work for the iPad. While the iPad will support apps that are exclusive to the device, its OS shares the same DNA as the iPhone’s.

Hackers use the term “jailbreaking” to describe the act of overriding the iPhone’s restrictions to install unauthorized software on the device. Jailbreaking is the first step an iPhone owner must take in order to later unlock the handset, enabling it to work with a SIM card from any carrier.

Wired.com in November 2009 profiled Hotz, along with the community of hackers persistently issuing jailbreaks and mods to fight against Apple’s tight control of its iPhone. The community also distributes unauthorized iPhone apps in a few underground app stores, the most popular of which is Cydia.

Hotz told Wired.com in a phone interview that he might release the hack when the iPad launches next week. But he said he would wait to see what the rest of the hacking community does first. He said he expects the Dev-Team, another group of iPhone hackers (that Hotz was formerly part of), to have figured out the same exploit.

“We’ll see what the rest of the scene does,” Hotz said. “Maybe I’ll release it [during the iPad launch].”

A video of the new iPhone jailbreak in action is below the jump.

Updated noon PT with a statement from Hotz.

See Also:

• Jailbreakers Battle Apple for Control of iPhone
• BlackRa1n Plus Blacksn0w: Unlock Any iPhone in Seconds
• iPhone Freed From AT&T; Some Soldering Required
• Geohot Trades Hacked iPhone for Crazy Expensive Sports Car
• Geohot Sneaks Out iPhone 3GS Jailbreak Early

Social news aggregator Digg.com has released its free iPhone app in the App Store. Packed with a slick, feature-rich interface, the app is a strong start for the popular website, though there’s plenty of room for it to grow.

Launching the app, you’ll be able to immediately browse popular stories on Digg. You can also view popular stories by topic (e.g., technology, business, science, etc.) or upcoming articles that are about to go popular. You can search through stories by typing a keyword in a search field.

The best part of the app is it makes it really easy to Digg or bury a submission. Tapping a link launches the story inside an in-app browser, and a bar below contains thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to cast your vote. There’s also a button to save a story for reading later. The entire interface is snappy; from my testing on an iPhone 3GS, stories loaded quickly inside Digg’s browser.

With that said, there are some features missing that I’d like to see in version 2. One major minus is you can’t comment on stories like you would on Digg.com. You can view comments, but you can’t actually write any. According to Tap Tap Tap, which developed the app with Digg, the public Digg API doesn’t support adding comments yet. So hopefully we can expect this feature in a later version.

Also, there’s limited interaction between the Digg app and other apps. For example, if you’re browsing your Twitter feed in Tweetie and you tap a Digg link, it doesn’t launch the Digg app. Instead, you’re stuck with viewing the Digg link in the Safari browser. To be fair, you can hit a button to share Digg links through Twitter, Facebook or e-mail, but the inability to use the app to view others’ shared Digg links is stifling.

The free Digg app is downloadable now in the App Store. A video demo of the app is below.

News release [Digg]

See Also:

• SXSW: Digg’s Big Redesign Taps Into Social Web
• Digg This URL Grey: Tea Is the New Coffee
• Digg Traffic Has Questionable Monetary Value

The iPhone community has reacted strongly to the Wired.com report that some app-review sites have pay-to-play policies.

Last week Gadget Lab reported on payola practices prevalent at several websites dedicated to reviewing iPhone apps. At least two authors of one site, TheiPhoneAppReview.com, recently required money from iPhone developers in exchange for reviews.

Those demands were at odds with TheiPhoneAppReview.com’s stated policy, which says that it only requires a fee for “expedited” reviews — those that are reviewed sooner than others.

Several developers responded to our story by promising to avoid sites with such policies. Jeff Campbell, owner of Tapestry Apps, pledged to blacklist pay-to-play websites and urged other developers to do so as well. Alexandra Peters, community manager of Firemint, which develops the popular iPhone game Flight Control, also said she would avoid sending news releases to pay-to-play sites.

