slshwtw writes "Pope Benedict XVI has recently encouraged priests to blog and promoted Christian Netiquette. Now apparently the Roman Catholic church has sanctioned a 'Confession App,' available through iTunes for $1.99. Apparently it doesn't replace 'traditional,' in-person confession, but walks one through the process, even suggesting sins you may wish to confess."'

Sprint and Kyocera want you to believe that two screens are better than one, even on a pocket-sized phone. The new Android-powered Kyocera smartphone, the Echo, will feature two touchscreen surfaces in a hinged design. The article says: "The Echo’s highlights can be seen in the phone’s obvious multitasking potential. The phone can be operated like most other touchscreen smartphones in its single-screen mode, but in 'Simul-task mode' users can run separate apps on each screen — like, say, open a text on the upper screen while reading an email on the lower one."

siliconbits writes "Texas Instruments wants to deliver a Minority Report-like user interface by combining its just-announced OMAP 5 platform, which is based on two Cortex A15 cores, with one of its own DLP pico projectors and a camera. The US semiconductor giant wants to pioneer the use of so-called next generation natural user interfaces by adding hardware support for stereoscopic 3D, gesturing including proximity sensor and interactive projection. This is reminiscent of the SixthSense, a wearable device invented by Pranav Mistry, which was demoed back in March 2009 by the then-PhD student of MIT's Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group at TED."

An anonymous reader writes "The Chronic Dev Team have rolled out Greenpoison RC5_4 aka Greenpois0n RC5 b4 for both the Mac and Windows platform, which brings untethered jailbreak for the Verizon iPhone." Since 500k iPhones were sold on the first day it'll be interesting to see how Verizon throttles users.

karios writes "Today I received a takedown letter from a law firm representing the Tetris Company for copyright violations involving my game Tetrada, which I published on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The witch hunt, after hitting Android, iOS and other platforms, continues on Windows Phone 7. It's a pity, since some of the tetromino games in the Marketplace were pretty decent."

WrongSizeGlass writes "The price of Motorola's XOOM Tablet has been leaked in a Best Buy ad. The $799 Android 3-enabled tablet will be available starting Feb 24th. Though the price may seem a bit high, the most surprising detail is that activating the Xoom's Wi-Fi will require signing up for at least one month of Verizon's 3G service. Let's hope the fine print in the Best Buy ad turns out to be a typo."

pbahra writes "French mobile telephone infrastructure manufacturer Alcatel-Lucent today unveiled technology that shrinks a mobile cell tower to a box the size of a Rubik's cube, potentially changing the structure of the cellular network, reducing greenhouse emissions and bringing mobile broadband into new areas. According to Wim Sweldens, president of wireless activities for Alcatel-Lucent, by reducing the technology from something the size of a filing cabinet, networks would reduce the total cost of ownership by half, as well as halving the global CO2 emissions from the mobile industry — currently equivalent of 15 million cars a year."

adeelarshad82 writes "When you look at the Apple iPad's sales figures, it's not hard to see why every technology company on the planet is jumping on the tablet bandwagon, a lot of which are Android tablets. Unfortunately though, some of these Android tablets were born way too early. They are haunted with a series of problems including flimsy hardware, low-quality resistive touch screens, serious display resolution issues, and old Android versions with limited or non-existent access to apps. Even the Samsung Galaxy Tab came well before its time. Even though it's fast, well-designed, and comes with a decent Android implementation, its functionality is limited to that of an Android smartphone. So here's to hoping that Honeycomb's functionality make up for the lost ground."

sitkill writes "A Canadian Federal Court ruling has rejected the Tory Cabinet's decision to overturn a CRTC mandate not allowing Globalive (which is more commonly known in Canada as the mobile carrier Wind) to operate in Canada. This is a small vindication to the embattled CRTC, which has been recently in the spotlight for its decision on usage based billing, drawing criticism from the Tory Cabinet. The CEO, Mr. Lacavera, stressed that this would not result in Globalive's Wind Mobile being shut down, simply that it would require another round of wrangling with the regulator over how much foreign influence is acceptable in a Canadian telecommunications company."

An anonymous reader writes "Privacy groups announced a mobile privacy developer challenge yesterday. The competition, Develop for Privacy, challenges mobile app developers to create tools that help ordinary mobile device users understand and protect their privacy. It's sponsored by the ACLU of Northern California, the ACLU of Washington, and the Tor Project, with the assistance of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner's Office. Submission deadline is May 31, 2011. The winner will be announced in August 2011 at an event in Las Vegas, coinciding with the DEFCON and Black Hat security conferences."

MojoKid writes "Dell recently started shipping their Streak 7 tablet and it's the highly anticipated big brother of Dell's 5-inch tablet, the Streak 5 that came out in September of 2010. The larger Streak 7 goes up against stiff competition with the likes of Samsung's Galaxy Tab, though the Streak 7 is retailing slightly lower with or without a contract through T-Mobile. Regardless, the Dell Streak 7 offers some pluses over the Galaxy Tab, like its 5MP rear-facing camera, but comes up short in other areas, such as its lower resolution (800x480) display — versus the Galaxy Tab's 1024x600 display. The Dell Streak 7 also has NVIDIA's Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz processor under its hood for a rather snappy Android 2.2 experience, as you can see here in this early, hands-on preview of the device. In early benchmark testing, the Streak 7 is looking pretty strong versus the Galaxy Tab, which comes in neck-and-neck with the Streak 7 in Neocore, at around 54 FPS."

