Nokia's N9 official: a luscious slab of MeeGo coming later this year

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Nokia's N9 official: a luscious slab of MeeGo coming later this year

Stephen Elop said that Nokia would
unveil
its first MeeGo device this year, and he just made good on his word with the N9 (also known as
Lankku). Just as we
spotted
earlier, the N9 is a solid slab of 3.9-inch AMOLED screen (854 x 480) sans a keyboard or physical switches of any kind (well, aside from that oh-so-necessary volume rocker and camera button). The phone comes with 16GB or 64GB of onboard memory and 1GB of RAM wrapped in a polycarbonate shell that's colored all the way through, so dings and scratches won't show -- unless the wounds run deep, of course. Connectivity comes courtesy of quad-band GSM and penta-band WCDMA radios, plus Bluetooth 2.1, NFC, and GPS. There is also a dedicated camera button for the 8 megapixel wide-angle shooter, which is capable of aperture F2.2 for low light picture taking and true 16:9 720p video recording. Oh, and it's an AF shooter, not EDoF.

The entire thing measures 116.45- x 61.2- x 7.6-12.1mm and weighs 135 grams, with a battery capable of lasting up to 50 hours (music), 4.5 hours (720p video), or between seven and 11 hours (GSM yappin'). You'll also get gratis turn-by-turn drive and walk navigation with voice guidance in Maps, a dedicated Drive app, proximity sensor and a choice of hue: black, cyan, and magenta. Other hardware specs include 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, an ambient light sensor, compass, orientation sensor, a micro SIM slot, tethering support and a 3.5mm "AV connector." It'll be humming along on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, with apps being compliant with Qt 4.7 and HTML5 support bundled in.

As for software? Aside from
Angry Birds Magic, Galaxy on Fire 2, Real Golf 2011 and OpenGL ES 2.0, those who take the plunge will be greeted with a Webkit2-based browser, pinch-to-zoom support, unified notifications for Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds in the Events view as well as social networking profiles and status updates merged into phone contacts. MeeGo touts a user interface simplified to three home views -- events, applications and open apps -- with a swipe gesture able to take you back to the home view. For those looking to expand upon what's loaded from the factory, Ovi Store access is included, but we've no idea what kind of pricing will be affixed. We'll be getting a fair bit of hands-on time with this guy in just a few hours, so keep it locked here for our first impressions

Comex woring on faster JailbreakMe 3.0, Will Implement for iPad 2

Breaking News for iPad 2 jailbreakers, Comex has drastically improved the time it takes to jailbreak and gotten rid of the Cydia's 'Reorganizing Filesystem' message by using unionfs instead of the current stashing approach. According to a long tweet posted moments ago, Comex plans to apply the new approach to his upcoming iPad 2 jailbreak.

If you don't know, the stashing approach jailbreaks have been using for years-- Cydia's "Reorganizing Filesystem"-- involves moving some large directories from the small / partition into the large /var partition, then creating symlinks from the original to the new location. This both ensures that any additional stuff put in those directories by packages will end up in the /var partition, and frees up space on the / partition for files created outside of those directories. However, the process has some issues, like taking forever to do when you jailbreak (I am a bit fanatical about speed), pretty much requiring the jailbreak to reboot the system to ensure there aren't any running applications pointing to the old files (ditto about speed, I want a jailbreak to not even require a respring, as in star, but since star used stashing, some obscure things could cause issues before a reboot), and seriously confusing the sandbox code in the kernel (because each application has a sandbox with a list of allowed filenames, but after the symlink has moved files, the filenames no longer match), requiring that code to be patched (it needs to be patched anyway these days because tweaks have to run under the sandboxes of the applications they're hooking, but depend on accessing various directories; but it still feels good to get rid of a kludge).

With unionfs (which was saurik's idea originally), new files are created in the /var partition, and merged with files in the corresponding directories in the / partition, so no files need to be moved, no descriptors are invalidated, and I think the sandbox code won't notice what happened. It also opens the door for upgrading the base operating system without destroying the jailbreak files (although maybe iOS 5 delta updates will already allow this? I haven't looked at them yet).

