rumor
BlackBerry 6 teased again in new official video
There have been rumors that the first volley of BlackBerry 6 -powered devices could launch as early as last month — but seeing how we’re still empty-handed, we may as well enjoy more high production value video pimping the biggest new features, right? RIM has published another official YouTube spot on BlackBerry 6 today showing off goodies likes aggregated social network integration, universal search, and — of course — the all-new WebKit-based browser coming out of last year’s purchase of Torch Mobile . Interestingly, this latest video continues RIM’s trend of showing 6 running only on full touchscreen phones; we can’t fathom that they’d abandon the form factor that made them famous, of course, but it’s becoming more and more obvious by the day that we’re going to see this launch on the rumored 9800 or something very similar to it
Tesla planting electric engines into two Toyota prototype bodies
Word on the street had it that Tesla’s $50 million deal with Toyota wasn’t formal back in late May, but evidently things have made positive progress since. According to a new (though admittedly brief) report over at CNN , Toyota is currently working with the electric automaker on a pair of prototype vehicles
AT&T handing out free 3G MicroCells to loyal customers?
While we’ve no clue how widespread AT&T’s generosity is, or how you might get one, it appears that the company’s “most valuable customers” are now receiving free range-boosting femtocells .
RIM’s Blackberry Tablet might be seven inches, feature dual cameras and 1GHz CPU?
The rumor mill’s been churning out quite the picture of RIM’s Blackberry tablet over the past several months, and it’s a research analyst who’s most recently picked up the brush — Ashok Kumar of Rodman & Renshaw, to be precise, who anticipates a 7-inch touchscreen device with a 1GHz processor, plus front- and back-facing cameras for video chat. Since that’s a good 1.9 inches smaller than the slate rumored a couple months back, this latest spiel fills us with doubt… but hey, it’s not like we had confirmation that RIM was even producing such a device, anyhow.
AT&T identifies Alcatel-Lucent as slow upload culprit, fix in the works
As we’d suspected, AT&T isn’t intentionally limiting upload speeds on iPhone 4s in some markets where things suddenly got slow over the weekend . Or that’s the company’s claim, anyhow — and seeing how they’re actually calling out a supplier in the process, we tend to buy it. Specifically, AT&T says that some Alcatel-Lucent equipment is causing uploads to fall back to non-HSUPA UMTS speeds “under certain conditions” affecting “less than two percent” of the company’s customers, and that they’re working on developing a fix
Amazon Kindle dual-screen e-reader patent granted, Barnes & Noble Nook potentially in trouble
Looks like the battle for e-reader dominance between Amazon and Barnes & Noble could soon expand beyond the recent spate of price drops and into the courtroom as well: the USPTO just granted a 2006 Amazon patent on e-readers with secondary LCD displays (like the original Kindle’s scroller-navigation panel ), and several of the claims are potentially broad enough to cover the Nook and many other devices with both electronic paper and LCD displays. What’s more, Amazon agreed not to file for any corresponding foreign patents during the four-year approval process and thus wasn’t required to publish the patent application — meaning this is likely a complete surprise to the entire industry