“I encourage fellow developers to publicly pledge their intent to not support these sites by succumbing to their pay-to-play schemes,” wrote Jeff Campbell, owner of Tapestry Apps, in a blog post this week. “The sooner that well of income dries up, the sooner these guys might move on to more journalistically sound practices. Tapestry is willing to make that pledge.”

Paid reviews are not illegal, but critics of the practice say requiring money in exchange for reviews inevitably creates a conflict of interest and brings a publication’s credibility into question. Rich Cleland, a member of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, told Wired.com last week that he frowns on the practice because a paid review can very easily be the same as a paid advertisement. Payment can induce a more favorable evaluation, and consumers, as a result, may be misled into purchasing a product based on a falsely positive review that was bought, he explained.

The FTC in October 2009 issued guidelines requiring bloggers to provide disclosure on reviews whenever goods, such as money or gifts, are exchanged. TheiPhoneAppReview.com and other sites covered by Wired.com disclose their “expedited review” fees in FAQs.

Some app-review websites responded to Wired.com’s coverage as well. Nine new websites have signed up to become part of the Organization for App Testing Standards (OATS), a set of ethical guidelines that rejects payment for reviews, according to Jeff Scott, owner of the app-review site 148Apps and co-creator of OATS.

Apple news publication Macworld, which owns an app-review website called AppGuide, is the latest OATS member. Jason Snell, editorial director of Macworld and a former journalism teacher at UC Berkeley, said the publication already follows “old-school journalistic practices,” so it was easy to join OATS.

“In the end, it’s all about being as transparent as possible so readers can make up their own minds about who to trust, and about not posing as something you’re not,” Snell said. “Readers need to know that true editorial reviews are fair, and aren’t the product of any quid pro quo involving money or any other favors…. People need to know where the opinions they’re reading are coming from.”

Wired.com’s article also sparked some debate among review websites. Michael Vallez, owner of the app-review site Crazy Mike’s Apps, said he charges for reviews, and he does not guarantee positive ratings.

“I provide more than a paid review, and I do not guarantee any positive reviews and have returned developers’ monies, because frankly their apps were horrible,” Vallez said.

Vallez added that websites that charge for advertising of iPhone apps, or benefit from affiliate links to iPhone apps, have financial ties as well.

In response to that argument, Macworld’s Snell said traditional media businesses build walls between editorial and advertising departments so advertising clients cannot influence coverage. He also said the actual dollar amounts from affiliate links are tiny, and that information is also walled off from editorial operations.

“I think it’s a ridiculous, slippery-slope argument — but hey, the payola sites have to find some way to try and hide their shame,” Snell said. “Maybe they should argue that any site that takes advertising is fundamentally compromised. But let’s visit reality: We live in a society with commercial media businesses. The way we’ve traditionally solved this conflict is by building walls between editorial and business, so that sales people can sell ads endlessly but the editors don’t even know who the advertisers are, and don’t care.”

In the journalism industry, the ethical debate surrounding pay-to-play operations has been longstanding, said Kenneth Pybus, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Abilene Christian University. However, he said undisclosed paid reviews are indisputably unethical because they manipulate the public.

“I don’t think it’s defensible to fail to disclose that,” Pybus said. “That’s an easy call to say it’s ethically wrong because that is a disservice to readers. It ought to be information that applies to readers and not information that advances yourself financially.”

See Also:

• Pay to Play: Some iPhone App Sites Demand Money for Reviews
• iPhone Developer May Be Bribing Reviewers
• Ad Exec: Payola Can Save Webcasters, Music Business
• FCC, Broadcasters Agree to Anti-Payola Guidelines

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Finding a way to keep track of your keys, wallet or phone is one of those frustrating tasks of life for which there’s no dearth of as-seen-of-TV solutions.

Here’s another product but one that’s embraces the Web 2.0 era.

Tech company Phone Halo debuted a hardware dongle that promises to help you keep track of your stuff through Google maps on your phone.