I've wanted to do this since literally a year ago (that's the date of the nullfs checkin, since I was dumb and thought I wanted that instead of unionfs), but I never got around to making it work properly.

So, I just hope that I can get rid of the crashes my meddling with unionfs's code have introduced, and fix it for the iPad 2 (my dumped copies of iPad 2 kernels do not include symbols; I wrote a small BinDiff-like tool to copy over symbols from a kernel for another device, but it's not perfect) and that there aren't any performance issues.

MuscleNerd notes that with unionfs Apple apps don't need to be moved. That means they retain their entitlements, simplifying the sandboxing problem.

We'll keep updating you with more information as it becomes available

This Is iCloud All About
Apple's iCloud has emerged from the shadows, providing wireless backup and syncing for your apps, songs, documents, books, photos, videos, calendars and contacts. Best of all, it's free. Here's a few of iCloud's more notable features.
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This Is iCloud All About

Apple's iCloud has emerged from the shadows, providing wireless backup and syncing for your apps, songs, documents, books, photos, videos, calendars and contacts. Best of all, it's free. Here's a few of iCloud's more notable features.

A centralized hub
iCloud will store your photos, videos, music, contacts and other files, which are accessible from any compatible device, whether that be laptop, desktop, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.

It's free
iCloud is free. That means every user gets 5GB of space to do as they feel with. Whether you want to upload video, music, photos or books to access on the go, it's your choice.

iTunes in the cloud
iTunes will take the tracks you purchase in the iTunes Music store and automatically make a copy from their servers accessible to you for syncing on the go (you can enable up to 10 devices per account). However, if you want to match songs that you havent purchased through iTunes, it will cost $25 a year to have iTunes match as many tracks as you want. Plus, what iTunes in the cloud matches doesn't count against your 5GB limit, which will come in handy for those with large music libraries.

iOS and OS X app integration
Many of MobileMe's features have been rewritten as apps that function in the cloud and deeply integrate with the apps on iOS devices and computers (Mac or PC). If you update a contact on your iPhone, that contact is added to your lists on your other Apple devices. Add a new calendar event in iCal, and it will show up on your iPad or any other device. Plus, all iCloud users get an email address that will have push updates enabled.

Photo streaming
When you snap a photo, you can send it up to iCloud, where it will beam it down to your computer and other iOS devices, but will also live on Apple's servers for 30 days. Photo apps on Apple devices will have a feature called Photostream, which will bring up a thumbnail array of all the photos.

App purchase history
Remembering what apps you've purchased in the appstore can be tricky. Especially when you need to redownload or install them on a second device. iCloud now keeps track of all your purchased apps in a single list, and allows you to directly download those apps from the list.

iWork compatibility
Now that iWork is on all iOS devices, it will automatically auto-save a copy of your progress made with the iWork suite of productivity apps, which is accessible by other devices.. That includes Pages (word processor), Numbers (spreadsheets), and Keynote (presentations).

Third-party APIs
Apps on iOS and OS X will have API access to store documents. Programs like Evernote could theoretically store and sync documents using iCloud.

Daily backups
App history, device settings, new photos, and purchased music, apps and books will all be sent up to iCloud automatically. El Jobso claims that "it just works."

iAndroid: The Best Android Emulator for iPhone

Today I found an interesting tweat in Cydia: iAndroid is a new emulator for iPhone, allowing you to simulate very realistic operating system from Google on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

The application allows you to simulate the operating system from Google in all its aspects without user leaving the experience of iOS.

The Android interface is reproduced quite closely and you can customize the user interface, add widgets, animated backgrounds and use applications for Android, all in one place.

The developer announced that the incoming of other cool features that make the application better.
The simulator is not currently being tested with IOS 3.x, so it ensures the proper functioning on this version of IOS.
iAndroid is available in Cydia, in source of ModMyi.com.