IBLOG SPACE

Red faces and angry Apple phone calls this morning, as one of Verizon’s executives apparently confirms that the carrier’s next Apple device – which we’re presuming will be the iPhone 5 – will be a “global device” with both GSM and CDMA radios. The presumably accidental revelation came during the carrier’s financial results call, in which Verizon promised that around 11m iPhones would ship on the network this year. Previous rumors had pegged the iPhone 4 as a dual-mode device, capable of accessing both AT&T and Verizon’s networks with a single handset, but the model eventually released only had the CDMA radio enabled. Rumors shifted to the iPhone 5, then, and the possibility of Apple using a Qualcomm Gobi chips in its fifth-gen model. Verizon’s audio download and transcript aren’t available yet – they’ll be uploaded here eventually – but we’re guessing the calls between the carrier and Apple are already heated. Recent rumors suggested the iPhone 5 would arrive in September , wit

Acer ‘s latest may look like a regular monitor, but the Acer Web Surf Station is actually the latest all-in-one internet terminal for people who really don’t want to invite a PC into their lives. Based around a 24-inch Full HD 1920 x 1080 LCD display, the Web Surf Station has an integrated web browser together with a media player – using Acer’s Clear.fi branded DLNA – that can stream content across a network (or indeed play it back from USB media). Both WiFi and ethernet are built in, while ports include VGA and HDMI inputs, audio in/out, USB and a memory card reader. Acer isn’t talking hardware specs, but we’re guessing there’s some sort of low-power SoC inside doing all the web and media crunching: just enough to keep things ticking along, but nothing so complex that a power cycle can’t save you from confusion. Thanks to the two video inputs you can use the Web Surf Station as a standalone monitor, too. It’s not going to replace an iMac, but at £299 ($495) when it lands in the UK com

HTC wasted no time in confirming that its Sensation powerhouse would be headed to the US in the guise of the T-Mobile Sensation 4G , but the company was coy about when, exactly, that might be. The company’s advertising team obviously has no such qualms, however; TmoNews spotted an AdWords result promising a June 8 2011 release for the HSPA+ handset. Meanwhile, their eagle eyes also caught June 8 somewhere else in the Sensation 4G masterplan: boldly featured on the Android 2.3.3 smartphone’s HTC Sense 3.0 weather widget. Alone, that might not be enough to convince us, but HTC wouldn’t be the first company to theme screenshots on promo material to an upcoming launch date. We’ll have to wait a little longer, most likely, to find out whether the June 8 release date is true. HTC and T-Mobile are unlikely to officially announce the Sensation 4G launch until perhaps 2-3 weeks beforehand; until then, you’ll have to sate yourself with our hands-on report .

Verizon Wireless is the next to announce its Q1 2011 financial results, and it’s a strong start to both its LTE 4G network – with over 500,000 LTE devices activated – and its iPhone 4 sales – with 2.2m Apple handsets activated. Over 260,000 HTC ThunderBolt phones have been sold in a two week period, helping total wireless revenues lift 10.2-percent over last year to $16.9bn. Subscribers increased by 1.8m – more than half of which postpaid retail consumers – to a total of 104m, a 6.1-percent increase on the previous year. Meanwhile retail postpaid ARPU (average revenue per user) climbed 2.2-percent to $53.52; data revenues rose $5.5 billion, up $1.0 billion or 22.3-percent year over year, representing 38.1-percent of all Verizon Wireless’ service revenues. Smartphone sales accounted for 60-percent of total phone sales, up from 49-percent in Q4 2010, to make up 32-percent of all Verizon’s postpaid users. Press Release: Verizon Reports Strong Start to 2011 as Wireless, FiOS and Strategi

