In our review of the TELUS MILESTONE we lamented Motorola’s decision to digitally sign the bootloader which makes rooting quite difficult. Thankfully, over the past couple of days there has been a lot progress within the Android community and root access for the TELUS MILESTONE has obtained by way of a Brazilian sbf. Sadly kernel access is still absent, but at this point we guess we should just be happy we’ve made it this far. Hit up the read link for a full set of instructions.

Thanks, Arjun!

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The code monkeys at Vodafone look like they’ve been rather busy today! The usually rather vacant ‘coming soon’ section of Vodafone’s UK website has just today added 3 of the latest handsets including the HTC Legend and HTC Desire clearly pointing out they’re coming in “April” with the Nexus one still “coming soon” – however we do expect the Nexus One to also be available in April. Why not have some screen-shots to gaze over:

Vodafone sure are jumping on the Android bandwagon! Offering the Legend, Desire, X10, Nexus one and possibly even making there own Android based device.

Their ‘coming soon‘ section has never looked so nice – oozing with Android offerings!

We told you to keep an eye out on androidforums ‘Official HTC Incredible thread’ now more pics have surfaced of the snapdragon powered incredible thanks to AF member NKT!

With the pictures come interesting specs. Reportedly, the Incredible measures 17.5 x 58.5 x 11.9 mm – almost the same as the Nexus one, comes with an 8MP camera with auto focus and 512mb of RAM & ROM. Interestingly it seems the 1 Ghz Snapdragon processor has been under-clocked to run at 768MHz – presumably to save battery but without effecting the performance.

Don’t forget this incredible phone should come loaded with Android 2.1,  HTC’s Sense UI, a 3.7″ AMOLED screen, an optical trackpad, an FM receiver and Wi-fi, bluetooth and GPS.

I’m really digging the look of the handset but I do think this could potentially be a final design as it has altered from that bright, red glossy cover to a soft feel black one while keeping the unique shape design & ofcourse this one brandishes Verizons logo. Though I really like the red thing going on theres no info it will still be this color at release. What do you think of the bold red design?

The Incredible has already appeared on Verizons inventory so lets hope for an official announcement real soon!

[Via Androidforums]

(Thanks to NKT & everyone that sent this in/tipped this!)

Boy Genius tends to know what he’s talking about when it comes to BlackBerry leaks – so when he says hes got some new details, we tend to believe him.

According to his tipsters, the Verizon BlackBerry Tour 9630 will be seeing an upgrade to BlackBerry OS 5.0 sometime in the next month. With that upgrade, says the same tipster, comes the option of push-to-talk functionality for an extra 5 bucks a month.

But that’s not all! This all leads up to the release of a brand spankin’ new piece of BlackBerry kit — presumably a new Tour — launching some time around May, complete with OS 5.0 and push-to-talk functionality out of the box. Alas, that’s all we know about it at this point; keep your ears to the ground for us, won’t you?

[Via BGR]

For those that are not up to speed, here is the Reader’s Digest® version of the Apple and Nokia legal saga. Nokia sued Apple, Apple sued Nokia, the ITC got involved, and here we are. A U.S. court date to settle the alleged patent violations has tentatively been scheduled for some time in the middle of 2012. Legal analysts have said the proceedings could last for two or more years which, barring a settlement, would delay the verdict to sometime in 2014. For those cheer-leading the demise of one of the involved parties, you’ll just have to wait until then.

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If I lose my phone, it’s a bad day. If this guy loses his phone, he just lost the equivalent of a CEO’s salary.

According to Brandon Chang, the ridiculous piece of absurdity you see up above is wrapped in 18 karat gold. Because that wasn’t enough, they then went and glued on 4,150 itty-bitty diamonds, ensuring that you can see just how tacky it is in even the lowest of lights.

The final price tag? $200,000 bucks. If you’ve got that sort of money to throw around, more power to you – but really, there’s a line between “impressive” and “obnoxious”, and this is a few miles past it.

[Via BlackBerryCool]

This February, Microsoft Xbox 360 sales bested those of the Sony Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii for the first time since September of 2007. The February sales figures were: Xbox 360 422,000 units — up 8% year-over-year, Wii 397,900 units — down 47% year-over-year, and Playstation 3 360,100 units — up 30% year-over-year. Take-Two Interative’s BioShock 2, which hit store shelves on February 10th, can be partially credited for the surge in Xbox sales. BS 2 sold over 750,000 copies, 75% of which (562,000) were for the Xbox 360. Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. Wii, sold 555,600 units raking second on the game sales chart and Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 came in a respectable third.

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Getting an update to your device, especially one that has so many improvements and classy alterations, is like Christmas every time it happens. For some devices, it may happen more than once in a year, and for others (at least of any kind of magnitude), not so much. Android though, they’ve got this upgrade thing down, and have been pumping out an update one after another since the mobile Operating Systems launch. The next big thing? Android 2.1. It was announced with the Nexus One (which has been mentioned a few times this week, yeah?), and ever since people with previously released Android-powered devices have been clamoring for the software upgrade.

