Rogers launches Canada’s first LTE network – true 4G, not 3G+ renamed

True 4G/LTE has finally launched in Canada via Rogers. We had first heard of this back in February this year, and were very excited to see that Canada wasn’t going to be left in the dust for wireless technology. Although it is only in Ottawa right now, Rogers has plans to launch in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal this year, as well as 21 more markets across Canada in 2012.
Rogers will first launch with the Sierra LTE enabled USB Rocketstick, followed by HTC and Samsung LTE smartphones later this year. Sweet! Would this mean that we get the HTC Thunderbolt? Or even the Samsung Nexus 4G, or even the HTC EVO 4G

Android Still first in OS usage, iPhone top device, Windows Phone 7 largest impressions gain – report

So not surprisingly, Android is still the top dog when it comes to overall mobile OS market Share with for the 7th straight month now at 54%, with Apple’s iOS behind it at 26%. Of special not however is that although Nokia and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 didn’t have a strong presence in the mobile OS mix, WP7 has the largest impressions quarter over quarter at 31%, RIM is second with 29%, where Android grew by 18% and iOS by 11%. That growth shows that WP7 and RIM still have share potential, and could make a comeback, but it would be a long one.
The Apple iPhone is still the most used device at 16.19%, followed second by RIM’s BlackBerry Curve at 5.57%, then the Motorola Droid at 2.95%. Out of the top 20 devices as seen below, Android devices total 22.6% over the iPhone, but this does not take into account tablet devices where the Apple iPad rules the roost substantially.

Fujitsu Toshiba launches first Windows Phone 7 Mango smartphone – au IS12T

Enter a new dawn of  technologically advanced smartphones and hardware, the Fujitsu Toshiba au IS12T Windows Phone 7.5 Mango device. It’s the first of its kind in more ways than just being the first to run WP7 Mango, it’s also the first to pair massive hardware specs into a smartphone. The au IS12T has 32GB onboard storage (HUGE!), along with a 13.2 megapixel rear camera with autofocus, and it’s waterproof! Has Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. This device is a monster! I can’t wait for this to get to North America, alas, we don’t know exactly when that’s going to be just yet, or how much it’ll cost. But we’ll find out soon enough!

Firefox 6 breaks out ahead of schedule, gets official August 16th

It looks like the sly fox is ready to make its worldwide debut a few days early. In typical Mozilla fashion, a complete build of Firefox 6 is now unofficially available for your downloading pleasure, three days ahead of schedule. If you're looking for a major facelift to the desktop edition, you won't find one here -- most of the new features aren't cosmetic. Perhaps most visibly, you'll find the domain name of the page you're parked on highlighted in the address bar. On the Android side, version 6 makes much bigger promises, like a "fresh visual style in Chrome Gingerbread," enhanced image scaling, and, perhaps most importantly, it's "faster and uses less memory." We've downloaded the desktop version of the browser ourselves, and we've found the release quite snappy. If you're not afraid of a little pre-release downloading, you can catch the (desktop) fox at the source links below. And as per usual, please let us know how it's treating you.

Swarm robots attack your bookshelf, win AAAI Oscar

What's more frightening than a swarm of robots? An award-winning swarm of robots trained to raid your library -- that's what. This SciFi-worthy outfit of mechanized literature swindlers, known as the "Swarmanoid," landed themselves the Best Video Award at this week's AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) conference in San Francisco. The video in question features the mixed bag of eye-bots, hand-bots and foot-bots in an Oceans 11-style bookcase heist. Of course, there are probably easier ways to reach the top shelf (e.g. a ladder), but none that get us thinking about the end times quite like this

Google acquiring Motorola Mobility

Happy Monday to you, and happy Monday to Motorola Mobility, which Google has announced is about to become its next acquisition. This comes hot on the heels of a $56 million Q2 net loss for Moto -- and CEO Sanjay Jha's less than subtle hints about going fishing for Android-related patent royalties. Now, at a price of $40 per share for a total of about $12.5 billion, Big G will be making Moto a "dedicated Android partner" to "supercharge the Android ecosystem" and "enhance competition in mobile computing."

Larry Page had this to say about the deal:

Motorola Mobility's total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies. Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.

What happens next? While this will of course strengthen the ties between hardware and software, Google is pledging to continue offering Android as an open platform -- Moto will license it and others will be able to as ever. Additionally, Google will continue to operate its new toy as a separate business and not morph it into an in-house hardware wing. But, one has to wonder what this means for companies like Samsung, which partnered closely with Google on the Nexus S, and of course HTC, which released the Nexus One and the iconic G1. And then there's the big question: just where does Moto Blur fit into this equation?

How would you change T-Mobile's G-Slate?

Splurged on a T-Mobile G-Slate, did you? Here's your opportunity to voice your opinion to LG (and anyone else who'll listen). Sporting an unorthodox aspect ratio and an affinity for a carrier that may not exist on its own by this time next year, it's certainly one of the odder slate options on the market. Combine that with the inability to buy a WiFi-only model, and you've got yourself firmly into niche territory. That said, we're confident that LG moved quite a few of these, and chances are that some of those buyers are reading these words right now. If that's you, we're interested to hear how you'd do things differently the next go 'round. Are you a fan of the form factor? Pining for a matte panel? Would you have preferred a WWAN-less variant? Is the UI everything you'd hoped for... and more? Go on and drop your thoughts in comments below -- mama always encouraged the art of getting things off your chest.

