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a report was released that around 6,000 spam apps had magically disappeared from the Android Market and it wasn't exactly clear whether Google or the developers had been the ones to remove them. One of the developers of So Wallpaper, a developer whose whole slate of 1,500 apps had been removed in the sweep, got a hold of AndroidGuys to offer his take on the situation.

The unnamed developer advised that he wasn't the one to remove the apps, claiming that even his legit apps had been removed as well. He seemed to be unhappy with the money he was making from his Android apps, stating "we didn't want to have to do that. But the Android Market doesn't have many people who like to pay for apps. So how is a developer to live? Just off of ad revenue?"

The developer continued by stating that he had "many developer accounts" and "we will still flood the Android Market until it provides a better profit environment. We will fire in the end! We welcome other developers to join with us." Most of his apps were found to be adult in nature, and although Android is known to be pretty lax on controlling apps, this isn't exactly what Android wants their Market to turn into.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed yesterday when the news came out that the HTC Desire and a few other phones would be switching from the AMOLED screen to the Super LCD screens due to supply concerns. Then again, my carrier is in one of the U.S. "regional markets" looking to get the Desire sometime in the next couple months, so I've been biting my nails waiting to upgrade to this phone. The question is, what's the real world difference in the screens? Howard of HowardForums took a look:

While there is a bit of a noticeable difference at some angles with the S-AMOLED screen and AMOLED screen over the Super LCD, the difference looks to be pretty minimal. I'm not completely sold that most of us would be able to tell the difference unless they are right next to each other as they are in the video. If the battery life is improved with the Super LCD as HTC has claimed, it may just be a worthwhile tradeoff. Is it Autumn yet?

The news yesterday from the Library of Congress stating that jailbreaking your iPhone was legal was expected to make the bigwigs at Apple a little unhappy. A spokeswoman from Apple kept their official statement pretty short and sweet, essentially stating that although it may be legal, jailbreaking your iPhone will still void your warranty.

According to the spokeswoman, "Apple's goal has always been to insure that our customers have a great experience with their iPhone and we know that jailbreaking can severely degrade the experience. As we've said before, the vast majority of customers do not jailbreak their iPhones as this can violate the warranty and can cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably."

While this may deter a few from exploring this new option, the modding community may be seeing an explosion in underground apps and modifications for the iPhone. We'll see how many give this a go now that a little thing like the law isn't standing in the way.

Gigabyte's On/Off Charging technology was announced back in April and it has made many with mobile devices pretty happy having a place to charge their mobile devices whether their PC is on or off. Gigabyte has now announced hat their On/Off technology is indeed compatible with the iPhone 4, and even provides a 40% faster quick charge than traditional motherboards. This is due to the fact that Gigabyte's USB ports can provide the near 1 amp that the iPhone 4 requests to quick charge compared to the 0.5 amps that USB ports are normally capped at.

We want to assure our customers that they will be able to continue enjoying the benefits of On/Off Charge should they choose to upgrade to the new iPhone 4," commented Tim Handley, Deputy Director of Motherboard Marketing at GIGABYTE Technology Co. Ltd. "On/Off Charge behaves just like iPhone 4 chargers in providing the amount of current that the device requests throughout its charge, without force-feeding or damaging the device battery." Check out the demo video from Gigabyte below:

More on the iPhone plan competing frenzy between all the big providers down under, along with Optus and Telstra we now have info on what Vodafone and 3 are offering with its iPhone 4 plans.

There are no less than eight plans available between these two networks, with Vodafone giving the cheapest deal available at just $29. For this you get 500MB of data per month and $180 of talk and text, but you'll need to pay an additional $18 per month for the iPhone 4 16GB, $24 per month for the 32GB model or $12 per month for the new 8GB 3GS over the 2 year lifespan of the contract.

3 are offering a plan for $39 a month with a much higher data allowance of 1.15GB, whilst the 16GB iPhone 4 will set you back an additional $10 a month, $14 for the 32GB model and $5 extra for the 8GB 3Gs.

Following details on Telstra's upcoming iPhone 4 plans, Optus, too, has now disclosed details on what it will be offering its customers at launch.

There will be four plans on offer from Optus to suit your usage/budget. The plans range from $49 up to $89 per month and data usages range from 1GB to 3GB.

Despite whispers of an unlimited data plan up for grabs from Optus, some misunderstanding (along with a bit of wishful thinking) seems to have stirred that one up in the rumour mill with Optus' meaning of 'unlimited' applying to the call allowance for national calls and text (excluding overseas calls) relevant only to the top $89 plan.

