Samsung’s BlackJack II

 

Samsung USA has announced that the BlackJack II (SGH-i617) will go on sale on Friday, which is known in much of the USA as Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season. Initially the BlackJack II will be available in black only, but the red wine colored unit will go on sale on December 12th. The BlackJack II will be available from AT&T online and retail locations for US$149.99 with a new two year contract, after a mail-in rebate.

Source : Mobileburn.com

Samsung’s 8 megapixel CMOS sensor for phones

Yet another world’s first from the samsung guys.Samsung just announced availability of their 8 megapixel CMOS sensor which shares roughly the same 10.5×11.5×9.4-mm girth of its 3 megapixel cuz. Just make sure you’ve got plenty of light to frame those shots if you’re expecting anything close to a quality image.

The Nokia N82 gets official

Right on schedule, Nokia has announced its latest addition to the multimedia-centric (and game-riffic) Nseries line, the N82 candybar. The phone clearly bears a striking resemblance to its recently announced cousin—the N81 slider—but the N82 ups the ante with a 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens paired with autofocus (naturally) and a xenon flash. Other features include microSD expansion, support for Nokia’s own Ovi goodies, WiFi, assisted GPS, a 2.4 inch QVGA display front and center, and an honest-to-goodness 3.5mm headphone jack like the N95 before it

Nokia Haptikos Set to Revolutionize Touchscreen Devices

One of the biggest drawbacks to many users of the iPhone is the lack of tactile feedback from the onscreen keyboard. Nokia has some new technology that is set to revolutionize the touchscreen phone market and make the iPhone green with envy.

Nokia’s Haptikos technology doesn’t simply vibrate under your finger like some touchscreen devices, but clicks and feels, according to The Red Ferret Journal, just like you are clicking a real key. The description of the technology sounds very similar to the touchscreen feedback patent filed by Apple recently in that it uses a screen with two elements that move to provide the feel of clicking something.

Roope Takala, Senior Program Manager at Nokia’s research labs told The Red Ferret Journal, “The basic technology is not that difficult,” he explained, “We inserted two small piezo sensor pads under the screen and engineered in a 0.1mm movement in the screen itself. What’s taken the time has been fine tuning the movement and response to mimic exactly the sensation of pressing a real key.”

Samsung follows crowd, preps M4650 Windows Mobile touchphone

Samsung officially calls this the M4650 Multi-Touch, but get this, it doesn’t support multi-touch. It does support single touches of its 2.8 inch screen, though, which’ll have to do seeing how it lacks either numeric or QWERTY keypads.

The Korean company is prepping the Windows Mobile 6-based touchphone for its domestic market, matching a recent trend toward keyless, finger-friendly input that LG, HTC, Apple, and others have adopted in recent months. A customized build of Windows Mobile isn’t the only trick up the handset’s sleeve, either: haptics give users a little bit of positive feedback when they make contact with the display, and when Office Mobile finally ceases to be entertaining, the terrestrial DMB tuner should come in handy.

Sony Ericsson Pre-Christmas Cellphone Lineup Leaked

Sony Ericsson’s new line of handsets will include:

The W890i, which will be a 3G Walkman branded cellphone, have a 3.2MP camera, an accelerometer for gesture based controls and a refresh to Sony’s Walkman media player software. The second phone in the supposed list will be the W380i, a lower end Walkman phone also toting gesture based controls. Finally, the last model shall apparently go by the K660i moniker, which shall be designed specifically for Internet browsing. Most interestingly, this model is supposed to support an on screen cursor, and both, landscape and portrait based browsing.

Instant Jailbreak for iPhone and iPod touch

A crew of hackers (including hdm/metasploit, rezn, dinopio, drudge, kroo, pumpkin, davidc, dunham, and NerveGas) have introduced a one-touch instant jailbreak for both iPhone and iPod touch. The jailbreak opens your iPhone for full disk access and installs Installer.app so you can add pretty much any third party application you like.

To use it, open Safari and point your browser to jailbreakme.com (which we aren’t linking to so folks won’t install this by accident, but you are prompted to confirm). Once there, read the directions, scroll to the bottom, and tap Install AppSnapp. If Safari disappears and you return to the main Home screen, you’re good. Just wait a minute more for your unit to restart–don’t touch anything until you see the slide to unlock screen. If Safari hangs, just quit out (press and hold Home for 4-8 seconds) and try again.

Once you get to slide-to-unlock, go ahead and unlock your iPhone or iPod touch. You’ll return to your home screen which will contain a new Installer.app icon. If you’ll want to ssh into your unit, install the BSD subsystem, Community Sources, and then install Open SSH–you may need to upgrade Installer.app (thanks Ste). With Open SSH and sshfs (part of Mac Fuse), you can open Finder windows that offer direct drag and drop access to your phone or touch.

The jailbreak really is as easy as it sounds. I restored my iPod touch and jailbroke it just a few minutes ago and it worked great

iPhone Elite team announces “revirginizer”

Over at Google Code, the iphone-elite team has released their revirginizing tool, which is designed to rebuild your iPhone’s seczone lock table. After using this tool, the team suggests, your 1.0.2 unlocked iPhone will return to its pre-unlocked state and be safe to upgrade to 1.1.1.As with all restore/revirginizing methods, I recommend caution. You may want to wait a few days, listen to reports, and see if iPhones truly get restored to a “never been kissed” or even “never held hands” state of pure Apple-in-the-Garden innocence.

iPhone Installer App Updated to 3.0beta3 With Many Improvements

The iPhone’s Installer.app has been updated to 3.0, and features a much better organizational system than the previous “everything listed in a flat list that takes forever to scroll through”. Not only are there sections now, you can “Update All”, and the packaging backend is improved as well. You can’t install this directly on your phone, but instead you have to install the older version, then update via installer itself. If you have 1.1.1, you’ll have to jailbreak first, then transfer it on manually. However, it does detect what firmware version you’re running and only displays the apps that run fine on yours. [Installer via PSMXY]

DOT.TUNES brings wifi streaming to iPhone and iPod Touch

DOT.TUNES has released two plugins that bring wifi (not EDGE) streaming to both the iPhone and the iPod Touch, respectively. DOT.TUNES basically turns your Mac into a web server for streaming iTunes content across your local network or across the internet. The two new plugins optimize the interface for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. With either you get access to your playlists, artists, albums, etc.

Of course any time you run your Mac as a server there are potential security concerns, but DOT.TUNES appears to be a great way to get iTunes content onto your iPhone or iPod Touch over the internet. They’ve even set up a demo server that will show you how it works (click here for the iPhone interface).

DOT.TUNES 4 itself is a free download, but the iPhone and iPod Touch plugins are $20 each.