Benchmarks are an important factor in a device's reputation. As soon as a new gadget hits the market, tech enthusiasts are keen to ascertain how much faster and more powerful it performs when compared with similar devices.
It's certainly been a great past week for those who like modding their devices. Two separate rooting methods have allowed boatloads of Samsung and Motorola devices running Gingerbread to be rooted using the same simple methods, and now, those running almost any HTC Android device can unlock their bootloader without jeopardizing that all-important warranty.
Weekends are usually slow with regards to tech news, but those interested in unlocking their iPhones have been pleasantly surprised with the revelation that all basebands and firmware versions can be carrier unlocked - provided of course that said device is jailbroken.
For those regular readers among us, you will no doubt be aware that we are heavily involved in support of JailbreakCon, the worlds first convention dedicated to all things related to jailbreaking. The event is set to take place on September 29th in the South of San Francisco at a venue that is located deep in the heart of the Biotech Valley, the birthplace of biotechnology.
With Mozilla opting to release new versions of its popular browser at light speed these days, it's not surprising to see version 12 being released today - just 5 weeks after Firefox 11 dropped for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Over the last day or so the unlocking aspect of the jailbreak community has seem to hit a red hot patch, with potential unlockers first all being introduced to a new method of iPhone unlocking using a procedure which takes advantage of Sam Bingner's Subscriber Artificial Module (SAM), and now we have the news that the latest GEVEY Ultra 5.1 now supports the GSM iPhone 4 running iOS 5.1 with modem firmwares up to 04.12.01.
The Instagram service has been growing in popularity and prominence since its launch in October 2010 as an app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Eighteen months down the line, the service now has native iOS and Android app offerings as well as grabbing the headlines in a big way recently due to its $1 billion cash plus stock acquisition by Facebook.
It seems that jailbreakers and potential unlockers are having to wait longer and longer for news to cheer about as the cat and mouse game with Apple and the networks becomes more and more difficult for those involved in producing jailbreaks and iPhone unlocks. Once upon a time, when a new firmware was released, it didn't seem to take that long for the development teams to pull something together to release to the public, but as time progresses it also seems that the difficulty levels involved in this kind of work is increasing dramatically.
As has been pointed out on a number of occasions, Siri, Apple's system-wide voice recognition software introduced with the iPhone 4S was, by no means, the first delve into such technology. Nevertheless, although there will always be skeptics, it cannot be denied that Apple has certainly brought the technology to the center of public interest, and predictably, there are a bunch of third-party apps purporting to offer similar services.
If you are anything like me, then you will appreciate the little Cydia tweaks that bring small changes to the way iOS operates, as well as finding yourself drawn to extensions that enhance the visual appearance of the OS in subtle but noticeable ways. Don't get me wrong here, the larger more-in-your-face tweaks obviously have their benefits, and can be extremely helpful to some people, but it tends to be the more intricate, small and useful packages that stand the test of time.