Just to be frank, the Motorola Droid (which is running here in the States, on the Verizon Wireless network) is currently running Android 2.0.1, but that’s not good enough. Folks with the device want the latest and greatest, especially when it has things like Live Wallpapers, or an application drawer that rotates like a toilet paper roll. They want those things. Unfortunately for those waiting for an upgrade, they are slow. They’re happening, it just takes some time. However, we do have a bit of a glimmer of hope, at least for those in the European region (which means MILESTONE owners, and not Droid adopters). On March 20th, Mobile Bulgaria has it that Vivacom (the region’s largest wireless carrier) will be offering up their own version of the Motorola MILESTONE, Android 2.1 and all.

So, what’s that mean for the rest of Europe (and Canada, by default)? We honestly don’t know. We’d love to tell you that Android 2.1 is now definitely confirmed for an end-of-March release, but we just can’t. Yes, Motorola and Google may be using Vivacom to usher in the new 2.1 update for MILESTONE users, but that’d be a long-shot, we imagine. Though, considering the mishaps that Motorola had regarding an update to 2.1 earlier in the year, we can’t imagine there’s much more time between 2.1 and DROID/MILESTONE users. Just have to hold on for a little bit longer.

[via Engadget]

For now, we’re planting this one firmly in the “rumor mill” category, and we don’t think we’ll be letting it out any time soon. However, if it’s true, then the folks living in what cell phone industries consider “emerging markets” are reading the best story they’ve read in weeks. Apparently, the folks over at Google think those aforementioned markets deserve their mighty Nexus One device, so they’re going to make that happen. However, it seems that the phone may be losing a few features along the way (unlike the Verizon Wireless model).

As the rumor goes, it seems that HTC (the phone’s manufacturer) has figured out a way to make the Nexus One thinner (consider our eyebrows raised), and apparently the device itself would be considered “downgraded” from the original model announced back in January. From our point of view, that could mean all sorts of things. The phone has a few stand-out features, like it’s 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED display, or its 1GHz Snapdragon processor, or even Android 2.1. So the fact that the emerging market version would be a downgraded model has us scratching our head in wonderment.

Again, this is just a rumor, but stranger things have happened. Getting the Nexus One name out there is a good plan for Google, especially considering they plan to make the Nexus name pretty synonymous with their efforts. Will we see a stripped down, “lesser” version of the Nexus One any time soon? That’s anyone’s guess. Only time will tell, and we have plenty of that, don’t we?

[via Android and Me]

We love a good surprise as much as the next person, but we’ve got some mixed feelings about this one. Truth be told, we’re fans of the Sense User Interface that HTC developed for their Android devices. It’s an upgraded, advanced version of TouchFLO 3D, and we couldn’t be happier about it. However, with the custom skin over the Operating System (just as we’ve seen on other devices), getting an upgrade takes inherently longer than on other devices. But, as we can see from the screenshot, it looks like that’s exactly what’s happening here.

You’ve more than likely seen the Nexus One in some capacity or another, but just in case, here’s what you’re looking at: a 3.7″, capacitive AMOLED touchscreen, Google’s mobile Operating System Android under the hood, powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor. It was all the talk of the town about two months ago, when Google officially announced the beast of a phone’s launch. One of the missing features though, especially considering the device was manufactured by HTC, was lack of Sense UI. It got a lot of people up-in-arms, as Sense UI is considered the primary reason to own Android, in some people’s opinion.

The screenshot looks real enough, but we’re under the impression that this could have just been included by mistake. Things like this have happened before, and we’re sure they’ll happen again and again in the future. But, there is certainly a possibility of this happening. After all, if the HTC Incredible does indeed have the specifications that’s been rumored, then customers might be more inclined to pick up the prettier looking UI.

[via Android Central]

So you’ve been using your iPhone for a couple months or years now. You might be addicted to your iPhone. Even if you’re not addicted, chances are that you have a stock of applications on which you rely heavily. Without a doubt, the single most useful application on my iPhone, and the one I use constantly throughout the day, is email. I live by email, and I read and compose email messages far more often than I make actual phone calls with my phone. To preserve my sanity, I’ve disabled the notification sound for new emails: if I hadn’t, my phone would be making noise pretty constantly throughout the day. But that’s not an ideal situation, because there are times when I do want to be notified of an important new email. Enter MailTones, an application that allows you to set custom alert tones, and makes good use of Apple’s push notifications.

MailTones is the first and only app to let iPhone users change the sound of their email alerts – both for “all” mail, and with different custom tones for different sender domains, subjects and individual friends… which adds enormous fun and practical value to the email on the iPhone – in ways which were simply not possible before!

This is a simple little app, but there’s a big catch: in order to enjoy push notifications, you need to forward your mail to a special address assigned to you at mailtones.net. Once that’s done, MailTones will work its magic and send you push notifications of new email messages. On the whole, this setup works well, but there can be some synchronization issues depending on how compulsively you check your new email: you might get a notification of a message you’ve already read.