When it comes to barebones mini-PCs, the name that always springs to my mind is Shuttle. This is the company that has been peddling little computers for years that take up little space and generally come with some of the hardware installed in a cute little chassis waiting for the user to buy it and add their own CPU, RAM, and storage. One of the things that Shuttle hasn’t traditionally offered is a way that a user can customize their system. Shuttle is now offering a system configurator for a computer called the SG41J4. The computer has a strange little front panel (that reminds us of the Nokia XpressCovers) that the user can remove and modify. The barebones rig can be crammed full of an Intel Core 2 Processor with a 1333 MHz FSB. It has a pair of DDR3 RAM slots that support up to 8GB of RAM. The case also has room for a pair of optical drives and a pair of 3.5-inch desktop HDDs. Other features of the computer include a PCI x16 slot that will fit a video card needing dual slots and the

Android versus iOS is one of the biggest rivalries in the tech world. It’s right up there with OS X versus Windows in my book. Both sides in the iOS version Android user base are very supportive of their platforms leading to a lot of numbers being thrown around to show who is larger. By most accounts, the Android platform is now larger than the iOS platform in the smartphone world. When you zoom out and look at the entire iOS versus Android ecosystem with all available devices the picture changes. When you consider the entire ecosystem comScore reported yesterday that iOS was actually much larger than Android in the US market. Today comScore has issued a very similar report for Europe that surveyed owners of iOS and Android devices. The users were specifically in UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. ComScore’s study found that the iOS ecosystem was over twice as large and the Android ecosystem. The iOS ecosystem includes iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch devices in the report. The survey

I’m not rich and I don’t have the kind of money it takes to start to consider versions of trivial things in life that are massively more expensive that what you can buy things for down at Walmart. For instance, you could walk into Wally World and walk out with a new corkscrew if you are a wine drinker for a few bucks. It will get the bottle of $5 port you picked up at the local liquor store open with minimal bits of cork in the drink. It won’t open your wine with much style or say, “I’m rich” like this fancy corkscrew from Core-38. This would be the perfect wine opening implement to sit on your fancy bar beside that fancy Personal Brewery I talked about last week that makes your own beer. That beer-making device was very expensive at over $4,000 and this corkscrew from Code-38 is much cheaper at only $210 – $440 depending on what version you pick. This Code-38 offering will also pop the top off a wine cooler for your less genteel pals. The Code-38 offering is said to be stylish, very

I live in Texas where things are more rural in many areas. That means that we tend to drive longer distances than the people that live in cities around the country do. The heat in the south and humidity along with longer driving distances combine to make the use of EVs more of a challenge for drivers and the sale of EVs more challenging for car markers. One of the big issues in the minds of a lot of people that are considering the purchase of an EV is where they will charge when away from home. You can just plug in when you are at home and charge the EV up. When you are at the mall shopping and need to charge things are not that easy. You have to be able to locate a charging station nearby and find your way to it and that can be hard if you aren’t familiar with the area. Google and the Department of Energy are working together to build a definitive map of the EV charging infrastructure around the country that is not vendor or brand specific. That means instead of the apps on the market

I am going to swing the cat a bit on this one. The other day we posted up a video of a white iPhone 4 that had surfaced that showed some interesting ties into Facebook that never came to iOS 4. We wondered at the time if perhaps what we were seeing was a glimpse at iOS 5. At the same time, what we many have been looking at in that video was Facebook integration that Apple had planned and then backed away from . This is where the swinging starts. We know from Electronista that the co-founder of FourSquare, Dennis Crowley, was on the Apple campus in Cupertino yesterday for a meeting. Apparently, along with Crowley was the business developments and partnerships head Holger Luedof along with public relations manager Erin Gleason. The trio was in the area for the Where 2.0 conference. What we don’t know is what they folks were there for. However, the visit raises some interesting prospects with rumors of a new Apple cloud service running rampant and a change for MobileMe nearing. This mee

