By Yesterday you met the still unnamed Phandroid Robot in our Site Redesign post. With all the drama and complications of bringing our new look live, we admittedly fell a step behind on the news beat. We want to catch everyone up to speed in one fell swoop so we can get back to your regularly scheduled and newly sexified phandroid news! Here are some of the stories we missed:
G1 Available In All T-Mobile Retail Stores
Its not a surprise that T-Mobile started off selling the G1 in areas with 3G coverage. Afterall, we love ourselves some 3G and it does make a difference. But why should areas with measley 2G network speeds be locked out of owning a G1?
Well… they weren’t. They could buy it online or order it in-store. But this past weekend T-Mobile began selling the G1 on-the-spot in all retail stores including those without 3G. It makes perfect sense… [Via BGR]
Android Multi-Touch Via 3rd Party
Although the T-Mobile G1 and Android don’t have multi-touch function build in – in fact they have it commented out – we’ve seen before that Multi-touch is certainly possible. In a nod to the power of open source, Luke Hutchinson has released an app for Android that will allow you to use Multi-Touch on your Droid:
It’s not available in the market and you’ll have to engage into some device flashing and hackery that might void your warranty, but the point in all of this is what’s possible.
Multi-Touch Patents Awarded To Apple
Many thought that the reason Google Engineers commented-out Android’s multi-touch code was because of potential intellectual property infringement. Apple COO Tim Cook recently threatened companies that thought they might get away with using their technology… the quote suggests Apple might have an issue with the Palm Pre and WebOS. And with the United States Patent & Trademark Office just published Apple’s Patent for, “Touch Screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics” they might have a case.
We’ll have to play wait and see – which it seems like Google is doing. Meanwhile, brilliant open source devs like Luke (above) are hooking us up sans litigation.
Android Powered Forknife Robot!
All this legal mambo jambo may have spoiled your mood. So to cheer you up we’ve got “Forknife”, an actual toy-like robot powered by the T-Mobile G1 and hacked together by Jeffrey Nelson from Macpod Software. I think they should make that little guy a friend and name it Knifork… or a chick named Spoon.
The First Android Application Virus?
So you’re sick with the flu but you haven’t seen your girlfriend/boyfriend in awhile and you make an effort to brave the storm and watch a movie with them. They get the flu. They get mad and dump you. Regardless of how you view this scenario it is pure fact that one person gave the other person a virus, correct?
Although eMobiStudio and their developers claim that, “Whatever damage is out there has not been done by our product,” there are a hoard of people saying that their application – MemoryUp – erases all of their data including the contacts in their phonebook and proceeds to freeze the phone. Whether or not the consequences were intended or not it brings up the interesting issue of scam/spam/virus apps on the open Android Market and what negative problems this type of loosely guarded system could create. [Via Wired.com]
All Caught Up…
We didn’t miss THAT much now did we? If we left anything else out, drop a line/link in the comment for everyone else. Hopefully we’re back to the status quo now… well, status quo is boring. We’re now back to your turbulently entertaining tech news attention stance. How about that?
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