You have the choice of forwarding all your mail to MailTones, and then using the MailTones iPhone app to set up a variety of rules for notifications. You can match on a specific sender address, any sender from a specific domain, or subject line contents. You can have multiple overlapping rules defined, and the MailTones app will follow a specific flow to determine which sound to play. For example, if I define a domain match for @crunchgear.com, and also specify a contact match for john@crunchgear.com, the tone I specify for John will be played rather than the tone for @crunchgear.com. The matching goes by sender address, then subject contents, then domain, and finally if none of those match the default tone will be played.

You also have the choice of selectively forwarding mail from your account(s) to MailTones. This is what I did in my GMail account. Rather than forward everything, I defined a couple of filters to selectively forward only mail for which I might like to be notified.

This allows me to rely on the default MailTones notification for those messages I forward, and I can then fine-tune the notifications based on sender address or subject line matching.

By default, MailTones is on all the time. If you forget to toggle the speaker switch on your iPhone, you’ll get email notifications all night long. Thankfully, there is a “Do Not Disturb” option in the MailTones preferences which allows you to specify a time range during which notifications should be suppressed.

You can get MailTones in the App Store for $2.99, with no on-going subscription costs. This is a pretty good price for an application that really adds a new level of functionality to your iPhone.

This is our first ever live podcast using BlogTalkRadio so bear with us if any train wreck occurs. We’ve got an awesome guest in Snaptic CTO and co-founder Andreas Schobel and as usual we’ll be talking about the latest Android happenings like Moto BING, AT&T Yahoo, .

You can either LISTEN RIGHT HERE:

Or check us out on BlogTalkRadio.com/phandroid where you can live chat with other listeners (and us) and call into the show.

When we hinted at tiered data plans in the story covered by the Wall Street Journal regarding LTE devices in 2011, we knew there was more to the story. After all, when a customer looks at their plan of unlimited data right now, they feel pretty safe and cozy, right? No worries about streaming Pandora Radio to your handset, or browsing the web on your way home. But, even if times are changing, Verizon Wireless doesn’t want you to be afraid.

Just as we mentioned in the previous article, unlimited data plans may have their days numbered. CTO of Verizon Wireless Tony Melone tip-toed around the sentiment, until he mentioned that plans offering this unlimited amount of data is an issue that needs to change, and soon. However, he also pointed out that inputting something like this meant they had to come up with a way to not “scare” their customers, which is something they are working hard on.

Of course, the simple truth is that some companies, like Verizon Wireless, don’t actually have an unlimited data plan. They assume that 5GB of data is more than enough for the average person per month, and let’s face it, they’re probably right. And while we are happy to know that nothing is official in regards to tiered pricing, it’s been one of those feature changes on the tip of Verizon’s tongue long enough, that we would be shocked to find out they’re going a different route. But, as phones get faster, more complex, and we see the Internet being adopted more and more into the mobile space, 10GB may become the next 5GB, so maybe they don’t have a choice.

[via Boy Genius Report]

We have two bits of Verizon BlackBerry information for you guys…

The first is that one of our connects has informed us that the mythical OS 5.0 upgrade for the BlackBerry Tour 9630 will be released within the next “2-3 weeks.” It will also contain a Push-To-Talk feature that will run over Verizon’s data network for a $5/month fee. This ties in nicely to our second bit of info… We’ve heard that the BlackBerry Bold 9650, or BlackBerry Tour2 9650, or BlackBerry Whatever 9650x will launch unfortunately around May. It will also include PTT.

A lot happened in the US smartphone market from October 2009 to January 2010, but thankfully there are companies like comScore kicking about to help us make sense of just which platforms were the biggest winners and losers during this period. The biggest platform was not surprisingly Google’s Android which saw an uptick of 4.3% to a total of 7.1% thanks in part to the successful launches of handsets like the DROID, DROID ERIS and Hero. RIM’s BlackBerry OS, which faired second best with a gain of 1.7% continued to dominate the total smartphone market at 43%, but one has to wonder if RIM could have done just a little bit more. After all, it did launch the BlackBerry Bold 9700, Curve 8530 and Storm2 during these months. Apple’s iPhone didn’t do as well as many would have guessed, but its 0.3% increase makes quite a bit of sense when you consider the tradition of people holding out on iPhone purchases in the six months leading up the summer release of the devices later iteration. Nonetheless, it does hold a 25.1% stake in the US smartphone market. When it comes to market share, one’s success is another’s misfortune. Not exactly a stranger to losing ground, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile managed to shed 4.0% thanks in part to what can be politely summed up as a general indifference to its current platform (how things will change). After this, we saw Palm with a loss of 2.1%. In Palm’s defence a lot of this can be attributed to people finally getting around to ditching Palm OS, but the fact remains that thing’s aren’t going to well for a company that many felt was on the path to recovery just 15 months ago.

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