Hackers are continuing to outpace Apple with feature additions. The team at iMobileCinema has created a flash plugin for the Mobile Safari browser. It’s a beta release and still a bit buggy. This app is only available to people who have jailbroken their iPhones. You just need to add d.imobilecinema.com to your sources in Cydia to get the package to appear. While it can crash from time to time, it’s certainly better than no support at all.
[via Gizmodo]
In our Dev Phone 1 excitement last week, we somehow overlooked phoneWreck’s teardown of the T-Mobile G1. The complex slider mechanism is certainly worth looking out. One of the major oddities they point out is the inclusion of two vibration motors. One is mounted next to the SIM on the mainboard. While the other is mounted in the frame next to the earpiece. We wonder what was gained/solved by using two. The phone also includes a digital compass module. We’d like a more detailed explanation of how the Xilinx CPLD is used. From this article in 2006, it seems HTC uses them to generate custom clock signals and switching off devices for power management.
While working towards open-sourcing Android, the team continued to work on new features in their own private development branch. These have now been published publicly in the “cupcake” branch. There’s a lot of interesting new features and bug fixes included. We’ve got a rundown of many of the significant additions after the break.
Continue reading “Android Adds A2DP, AVRCP Bluetooth And More”
iPhone dev team is at it again. They claim to have finally hacked the iPhone 3G. Originally codenamed “yellowsn0w”, it is targeted to be released on December 31st. This should free you from your locked in carrier as long as you have version 2.11.07 or earlier.
[via Engadget]
Google has new program to sell Android phones directly to developers. The Android Dev Phone 1 is both SIM-unlocked and hardware-unlocked. SIM-unlocked means you can use it on any GSM carrier you want. Hardware-unlocked means you can run any system you want on the phone, not just officially signed ones. No more need to worry about security patches taking away your root access.
The device is $399. You will need to purchase it through the Android Market as a registered developer (a $25 fee). We wonder how long before the unsigned bootloader starts getting flashed to T-Mobile phones.
Two new Android phones have surfaced recently which may prove just as friendly: the Kogan Agora Pro and the QiGi i6.
UPDATE: While shipping is free in US, it is incredibly expensive everywhere else. Yes, we bought one.
[via Techmeme]
[photo: tnkgrl]
If you can get through the cell phone text speak, you’ll probably enjoy this cool tutorial on how to build a cell phone controlled robot. This bot decodes the key tones, similar to the automated phone systems we’ve all experienced. It uses a chip called a MT8870 DTMF decoder to translate the signal for the Atmega 16 controller. The circuit diagram is pretty hard to read, maybe we missed a downloadable one somewhere. The source code is available.
It would be nice to get some feedback from the robot, so you aren’t driving it completely blind. This is similar to the Lego cell phone rover that we showed you before. Next, he should make it recognize voice commands.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L3hdPxMa_o]
[Stephen Myers] has been toying around with some beta ioBridge hardware. He decided to build a remote control dog treat dispenser. ioBridge‘s hardware is built specifically to make web enabling projects easy. The main controller board has four I/O channels that speak to addon modules. It has an ethernet port on the main board and an easy to configure website.
[Stephen] used a servo addon board for his project. The dispenser is built from a scrap CD spindle attached to a servo. He can issue commands from his iPhone, which shows live video of the kennel. He’ll be building several other automation projects based on this system.
[via TUAW]
