Manufacturers of Bluetooth headsets are in an arms race of sorts in an effort to design and build a headset with the most complete noise cancellation possible. Various headsets sporting an assortment of hardware and software solutions have been marketed over the years as offering high end noise reduction and cancellation, but it has never quite been perfected.

Motorola’s latest high-end headset, the HX1 Endeavor, leverages a number of technologies to provide optimal noise cancellation and voice quality in a wide array of situations. The full review follows the break. (And you can watch TiPB's video hands-on with it at CES here.)

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems as if the Twitter-client wars have simmered down a little bit (remember when we had updates like every few weeks?), but the biggies are still dropping some changes.

In this case, TouchTwit has updated to v1.6 (the author has been busy with civil service) and there are some nice new features and fixes:

• New notification for "new followers"
• New notification for "unfollows"
• Some Theme-bugs fixed
• Lesser memory ussage
• Lesser cpu ussage
• Scrolling bugs on 1Ghz processors fixed
• More->Following was modified
• And a lot of small bugs are fixed too

Overall it seems to work quite well, although we find the background vs. foreground sync option a bit confusing and limited (only 1 hour in background?).

Still, you can't beat the graphics and that scrolling all for a very fair $1.99.  Updates can be found in the Windows Marketplace.

Mal and Phil talk up the latest Windows Mobile 7 rumors in what likely is our last podcast before Microsoft officially announces it. Plus, your e-mails and voicemails!

• Download it directly with this link
• Subscribe on your Zune
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe directly to the Podcast feed with your favorite Podcatcher here
• Listen to it here with the flash player above.

Read the rest of this entry »

One benefit of the heavy competition in the Smartphone market is the number of accessories that are designed to be generic, making them work with many products even if they were designed for one specific device. With offerings from Apple, Google, Palm, Nokia, and Microsoft; it behooves accessory manufacturers to be generic in their designs.

The H1-Touch phone holder from Luxa2 (a division of Thermaltake) does more than simply fit the description of an accessory that will work with a multitude of devices, it is designed to work flawlessly with handhelds of all shapes and sizes.

For the complete review of the H1-Touch, hit the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

We're proud to say that The iPhone Blog is now TiPb: your #1 iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad blog!

A little SPE network news before we get to our weekly list o'links. We've been calling TiPb 'TiPb' instead of 'The iPhone Blog' for so long now, we figured we may as well make it official. Add in that the iPhone platform now encompasses the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the newly announced iPad and renaming the site pretty much became a foregone conclusion. Same great content, new shorter URL to type in!

We're a little more than a week away from likely finding out what all the Windows Phone Seven (or Windows Mobile 7, or Seven, or whatever) is all about. And that means it's time for more rumors to come crawling out of the woodwork.

After the break, let's tackle the latest batch that was seeded to a couple of sites (Mobile Tech World and PPCGeeks) and what we think of them.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those using custom ROMs, the familiarity with Windows Mobile 6.5.3 should be quite high, as folks have been using builds from this branch since last summer. But for the majority of we assume what has changed in 6.5.3 won't be as clear, so we've thrown together this little overview guide to explain.

While the changes aren't as big as say 6.1 to 6.5, Windows Mobile 6.5.3 is pretty significant, especially in the case of the UI layout, which hasn't been changed in nearly 10 years (we're looking at you Start menu). Capacitive support is also important.

The bigger point is though is this: Windows Mobile 6.5.3 represents one of the fastest Windows Mobile revisions we have seen from Redmond. After just four months from WM6.5's release, an upgrade is available to OEMs which have begun to roll it out on new devices, including the just-announced Sony Aspen.  They did this while another team is hard at work on working on their next generation OS, Windows Mobile 7.  

Far from abandoning support for this soon-to-be-legacy OS, Microsoft has ramped up development, in fact we believe there will be a Winodws Mobile 6.5.5 at some point.

Sure, for some it's too little, too late.  Fair enough. But we're still glad to see Microsoft putting all of their energy into this platform for what seems like the first time.

After the jump, we'll gloss over the change-log for WM6.5.3 ...

Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like that T-Mobile HD2 (US version, slated for March 24th) just keeps getting better and better.

Not only does it come with a memory boost (or rather, has memory allocated differently) which seems to shape it up for a Seven upgrade in October (that's what we're hearing too), but it looks to also feature Swype.

To refresh, Swype is that new soft-keyboard that first appeared on the Verizon Omnia II. It was then quickly ripped and ported to other devices (to the chagrin of the developers), due to its overwhelming popularity. The company has also recently secured a nice source of funding, meaning we can expect more form them in the future.

Fast forward to today and we find the latest T-Mo HD2 ROM dump features a unique file: 

PACKAGE_LEO_1_5_IME_Swype

And to the right you'll see a screenshot of that very file in action. We're also told that this new build is "...slightly more accurate and looks much more polished than the original". What can we say other than we approve of this addition greatly? Nice move HTC and T-Mobile!

[Thanks, Tek818, for the info and screenshot!]

We've been throwing around a March launch date for the T-Mobile HD2 for a while now. And if this slide, purportedly from an internal T-Mobile presentation, is correct, it seems we're on the money. It shows the HD2 being released on March 24, along with a slew of other current and future devices. Not much to say other than that, until we see it confirmed by other sources. [PPC Geeks via TMoNews]

We're expecting to get a better look the Sony Ericsson Aspen in just a few short days at Mobile World Congress. But in the meantime, Russian YouTuber Zavackiy managed to get his hands on a couple of them. It's good to see Windows Mobile 6.5.3 in action on a front-facing QWERTY device, but the hexagonal start menu looks like a pretty inefficient use of space at such as small screen size. See for yourself after the break. [via Engadget]

Read the rest of this entry »