Saturday, February 26, 2011

MobileCrunch

MobileCrunch

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Weekend Giveaway: Rebtel Wants You To Have A Motorola Atrix

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 07:00 PM PST

Rebtel is offering us one hot little Motorola Atrix to give away this weekend to one lucky reader. How do you win? Well first you have to be very very nice to animals and the environment and then you need to click through to comment.

Rebtel, FYI, offers cheap VoIP calling on Android, iOS, and Blackberry devices and they want you to try the service on a brand new Motorola Atrix. To enter, comment below about how you rebelled today and we’ll pick one winner on Monday at noon Eastern.

To be clear, this is an AT&T Atrix without service so if you want to use it here or overseas, you’re going to have to find your own SIM card. Otherwise, comment away.

“Feature Phone”, “Sexting” and “Rumor Mill” added to the Oxford Dictionary

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 04:37 PM PST

As anyone who’s been reading MobileCrunch for a while knows, I refer to the rumor mill in just about every other post. Usually it’s when I’m decrying the rumor mill as a cruel, cruel vixen, hell bent on crushing our spirits by setting our hopes on itty-bitty candy-powered iPhones, only to smack us in the face with silly things like logic, feasibility, and whats-actually-happening.

Sometimes, I worry that new readers won’t know what the rumor mill is. Will they think it’s a real place? Will they try to go to there? Fortunately, I can now just send them to the Oxford Friggin’ Dictionary, which added the term to its catalog today.

The Rumor Mill, according to the Oxford Dictionary:

used to refer to the process by which rumors and gossip are originated and circulated among a group of people:
the rumor mill says that he was reimbursed to the tune of $25 million

Sure. That works. We also would have accepted “used to refer to the ambiguous, impalpable source of sometimes-true-but-often-not blurps of information”, or this image.

Two other mobile-ish words added to the dictionary today: “Sexting“, and “Feature Phone“. They also added the term “fnarr fnarr“, which has absolutely nothing to do with cell phones but is absolutely glorious regardless. fnarr fnarr.

[Via MSNBC]

PSA: Own An Android 3.0 Device And A Mac? Install This.

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 04:05 PM PST

Unless you’re the hack-it-yourself type, a lucky blogger type, or the super-early-adopter type, chances are pretty good that you don’t have an Android 3.0 device just yet.

But when that day comes, you’re going to need to transfer files back and forth — and if you’ve got a Mac, things aren’t going to be quite as straightforward as they were on pre-Android 3.0 devices. Whereas simply plugging in the USB cable was once all you’d need, Mac users will now need this here File Transfer utility. Windows users should be a-okay out of the box. That step has managed to confuse just about everyone we know who’s acquired a 3.0-device so far (read the manual? LOL! NERD ALERT!), so consider this a little future-proofing PSA.

Consumer Reports Confirms Death Grip In Verizon iPhone

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 11:40 AM PST

Apple just can’t get a break. Consumer Reports is, well, reporting that in their testing scenarios the Verizon iPhone 4 has the same “death grip” attenuation issues as the AT&T/GSM model.

Just as with the previous model, the Verizon iPhone 4 suffers from the same conductive gap issues and the problems manifest when you touch the small spot between the two pieces of metal cladding.

This means you’ll probably have to put your iPhone in a case and clearly the issue isn’t stopping the iPhone 4 from still selling like crazy.

With the iPhone 4, we placed a finger in contact with the lower-left-side gap. Reception typically dropped notably within 15 seconds or so of the gap being bridged. The iPhone eventually dropped calls when touched at very low signal strength—that is, at levels of around one bar in the phone’s signal-strength meter.

HTC Merge Announced At Last, Will Be HTC’s First Android-powered CDMA World Phone

Posted: 25 Feb 2011 09:16 AM PST

The HTC Merge! Remember that thing? It was the focus of almost constant leaks back in 2010 (like this one, or this one , or this one) and then… nothing. It pretty much disappeared off the radar, with word that HTC had gone back to the drawing board to add LTE support.

Well, the HTC Merge is finally a real boy.

HTC just popped out a press release on the device, confirming that it’s an Android 2.2 phone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, a 5 megapixel rear camera, a 3.8″ display, and that it’ll be HTC’s first Android-powered CDMA world phone. Alas, there’s no mention of LTE support — but they might just be holding that back for certain carriers (read: Verizon) to talk up when launch time comes sometime in “Spring 2011″.
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