With the official launch just around the corner, details on various iPhone 4 plans are surfacing left, right and centre from all the big providers including Telstra, Optus, Vodaphone and 3.

Telstra were first out the gate to share details of its plans for both the iPhone 4 and the new entry-level 3GS 8GB. There are going to be three plans on offer for these phones, beginning at $49 a month.

The $49 per month plan gives you 200MB of data and $400 worth of talk and text. If you link it to a 24 month contract, you can get the 3GS 8GB on this plan with no upfront charges, whilst the iPhone 4 16GB will set you back $149 up front on this plan and the 32GB model costing $299 up front.

The Library of Congress made a few sweeping changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which it has the power to make changes to every three years. Among the major announcements: iPhone jailbreaking is now covered under "fair use," DRM circumvention is now allowable in certain situations, and e-books are now allowed to be read aloud by computers.

The iPhone jailbreaking announcement came as the biggest shocker to most. The Register of Copyrights, who handles the DMCA changes for the Library of Congress, concluded that jailbreaking affected "fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole. Where the alleged infringement consists of the making of an unauthorized derivative work, and the only modifications are so de minimis, the fact that iPhone users are using almost the entire iPhone firmware for the purpose for which it was provided to them by Apple."

In a drive to keep the Nexus One and Desire phones on the shelves, HTC has officially verified in a Press Release that "later this summer" these two devices will be receiving Super LCD screens instead of the AMOLED screens that are the culprit for so many high end devices being out of stock.

With the North American release of the Desire coming in August, it seems this was the only way to keep up with expected demand. Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, stated that "the SLCD displays provide consumers with a comparable visual experience to HTC's current 3.7 inch displays with some additional benefits including battery performance."

The full Press Release: (Courtesy of Engadget)

According to Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the internet is going to run out of available IP addresses much faster than most people (incl. ISPs) realise.

The underlying protocol, IPv4 has a limit of about 4 Billion IP addresses. However, due to everything from computers to mobile phones to the latest high-tech refridgerators and air conditioners snapping up an IP address, the boundary is being neared with only about 232 million addresses left. Geoff Huston says he has worked out all the figures and at the rate of addresses being taken up, IPv4 address availability will reach the end of the line in about 340 days.

The answer? IPv6 which is capable of providing trillions of addresses for every person on the planet. However, ISPs and websites have been reluctant to move over to the new protocol as all devices connecting via that protocol would need to be either reconfigured or upgraded with new firmware, or in some cases, replaced altogether.

The results of a BitTorrent specific study have been published this week by researchers at the University of Ballarat which claim that only 10% of torrents available on the net are legit, whilst the remainder all breach copyright. They used Torrentz.com to make this analysis; a search engine that combines results from all the most popular BitTorrent sites such as Demonoid, TorrentBay, BitReactor etc.

I'm surprised that 10% of the results they obtained pointed to legal downloads, considering Torrentz.com links only to illegal torrent downloading sources......

Of course, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) were quick to lap up the results of this report and have published it in full (in PDF format) on their website.

With intent to help connect Australians with political information and to encourage more participation online, Google is launching its "Google Election 2010" initiative on the 28th of this month which involves Federal politicians, Google engineers, the Australian Electoral Commission, students from local secondary schools, journalists and submitted YouTube videos with questions and/or comments.

The launch event will kick off with a welcome address by Karim Temsamani whom is the Managing Director for Google Australia and NZ. Following that, Google's election initiatives will be officially launched by Google Australia's Engineering Director, Alan Noble. From there will be an address by Kate Lundy, Senator for the ACT and member of the Australian Labor Party then it's onward to speeches by Joe Hockey, MP and Shadow Treasurer of the Aus Liberal Party and Mr Doug Orr, State Manager for NSW division of the Aus Electoral Commission.

In conclusion of the event, there will be a panel discussion with Kate Lundy, Joe Hockey, Mr Doug Orr, several media, school students and videos submitted via YouTube.

In an ever-expanding fight to keep your eyes on the road where they belong instead of on your mobile device, the iPhone app Text'nDrive has been made available at the App Store. The free version, which has been specifically tested with Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and MobileMe, will read up to the first 45 words of an email to you. For $20 USD you can get the full version that pumps the word limit up to 500 and even allows you to dictate a reply.

According to CEO Daniel Robichaud, Text'nDrive is an "innovative solution which we hope will entice more responsible driving habits and ultimately make the roads safer for everyone." SMS functionality is reported to be under development, and the company is actively taking user feedback to improve the product. Text N'Drive is also available for Blackberry and is "coming soon" to Android.