When it comes to your smartphone, the thing that consumes most of the battery power inside the device is the LCD screen. The LCD is also one of the thicker components of the smartphone and has a lot of impact on how thin the device can be made. The brighter the screen is, the better you can see it in the outdoors or other bright locations. With all that said, the thinner and brighter our screens of smartphones and tablets can be, the smaller and easier to read the devices can be as well. Sharp has announced that it is set to commercialize the world’s first small and medium size LCD panels that new a new oxide semiconductor. Sharp plans to start making these screens at its Kameyama Plant 2 sometime this year. These small and medium size panels will find their way into the smartphones and tablets we are using over the next year or so. The new Sharp panels will use InGaZnO material in the thin-film transistor and they will be the first screens on the world to use the material. The new pan

Nokia has announced its Q1 2011 financial results, along with what the Finnish company is describing as a shift “from developing strategy to executing strategy.” The Microsoft Windows Phone partnership is finally inked , and it’s about time too: total mobile device sales are down 12-percent from last quarter, while smartphone sales are down 14-percent from last quarter. Still, they’re higher than this time last year – up 1-percent and 13-percent respectively – and there are more Symbian devices to come: Nokia says it expects ”the transition to Windows Phone as our primary smartphone platform to take about two years.” Last we heard, Nokia’s first Windows Phone handsets aren’t expected to arrive in bulk until early 2012 , with various models based on the existing X7 and N8 among others. However the company is still aiming to break Windows Phone ground in 2011, according to the official blog . In the process, Nokia will get investment measured in billions of dollars from Microsoft. Mo

We know that all you gadget hounds out there want to see new gadgets and watch unboxing videos like a fat kid wants to eat cake. We offering up a lot of our own unboxing vides for you to peruse. Today we have found a new unboxing video from an unlikely source, Wirefly. The gang over at the seller of mobile devices has somehow landed their hands on the HTC Droid Incredible 2 and made a video unboxing for us to see and offered some hands on footage with the device. The Incredible 2 is also compared for size against the original incredible. The second that the two smartphones are placed side by side, it’s clear that the Incredible 2 has a lot of the same design features, but a significantly larger screen. The original Incredible had a screen that measures 3.7-inches. The new Incredible 2 has a screen that is 4-inches with a WVGA resolution. The details on the hardware aren’t offered by the person unboxing the phone at Wirefly, they come from a boot screen you can glimpse in the video. Acc

Up to a point, we all want our smartphones and other gadgets to be as small as possible. At some point, things can get to small with screens that are too tiny to be readable and enjoyed on the go. Before our gear can get smaller than it is, today we will need the components inside the devices that actually make them work to get smaller too. One of the components inside your device that needs to shrink is the flash memory. Flash memory is found inside every smartphone out there and even if we don’t want smaller screens, smaller components also mean that your gear can keep the big screen and get smaller and slurp less power. A thinner iPhone with longer battery life sounds pretty good to me. Smaller memory often means less power consumed to operate the hardware leading to longer battery life. SanDisk is one of the largest makers of NAND flash memory chips in the world and a lot of the gadgets you are carrying around today probably use NAND from SanDisk. The company has announced a new br

If you are really paranoid about The Man keeping track of you via your iPhone throughout your travels with your smartphone or other electronic device there is a way you can keep those singles from emanating from your device until you need it. You could take out the battery and carry your phone as parts like they do in spy flicks, or you could just get this special bag that promises to block signals to and from your gadget. The bag is called the Standard Black Hole Faraday Bag. It looks like a soldiers pencil bag to me. It is made from some sort of flexible material that has effective electromagnetic shielding built in to block those signals you worry so much about. I think this would be the perfect complement to the tin foil hat to keep your thoughts from being read. The outer canvas shell of the bag is water-resistant. The bag also has a special little slot in side that you can slip notes into so you can keep up with how many times a day you see the black helicopter following you aro