Gingerbread Build For Evo4G Now Rooted

A few weeks back the Sprint Evo4G received the update to themuch anticipated Gingerbread build. This update brought devices up to Google’slatest software, but also re-locked rooted devices. This new lock was notrootable till today. The Revolutionary team managed to add devices using thenew Hboot 2.16.0001 system to their unlocking software.
For any Evo4G users out there wanting to get their phonesback to the rooted world of bliss, follow the source link and read thedirections.

HTC Ruby Specs Leaked

We've heard of the HTC Ruby before, but now we have a littlemore details on the possible future T-Mobile 4G device. The device that mightcome with beats audio is now being rumored to have a dual-core processor. Mostnew premium HTC devices are apparently going down the dual-core pathway, andthis is one of them. TMONews is reporting this phone will have HTC’s 1.5Ghzdual core processor, a 4.3” qHD display, and a dedicated camera and videobuttons (not an all in one) for the 8 megapixel member in the back. For thosethat are fans of video calling; the phone will have a 2 megapixel front facingcamera. The other less exciting news isthat this device will have 1GB of RAM and Bluetooth 3.0 for fast data transfer.
There you go folks. T-Mobile now has this bad boy on itsraider, the future Nexus Prime, along with the Galaxy S II… What does thecompetition have on us?

Photon 4G Bootloader Unlocked- The Bionic Could Be Next after it is Released

The Photon 4G’s bootloader has just been unlocked. What this could possibly mean, is that the DROID3, and even the Bionic have a chance of an unlocking. We need all the hard working developers we can get with an expected Bionic announcement sometime soon.

T-Mobile preps Samsung Gravity TXT for August 24th launch

While the smartphone is everybody's darling, T-Mobile and Samsung are hoping the Samsung Gravity TXT might garner some love, too. This landscape QWERTY slide features a 2.4-inch display, 2 megapixel camera, and Social Buzz -- via a dedicated key -- which integrates all your social sites into one app. The pic above seems to have the new feature phone shipping August 24th at $139.99 off-contract or $39.99

Introduction:

You first need to register to use the app

Remember Skyfire, the browser that converts Flash videos to an iOS compatible format? The same exact one that was pulled from the App Store as it enjoyed such huge popularity that its servers couldn't take it? Well, in the last couple of days we've been playing with Skyfire VideoQ ($3.99 on the App Store), a neat little app by the same company that offers similar functionality but not tied with a particular browser – it will play back a Flash video whenever you encounter one on the web. Why do you need it? How about playing back The Daily Show or that South Park episode that you missed on your iOS device?

The idea is pretty simple: whenever you stumble upon a video you can't play - you just email the link to it to video@skyfire.com, go back to Skyfire VideoQ hit the refresh button and it appears in an iOS compatible version. Voila! A killer app? For your average Flash-hungry iOS user – yes, but there are a couple of caveats we have to mention before giving our heart-felt recommendation.

Interface and Functionality:

Skyfire VideoQ is designed for both iPhone and iPad running iOS 4.0 or higher. While its main function is to deliver you that one video you want to see online, it also serves to help you discover new videos. That's why when you fire up the app you're greeted with four tabs, but first you need to register by sending an email with your Device ID. 

The first tab, your queue, lists all the videos you've requested by email. The screen fits four of them at a time, but you can flick up or down and remove some of them. Tapping on a particular video doesn't automatically play it – actually it splits the screen with the requested video in the upper part and all the videos the app could pull from that website displayed in the bottom half. To go into full screen mode you simply put your device in landscape mode – an elegant and intuitive solution.

After watching a couple of videos, though, you realize that the VideoQ service has a couple of notable downsides. First of all, all footage is converted on Skyfire's servers to a compatible format, but that means that quality gets degraded – we found the picture to be pixelized, while audio was muffled. We found buffering to also take quite a while, often 30 seconds or more.

In addition, you can't fast forward through videos – that's right there's no timeline at all for you to navigate when watching something. Your settings are limited to the bare minimum – pause and play. You can't even stretch the video to fill the screen, which is a disappointment. But VideoQ has this major benefit of bringing you any Flash video (the app claims to support over 200,000 websites, and it did play most of what we threw at it). You can also share a video via email or open the webpage where it stems from in Safari (the video won't play, though).

Back to the main menu, second on the list comes the Hot videos tab. The tab gives you “hot” videos judged by what Skyfire users watch, but in reality you end up with a pretty chaotic selection of videos ranging from the aforementioned Jon Stewart's Daily Show to anime. The next tab, Channels, is a bit less random as you can specify your channels of interest like Technology or Humor for example, but again you can't add websites to those collections, so you have to make do with what the app creators have provided (which is not that bad admittedly, just limited). Finally, you've also got the Settings tab with FAQs and a couple of other informational/sharing features.

Conclusion:

So finally, is Skyfire VideoQ worth it? For $3.99 you can get Flash videos on your iOS device without the hurdles of using a particular browser and while the quality leaves a lot to be desired, this feature alone would lure most of you into a purchase. In addition, you can also use the app to bring together all of your favorite videos into one place. The app also has a basic catalog of popular websites streaming video, which is a welcome addition. 

Sure, you have to send an email and switch to VideoQ from the browser, then wait a while for the video to buffer, but those are the realities of iOS. And whatever Steve Jobs says about Flash, having access to those videos is something we would all appreciate.

Pros:

+ Plays Flash videos,

+ Comes with a catalog of channels and videos.

Cons:

- Video quality gets degraded,

- Buffering is slow.