Qantus has decided to go ahead with its new next-gen check-in system and will be trialing it next week in Perth.

This system comprises technologies from 15 differing vendors and will involve 100,000 of Qantus' platinum, gold, silver and bronze Frequent Flyers. The system's development has been in place for two years now and includes helps from vendors such as IBM, New Media Innovations, Unisys, Fujitsu, Telstra and several others to make it all come together.

The project was first announced as far back as November of 2009 by Qantus CEO Alan Joyce in which he stated its aim would be to speed up the check-in process and reduce congestion at the terminal. New loyalty cards will be given to platinum, gold, silver and bronze frequent flyers with a smart chip built-in which is designed to act as a boarding pass when scanned through new check-in kiosks that are being deployed for the trial.

BMW, one of the leaders in technological car gadgetory are bringing aboard select production vehicles another advancement to help distract them some more from the critical responsibilities of road awareness down under.

BMW will be the first car maker to bring vehicles to Australian roads with an in-car web surfing option. BMW simply refer to it as BMW Internet; it's designed to work via the iDrive interface and utilizes a 3G network equipped smart phone for its connection point. So it's not quite as advanced as you may have first thought with self-linked internet, but I'm sure in the not too distant future they will tick that box.

The system is also designed not to be operational when the car is in motion, but we all know how quickly someone will find a way around that.

Apple's huge press event on Friday did more than announce free cases for all iPhone 4 users; it also lit a fire under several companies as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that many modern phones suffer from "death grip" signal loss. He used examples such as the

BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, and a Samsung Omnia II during the conference and the top brass at several of the companies aren't taking Jobs' words lightly.

RIM was one of the loudest against Apple, stating "One thing is for certain, RIM's customers don't need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple."

July 30 is the big day many are holding out for in the land of Oz with Apple launching its iPhone 4 then. But perhaps the sales numbers won't be quite as big as they would have been if the whirlwind of reports about signal issues (dubbed antennagate) weren't floating around.

However, Jobs had this to say upon opening a press conference on Friday morning. "We're not perfect. We know that, you know that and phones aren't perfect either, but we want to make all of our users happy. If you don't know that about Apple, you don't know Apple.

When we fall short, we try harder ... if a user is having a problem, it's our problem."

It's not hard to understand in today's world of technology why many services of yesteryear have become redundant and forced people and corporations to go the way of the internet highway. In many ways this is for the better for all parties involved, but there are a lot of cases where the ease of accessibility and usefulness of internet based services is a big black cloud hanging over many business owners heads.

One such example applies to owners of video rental stores. With such advents as Foxtel IQ, fetchTV, Telstra's T-Box etc. giving a vastly growing number of movies on demand, this is one of the main reasons why you see Blockbuster and Video Ezy stores shutting down that were once upon a time booming with activity. It's all too easy to jump on the net and pay for a movie download or stream these days, too. The convenience of such means less people taking trips to their local video rental store.

However, there are a number of clever folks out there looking to revolutionise the video rental industry so that it can still survive the long haul and be a viable alternative to these fandangled internet connected services. Jennie Curtin of SMH has the full report.

Yesterday it was reported by many outlets, including yours truly, that the eFuse technology will brick your Droid X if the phone finds anything modded or hacked in the software. The guys at Engadget decided to do a little more digging and got a response from Motorola. Motorola states that eFuse will not kill your phone; it will simply go into recovery mode until approved software is reinstalled. It seems the modders out there will still have a rough time tinkering with the Droid X, but the results don't seem to be as bad as initially reported.

Here's the full response from Motorola: (courtesy of Engadget)

"Motorola's primary focus is the security of our end users and protection of their data, while also meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements. The Droid X and a majority of Android consumer devices on the market today have a secured bootloader. In reference specifically to eFuse, the technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software. If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed. Checking for a valid software configuration is a common practice within the industry to protect the user against potential malicious software threats. Motorola has been a long time advocate of open platforms and provides a number of resources to developers to foster the ecosystem including tools and access to devices via MOTODEV at https://developer.motorola.com."

Well, the cries over the iPhone 4 have been heard all the way to the top of the mountain. While Apple gears us for the press conference tomorrow, even a U.S. senator has gotten involved in trying to get Apple to fix things with their newest device. Charles E. Sumner, a senator from New York, has posted an open letter to Steve Jobs criticizing the iPhone 4 and its problems and strongly encouraging Jobs to make things right with customers.

Here's a copy of the letter: (courtesy of Gizmodo)

July 15, 2010