I don’t care what you call them, Slurpee, Icee or Slushee. They are all the same thing in my book. They are all frozen drinks that you can buy at a gas station right up the street made generally from the frozen carbonated drinks like Coke and others. I also know that these drinks may well be the number one cause of brain freeze known to man. To my 6-year-old daughter this is THE drink to have each day. If she makes a good grade on a test, an Icee is what she wants for a snack after school. The thing she likes to do most is get one giant cup and layer two flavors in the same cup for some alternating flavor drinking action. She gets Coke, cherry, Coke, cherry, Coke, cherry – you get the drift. The big problem with layering these drinks is that when they inevitably start to melt you end up with a hodge podge of melted brown goo in the cup that doesn’t quite taste the same. Thankfully, 7-eleven stores has invented an awesome new Slurpee cup that will let you drink two flavors and keep the

UK retailer Phones4u has announced it will be selling the Samsung Galaxy S II from April 27, with the company having snatched initial exclusivity on the 4.3-inch Android smartphone. The exclusive should last for just a few days, but the earliest of early adopters will be able to grab the Galaxy S II from free on a £35 ($58) or above agreement or for £499 ($822) on pre-pay plans. Announced at MWC 2011 , the Galaxy S II has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus touchscreen, an 8-megapixel rear camera with 1080p Full HD video recording, and a front-facing 2-megapixel camera for video calls. Inside there’s a freshly-overclocked 1.2GHz processor; Phones4u will be throwing in an 8GB microSD card for anybody who pre-orders before the launch date. We’re expecting to see broader availability of the Galaxy S II from May 1 . More information on the smartphone in our hands-on and in the video below.

ASUS has confirmed that the Eee Pad Transformer will launch in the US and Canada from April 26. The 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet – which has an optional battery-toting keyboard attachment – will be priced at $399 for the 16GB TF101-A1 model, and at $499 for the 32GB TF101-B1 version. Neither SKU will come with the keyboard dock, which will be offered as a $149 accessory. As well as offering a QWERTY keyboard, the dock has a battery which boosts runtime to up to 16hrs, along with two USB 2.0 ports and a 4-in-1 memory card reader. The Transformer tablet itself has an HDMI port, microSD slot and the usual WiFi and Bluetooth. Inside is NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chipset running Android 3.0, with a few interesting pre-loaded ASUS apps including a remote desktop tool . The Eee Pad Transformer launched in the UK earlier this month, and demand soon outstripped supply .

Apple could be scaling up for some birthday celebrations, with staff reportedly told they they can’t request vacation days between May 20 and May 22. According to AppleInsider ‘s sources, and speculation around the dates by ifoAppleStore , the company is believed to be most likely celebrating its 10 year anniversary of bricks & mortar Apple Stores, the first of which opened on May 19 2001. Store managers are reportedly “very excited” about these particular dates, but what tApple could be scaling up for some birthday celebrations, with staff reportedly told they they can’t request vacation days between May 20 and May 22. According to AppleInsider ‘s sources, and speculation around the dates by ifoAppleStore , the company is believed to be most likely celebrating its 10 year anniversary of bricks & mortar Apple Stores, the first of which opened on May 19 2001. Store managers are reportedly “very excited” about these particular dates, but what the actual event might be is unclear.

T-Mobile and LG haven’t just been working on a tablet: there’s also a dual-core smartphone on offer as well. The T-Mobile G2x doesn’t bother with the docking accessories of AT&T’s ATRIX 4G ( review ), instead expecting its own dual-core potential to stand on its own feet. Is this the best of a new breed of Android devices, or just a fast phone that still falls short? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut. Hardware Long and lean is a good way to describe the G2x. Like its European LG Optimus 2X counterpart, it measures in at 4.88 x 2.48 x 0.43 inches and 5oz, fronted with a 4-inch WVGA TFT LCD touchscreen. The entire fascia is flush-fitting Gorilla Glass, though it does have a somewhat oversized capacitive button area at the bottom – with the usual menu, home, back and search keys – which could do with being smaller. Above the display is a 1.3-megapixel front camera while an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash are on the back. While at first glance the bat