MODDING: blogs

“Breathe, breathe in the air”… So sang Pink Floyd in 1973. And now it’s competition time here on AAS. Inspired to give away some N79 hardware, I’ve put together a video competition, embedded below. All you’ve got to do is work out how many phones I’m showing and what they are. Easy, eh? The first correct answer in the comments wins. Only one go each, mind you, so guess well…

A look at the AMD Phenom II TWKR Black Edition @ Neoseeker and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

“So in what different are the internals compared to the Phenom II X4 955? Since it is geared toward the extreme overclocking crowd, it is a high SIDD chip. This is an engineering term which means it has a high leakage. In simpler words, the TWKR processors can be supplied more voltage, thus power, and handle it without any glitch.”

The Arc Mouse is aimed at all you mobile warriors out there who don’t want a bulky mouse taking up space in their bag. We take it for a spin and find out how good it really is…

Micron today introduced new 34nm NAND products, including mass production of a 16Gb chip and a newly architected 32Gb chip. Also as part of the announcement, Lexar will introduce two new products leveraging Microns new 34nm NAND die including a 16GB microSDHC and a 32GB SDHC flash card. The new Lexar Platinum II 32GB Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) memory card that uses 34nm NAND Flash is pictured below.

Microns new 16- and 32-gigabit (Gb) NAND chips pair large capacity with performance, providing a compelling solution for todays demanding portable storage requirements that are tailored to end-customer product dimensions. The newly architected 32Gb multi-level cell (MLC) NAND chip is 17 percent smaller than Microns first-generation 32Gb chip. The 16Gb MLC NAND chip, at just 84mm, provides high-capacity in an ultra tiny package. Micron is also now sampling 8- and 16Gb single-level cell (SLC) NAND chips using the 34nm process. Additionally, Lexar Media, Inc. a subsidiary of Micron and a leading provider of consumer memory products for digital devices is taking advantage of Microns new 34nm NAND products by delivering a wide range of flash memory cards and USB flash drives utilizing this technology.

Version 3.5 has been, relatively speaking, long in the making. It began its life as what was intended to be a quick and modest upgrade to Firefox 3.0, but the version number expanded along with Mozilla's ambitions for the software. And it is indeed an important release, both because of competitors and because of new Firefox 3.5 features. Be sure to download it here

Firefox 3.5 has a host of improvements, some the sort of thing people can notice immediately and some plumbing improvements that could help the Web in the long run. With a release in 70 languages, a lot of people will be able to try. Under the covers but providing a direct benefit it TraceMonkey, the new engine that runs Web page programs written in the common JavaScript language. That will mean Web applications such as Google Docs get faster today and, if JavaScript speed improvements continue, more sophisticated tomorrow.

The Symbian Foundation has announced that the Symbian Smartphone Show The Symbian Exchange & Exposition (with the name change, the acronym is now the friendlier SEE 2009) will be taking place on 27-28 October 2009 at Earls Court 2, London. More details below, plus you can expect an All About Symbian meet up on the evening of the 26th, venue to be arranged.

I couldn’t resist a link-of-interest to the Serie-N folks over in Italy, who have dug deep to uncover what’s coming in the version 11.0.021 firmware for the Nokia N97 tomorrow. Relax, you can skip their first para in Italian - the good stuff’s all in English!

Having a busy day, Nokia Beta Labs has formally launched a next-gen Java Runtime for S60 5th Edition and upwards - presumably this will make it into future device firmwares. In addition, version 2.0 is a component which can be maintained in the future independently, through the ‘Sw update’ system built into each device. The technicalities of the update mean that the installer (a 4MB SIS) includes a routine to modify any already-installed Java MIDlets to work properly with the new runtime. More details below.

Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X AB has agreed to purchase the file-sharing site website, The Pirate Bay, for US$7.7 million. Earlier in April, the four men behind The Pirate Bay were sentenced to one-year jail term and US$3.6 million fine.

Nokia is previewing its upcoming Messaging/IM hybrid application by releasing a Java-hosted test version for just the E75, over on Beta Labs. This is the only S60 phone (so far) with permanent full access to Nokia Messaging as a service, but presumably functionality from this will spread in the coming months, as well as it getting wider compatibility. More details below, if you’ve got an E75, if use either Yahoo Messanger or Ovi Chat, if you don’t mind its Java nature, and if you fancy giving this a whirl.