An anonymous reader writes "Security researcher Vanja Svajcer is warning that cybercriminals may be particularly interested in stealing your Google credentials, after discovering a way of installing applications onto Android smartphones with no interaction required by the phone's owner. The new web-based Android Market retrieves the details of Android devices registered to the Google address, and automatically installs software onto the associated smartphones with no user interaction required on the phone itself. Svajcer summarizes: 'Google should make changes to the remote installation mechanism as soon as possible. As a minimum, a dialog should be displayed on the receiving device so that the user must personally accept the application that is being installed.'"

Hugh Pickens writes writes "KCRA reports that the number of contraband cell phones discovered in California state prisons has exploded as prison guards, staff and vendors are cashing in on smuggled phones that can fetch between $200 and $800. Although the large majority of inmates are using the phones to stay in contact with loved ones, there have been documented cases of escape attempts, drug deals and conference calls coordinated via smuggled cell phones. 'The potential is there for the worst kind of activity,' says Folsom Prison Warden Rick Hill. Even Charles Manson has been caught with a cellphone smuggled to him. 'We know the problem is out of control,' says State Senator Alex Padilla, who has proposed making such smuggling illegal in hopes of stopping the continued rise of contraband cell phones in prison."

tekgoblin writes "Verizon has enacted a new policy today that allows them to throttle 'high' bandwidth users on their network. We're not sure exactly what 'high' means but it is probably over 2GB of data per month. This comes as the iPhone launches on Verizon's network. The policy is said to only affect the top 5% of data users on the network. When these 5% of users hit the soft limit they will be throttled during peak times of the day. From the note sent to customers: 'Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren't negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.'"

tekgoblin writes "Google has officially announced that Honeycomb will not be coming to Android based smartphones. Android 3.0 Honeycomb was specifically made for Tablets according to a Google spokesperson. Although, certain features that are present on Honeycomb will become available over time on Android smartphones. Google has not offered any information to what features will be ported over specifically." On the bright side, Honeycomb will come with disk-encryption capabilities built in.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "UPI reports that AT&T is facing a lawsuit that says AT&T routinely bills for 7 percent to 14 percent more data transactions than normally take place, which could blossom into a costly class-action case. Court papers claim that attorneys set up a test account for an iPhone, then closed all of its apps and left the device unused for 10 days. AT&T still billed the account for 2,292 KB of usage. 'A significant portion of the data revenues were inflated by AT&T's rigged billing system for data transactions,' say court papers filed on behalf of AT&T customer Patrick Hendricks. 'This is like the rigged gas pump charging you when you never even pulled your car into the station.' Attorneys say they would file to have the case moved to class-action status, which makes the outcome relevant to all of AT&T's iPhone accounts."

nk497 writes "Symbian is no longer the most-shipped mobile platform, with Android finally knocking Nokia's OS out of the number one position. Manufacturers shipped 32.9 million Android devices in Q4 of last year, compared to 31 million Symbian devices, according to Canalys. That gives Google a 33% share of the global mobile market, over 31% for Nokia's Symbian. 'It's gone from nowhere to number one in the space of two years, which is pretty impressive,' Canalys analyst Pete Cunningham said, predicting Android would double its growth rate this year."

tekgoblin writes "It appears Apple has changed its stance on whether an iOS device is actually water damaged. If you remember when the 13-year-old girl sued Apple in December, it was because her iPhone's moisture sensors had gone off and Apple voided her warranty. Those sensors have also been triggered by simply exposing the phone to low temperatures. Now Apple says that if the moisture sensors are red but the customer disputes and says no liquid has come into contact with the device, the warranty may still apply."

Barnes & Noble markets the Nook Color as an e-reader with tablet functionality handily built in, but that designation undersells it a bit — it's just as easy to see it as an Android tablet with a 7" multitouch display and a Cortex A8 processor that happens to have strong book-reading features. Compared to the current big name in 7" Android tablets, Samsung's Galaxy Tab, it's quite underspec'd (no camera or GPS receiver, Wi-Fi but no 3G), but it also costs only $250. A few days ago, Android hackers managed to put Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) onto the Color, though in a mostly crippled state. Now Liliputing points out that they've enabled hardware acceleration, too. Pretty neat that one of the cheapest capacitive-screen tablets you can get handles an operating system that a few weeks back was expected to require heavier iron. As comments at Engadget point out, it's not the very smoothest performance, but this is an early build by enthusiasts, and doesn't look too shabby. The developer's announcement of the port points out that this is a work in progress: "What is not working... pretty much everything else, no accelerometer, no wlan, no sound. Haven't started working on those things yet."

theodp writes "Verifying Google's data snare is crucial to assessing a penalty and assuring no repeat,' said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal last December in response to Google's 'accidental' collection of payload data from WiFi networks. 'We will fight to compel Google to come clean-granting my office access to improperly collected materials and protecting confidentiality, as the company has done in Canada and elsewhere.' That was then. Luckily for Google, there's a new AG in town, and Blumenthal successor George Jepsen said Friday that his office will enter into settlement negotiations with the company without reviewing the pilfered data, which Google has steadfastly refused to share with it. 'This is a good result for the people of Connecticut,' Jepsen said in a statement. A separate Jepsen press release suggested some of the blame for the privacy offenses laid with Google's victims, who were advised to 'turn off your wireless network when you know you won't use it' to thwart those who 'may be watching your Internet activity without your knowledge."