The until-just-recently Chief Marketing Officer of GetJar – Patrick “Mad” Mork will head over to Google-land as Director for Mobile Applications. He has been a part of GetJar since 2008 and as he wrote in his personal blog – it has “come a long way from the small, 7-man company I was supporting from my kitchen desk in London in 2008!”.

Mork will start off with Google from September and also said in his “see you soon” letter that he’s very excited about “some of the new products and improvements we [that's GetJar, not Google] will be introducing over the next few weeks and months.” Read more »

The latest Apple iOS 5 beta was released for developers on Saturday – number 5 (build 9A5288d). It’s an OTA update, but if you don’t get that option in the “Software update” settings menu check out some answers after the break.

Aside from the iOS 5 beta itself developers also got the Xcode 4.2 Developer Preview 5, iTunes 10.5 Beta 5 and Apple TV Software beta 4. Read more »

Samsung and Sprint has just announced the availability and pricing details of the upcoming Samsung Conquer 4G. The Android smartphone will be available from 21 August for just $99 bucks on a two-year contract.

The Samsung Conquer 4G is a droid with a 3.5″ HVGA (320×480) display, runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a 3.2 MP autofocus camera on the back (and a 1.3 MP front-facing one) and powered by a 1 GHz MSM8655 Snapdragon processor. The Conquer 4G is also a dual-mode handset as it can use nationwide 3G networks as well as Sprint’s own WiMAX network. Read more »

The widely popular iOS and Android game Cut the Rope got its third title, dubbed Experiments and it brings 3 level packs and a total of 75 levels.

Following the original title – Cut the Rope and the sequel Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift this third title, Experiments, ushers the gameplay into a scientist’s house. You’ll have to chase the stars around with the candy before feeding it to Om Nom. Read more »

Skype has just added video calling support for an additional 17 popular droids with its latest ver. 2.1 for Android. Some of them are the HTC Flyer slate, Samsung Galaxy S II, the Xperia PLAY and more.

The minimum requirement you have to cover is Android version 2.2 (Froyo) or above and even if your device isn’t blessed to be in the list of newly supported droids you should be able to enable video chat through the app’s settings. Keep in mind that this will allow only rear camera video calling and you’ll need 2.3 Gingerbread and beyond to enjoy true front-facing camera chat support. Apart from video-calling support, the new update brings a number of bug fixes and a performance boost. Read more »

The BlackBerry Playbook won’t have Android apps support until late fall. This is a bummer for many and could worsen the prospects of RIM’s Playbook even more so.

The Playbook is RIM’s first slate and its user interface relies on the proprietary QNX platform. It’s a smart OS platform alright, but it’s light years behind Android or iOS in terms of available third-party apps. The lack of strong app support is a huge handicap for any new OS nowadays. Read more »

A sneak peek video of the BlackBerry Torch 9860 has popped up, courtesy of Vodafone UK. It highlights the BlackBerry OS 7-wearing smartphone’s main features and, of course, the fact that Vodafone already has dips on the 9860.

You can see the camera in action and parts of the user interface and the browser but the whole video is not meant to be a thorough walkthrough. Read more »

The Nokia has inspired young talents to create cool videos with its N8 camera phone for a while now. This is the latest in a line of many very cool videos and the largest in scale stop-motion animation shot with the Nokia N8.

The plot is marine in essence – a fisherman in his small boat is taken on a perilous journey after he gets swallowed by a giant fish. You can check out the making of if you’re interested in making your own stop-motion video. The tricky part is that little bot is actually a life-size, real vessel. The person starring is a real man, as well. Read more »

It’s that time again, folks – the time for the iPhone 5 rumor of the week. This time we came across some snapshots of a mysterious iPhone with a design unseen so far anywhere. So, naturally, the question is whether this 64GB would-be iPhone is the real deal or not – is this the fabled new design the next generation iPhone will offer?

Well, here are some arguments that just quickly popped to my mind – the volume keys are again a single piece – which is a step backward from the current design logic. The device looks tangibly thicker than the iPhone 4 (which is just 9.3mm) – a definite no-no in today’s tech design trends.

The outer rim of the phone doesn’t look like an antenna or even made out of steel (it just looks plastic – see how the Apple logo doesn’t seem reflective) so I can only assume this thing’s fake.

Oh, and also look at the bezel around the screen – and there’s also considerable slack space above the home button. And finally the sign – “Designed by APOLLO in California” doesn’t scream legitimate either. Read more »

After a court hearing in Sydney, Australia, Apple has won an agreement with Samsung that the latter won’t advertise or sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 slate on the count of it infringing on 10 Apple patents. Those include the look and feel, and the touchscreen technology of the iPad. Samsung won’t be able to release the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia until it gets court approval or it resolves the conflict with the Cupertino-based company.

Apple sought an Australian injunction and is looking to get the same result in other countries too (unnamed for now). It comes as a great success for Apple but should it eventually lose its patent infringement lawsuit with Samsung, Apple will have to pay Samsung some heavy damages as compensation. Read more »

We came across a very interesting tablet that came all the way from China and landed in our inbox. The Marvel TBT-10C 7″ Mercury Pad Tablet is a 7-incher, running Android 2.3.1 Gingerbread, with a 1GHz Samsung S5PV210 A8 processor, 512MB RAM and has a 800×400 (WVGA) multi-touch display among other specs. And it looks ghastly similar to the iPhone 4, doesn’t it?

This tablet is certainly nothing out of the ordinary, especially coming from China (fake Apple retail stores anyone?), and is easily outclassed by the current crop of Android tablets with its so-last-year single core processor, WVGA-only screen (even if it is 7″), 2 MP camera and the fact it just looks like a cheap iPhone rip-off. Read more »

The Nokia 500 is still hot out of the oven and Nokia has put up a promo video for it. It’s the second Nokia phone using a 1GHz processor and the first one to do it on Symbian^3. The video revolves around the motto “express yourself” hence the upbeat song in the background.

The video shows-off the functionality of the new Symbian smartphone to install a variety of apps through the Ovi store, changeable covers that make the device look flamboyant, the fast 1GHz processor and finally, the fact that this smartphone gives you more. Read more »

You’ve probably heard of Plants vs. Zombies – one of the hottest games on the App Store since day one. Today it got updated to version 1.7 on iOS to bring users Retina support which means that the graphics are now much crisper and just look awesome.

PopCap Games (creator of PvZ) has also said that they’ve removed some bugs along the way and even made the game speedier so the update is a must. Read more »

If you happen to be situated in the United States and own an Asus Eee Pad Transformer, it’s your lucky day. Version 3.2 of Android Honeycomb is now out for the popular tablet-slash-netbook and with it come stretchable widgets and the compatibility zoom which will make smartphone apps much better to use on the bigger screen.

The 3.1 Honeycomb update came in the first half of June – those are some super-fast update cycles. Also if you have the Transformer plus the keyboard dock you can enjoy the dock’s USB host functionality. Read more »

Downloading Microsoft’s camera codec pack (16.0.0652.0621) will enable your Windows 7 or Vista OS to show RAW format pictures in Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery and it has support for about 120 DSLR cameras. This means that you’ll no longer get the “unknown file” icon when looking into an album of RAW format images.

The RAW photo format is like a digital negative of a photo made with a DSLR camera. It contains (ideally!) uncompressed data from each individual pixel of the camera’s sensor and in layman’s terms it’s a bigger, unprocessed version of the JPEG photo. Read more »