A $70 “eraser-sized device” Phone Halo has Bluetooth and GPS capability and supports Blackberry, Android and the iPhone. The company showed the device at the ongoing DEMO Spring conference.

The Halo charges via USB and has a battery life of about a week, says the company.

But here’s the problem. The device has a range of only 30 feet or 10 meters so it’s best for use across a room or two. It won’t be handy if you forgot your phone outdoors or have already left the location. There’s an option to lock the phone remotely but with most major phone makers including Motorola with Moto Blur and Apple with Mobile Me offering locator services for your phone, Halo is not particularly useful.

Phone Halo says users can specify a radius so that if the object and the attached Halo hardware moves beyond it, the Halo dongle will beep to alert you. Or you can all the hardware by pressing a button so it beeps. Users can also open up the Halo phone app and see the last location of the object.

And since everything has to have a social component these days, the Phone Halo lets you post a Google map of where you Halo’d object last was seen on Facebook or Twitter.

It’s all rather gimmicky and pedestrian. There are plenty of key locator services out there starting at $30 and almost provide the same service. Except for the ability to post to twitter, there’s little that sets Phone Halo apart. But isn’t tweeting a big deal these days?

Check out the demo video to see Phone Halo at work

Photo: Phone Halo

UPDATE: A source within Palm (who is known to us but wants to remain off the record) has contacted us to say that “there is no memo and no plans to adopt Android. We are very happy with and committed to webOS.”

An anonymously sourced, unconfirmed memo partially quoted on Slashdot purports to show that Palm is ready to ditch the failing WebOS — which powers its Pre smartphone — and instead become yet another Android handset maker. The full memo was promised to be posted on Wikileaks at midnight ET last night. It is still not there. Here is the purported “quote” from Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein:

While Palm is incredibly proud of our engineers who spent timeless work and effort to bring us this advanced operating system, consumers simply have not caught on. To provide a better future for ourselves and our customers, the only logical choice is to transition our hardware and software to the Android platform.

Despite the rather suspicious origins of this information, it does seem like one of the only ways out for Palm, which really did bet the farm on the WebOS. Back at CES 2009, the Pre was the star of the show, with almost unanimous praise from the tech press. It multi-tasks, it has the UI polish you’d expect from a bunch of ex-Apple engineers and it has some genuinely clever features: the windows-as-card-stacks metaphor, and the notification bar, for example. Everybody thought the Pre would save Palm.

But it failed to sell, to the extent that Palm has actually ceased production temporarily and is trying to help telcos shift inventory.

Could a move to Android keep Palm from closing down? Android is hot right now, and while the Motorola Droid and the Google Nexus are no iPhones is terms of sales, they’re getting a lot of press. Just like the Pre did, in fact.

It’d be a risky move. In swapping to Android, Palm would be throwing out the one unique thing that it has to sell. The WebOS is way more important than the Pre (or its little sister, the Pixi): those are just boxes. And if the iPhone has taught us anything, it’s that the box doesn’t matter: It’s all in the OS. Palm’s failure wasn’t in making a bad OS. It was poor marketing. That weird, giant woman on the TV ads? Confusing, if not scary. The iPhone ads, on the other hand, tell us exactly what the phone does, and no more.

Our advice? Stick with WebOS and just fix your ad campaign, showing people that you can use the phone as a five-device MiFi-style hot-spot or that you can use it to tether your iPad. Show the phone in action and people will buy it.

Or license that OS and go up against Android itself. Handset makers will be getting the jitters right now after Apple’s lawsuit against HTC. Offer them something free of patent infringements, something that is here today (unlike Windows Phone 7), and you might just turn Palm into the Microsoft of the cellphone world.

Rumor: Palm ditching webOS for Android? [Slashdot]

See Also:

• Palm Can Still Win: Here Are Five Things They Need To Do …
• Palm Unveils Its Long-Awaited Smartphone, the Pre
• Palm Acknowledges the Pre Isn't an 'Anything' Killer. But Is It …
• 6 Reasons Why the Palm Pre Is Special

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com