Review Horizon

This morning, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer during Microsoft Partner Conference mentioned a new music service scheduled to arrive on their very successful XBOX 360 console called XBOX Music. While he didn’t get into more details, the service will offer over 11 million songs and follow the same path as the other media applications including Netflix, ESPN and Hulu Plus, providing Kinect support for navigation, search and voice recognition. Beside the new music service, toward the end of the year XBOX will also add YouTube streaming, Bing voice search (although limited to media content, no browser for you) and maybe even live TV.

The new voice service is widely expected to be based on Microsoft’s Zune.

via Business Insider

Unfortunately I forgot that I had my iPhone 4 in my pocket and plunged in the pool. I figured out what I did 5 seconds later, but it was too late, the damage was already done. In the next several minutes, my phone started to get really hot, no doubt due to some short circuit that drained the battery really fast. In the next 4-5 days I tried to dry it completely through several methods and eventually the iPhone started to work again. You need to know that water damage is not covered under the warranty and not even if you paid for the  AppleCare Protection Plan (APP). If you went through a similar experience (with your iPhone or any other smartphone), here are some tips that might help you deal with this annoying issue:

0. Important: Do not attempt to power it!

1. If you can, take the battery out immediately. Unfortunately Apple in their infinite wisdom designed their devices to prevent you from doing that. A good idea is also to remove the SIM card.

2. Shake it gently in an effort to take as much water out as possible. In iPhone’s case, the water might come out through the charging port or through the headphone socket.

3.  Let the phone out in the sun to dry. Place it face down because a powerful sun might damage the screen. To prevent overheating, do not let it out for too long.

4. When the smartphone is reasonably dry, it is time for the next step. Try to get some desiccant. You might find some small packages of Silica gel included in either pill boxes or electronics. If you collected some of them, it is a good time to put them to a good use. Rice is also a reasonably good hygroscopic substance (means it can suck the water vapors out of its immediate vicinity) that can be used if you don’t have Silica gel. Get both the desiccant / rice in a closed dry jar and leave your iPhone inside for 4-5 days. Resist the temptation to check after only a day and do not attempt to power it up before the 5 days passed!!! Read More…

This is the best news lately if you are an iPad 2 owner. It took a while but the iPad 2 jailbreak is finally here, and this time is not a leak anymore but official. The jailbreak is web based and you’ll need to point your browser, load a PDF file at this point a certain vulnerability in the PDF renderer will execute some code and install Cydia on your iPad. The Jailbreak 3.o is not limited to iPad 2 but pretty much every iOS based device under the sun including Apple TV, iPad 1 and 2, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, etc. Unfortunately the upcoming iOS 5closed the vulnerability used for this jailbreak method.

Here is how to do it:

Note: This method was successfully tested on an iPad 2 running iOS 4.3.3
1. User your ipad 2 to navigate to JailbreakMe.com website Read More…

Update: The official iPad 2 jailbreak is out. Check here how to do it!

Well, it looks like it finally happened. The long awaited iPad 2 jailbreak is here, albeit not “officially”, if this is a good word to describe a hack. JailbreakMe 3.0 is the work done by Comex and one of the people in the team is rumored to have released the Beta iPad 2 jailbreak ahead of schedule. One of the good news is that you won’t need anything fancy, other than just to point a browser to a specific place and load a specific PDF file. As of right now, only the PDF file exploiting the vulnerability for iOS 4.3.0 is still up, the other for 4.3.3 was taken down already. The video describing how to jailbreak iPad 2 is still up on YouTube though and you can take a look here. Read More…

Another day, another iPhone 5 / iPad 3 rumor, but that keeps everybody entertained and gives us subjects to write about. This time, is a rumor everybody seems to agree upon, not just a lone analyst in a dusty office. It looks like the Taiwanese companies involved somehow in the production of Apple’s toys are starting to prepare their components anticipating to start production sometime in August. Both iPhone 5 and iPad 3 are rumored to see the official light of the day sometime in September and start shipping the following month. Not sure how fast you’ll be able to get one, but that’s an entirely different issue.

While everybody does expect an iPhone 4 successor, the iPad 3 if true comes as a surprise because Apple would break their 12 month standard cycle between models. Of course, the market is somewhat different. More competitors, especially in the tablet field,  are releasing devices that rival iPad 2 (Samsung’s new tablets are just an example) and they are forcing Apple to work harder. iPad 2, cool as it is, was also an evolutionary device rather than revolutionary and did not include several expected technologies including retina display (which is again rumored to arrive in iPad 3 as a 250 dpi screen), NFC (Near Field Read More…

If you haven’t heard of Roku up to this point, they hold the title for the first dedicated Netflix capable media streamer in the world. As weird as it might sound, back in the day not every media streamer was Netflix capable . Now, of course we live in different times, and Netflix is the largest movie streaming company in the world so Netflix streaming clients can be found everywhere, from stand-alone media streamer boxes to connected Blu-ray players and connected TVs, smartphones, tablets, you name it.

Roku obviously didn’t stop with Netflix, their boxes have the most streaming channels available in any media streamer box (see here our Roku review). The new version of this loaded box found its way to FCC and is currently in beta testing, so that means you’ll soon be able to find it in stores. FCC website lists three new models - 3000X, 3050X, and 3100X. Hardware wise, the new boxes are even smaller than the current version (44.65mm x 44.65mm) and built around a Broadcom 2835 SOC. The good news, they now feature a MicroSD Read More…

Update: And here it goes:

Hello,

Unfortunately, Governor Brown has signed into law the bill that we emailed you about earlier today. As a result of this, contracts with all California residents participating in the Amazon Associates Program are terminated effective today, June 29, 2011. Those California residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com, Endless.com, MYHABIT.COM or SmallParts.com. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned before today will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule. Read More…

Google improved their Webmaster Central reporting tool by adding +1 reporting. By now, if you are a webmaster, you are surely familiar with the +1 button used to get a sense of quality of a post / site. What we didn’t have until today was a way to quantify the impact that +1 actions by visitors will have on your ranking. Wait no more, just log-in into your Google Webmaster Central and you’ll find out how many posts were +1, data about the search impact and audience (unique users, etc). Read More…

Introduction

I wanted to buy a photo frame for my parents in law with the following characteristics: reasonably cheap, large good quality screen, easy to use and, very important, capable to accept 220V power input because they are living in Europe. I wasn’t interested in any fancy features, no video / music, just basic photo slideshow and eventually remote control. I shopped around for a while and I found a product that met all my requirements – the ViewSonic VFD1027w-11 10.2″ 1024 x 600 Digital Photo Frame. I bought it, tested it and here is the review. Read More…

Introduction

I am a long time AT&T subscriber, not because I particularly love the company, but because in my area, the competition sucks even more in terms of signal strength and coverage. While AT&T’s signal is relatively decent outside the house, inside the strenght is atrocious, my iPhone 4 gets only 1 line and 50% of the time the call is dropped. I called AT&T many times to complain to no avail. You can imagine my surprise when I got a letter from AT&T a couple of weeks ago stating that they are having a promotion for a free 3G Microcell and I immediately jumped in the car and drove to my local AT&T store to get one. One our later, my new gadget was unpacked, installed and activated. I did use it for almost three weeks now and the conclusions are described in this AT&T 3G MicroCell Review. Read More…