HTC HD2 owners have been trying to shoehorn Windows Phone 7 onto their hapless devices practically since day one, but it looks like a port won’t make it into the wild before the platform’s formal US launch. That doesn’t mean you should give up hope, however, because one variant seems to be at least partway done, winding its merry way from boot through the splash screen and deep into the speedy UI in a far more convincing video demo than the last one that hit our inbox. Though no apps are actually demonstrated nor so much as a basic phone call (pretty please?), multitouch pinch-to-zoom appears to work just fine, and we’ve little doubt any remaining quirks will be worked out in due time — if not nearly as soon as new HTC HD7 owners migrating from the HD2 might have liked. Video after the break.
Update: Here comes a new, 5-minute video of the purportedly WP7-equipped HD2 (via XDA.cn / Pocketnow), this time side-by-side with the Surround and with expanded functionality — Office, Zune, and more. Video is also, as you might’ve guessed, after the break.
I spent many a lazy summer day in my youth playing some games on the Super Nintendo and I remember the controllers well. I would bet lots of you out there did the same thing during the summer and have some fond gaming memories with pals.
One enterprising geek has taken a left over controller from the SNES and hacked it using a Streak connector and a Teensy USB Microcontroller board. He hacked the controller so that the Streak recognizes it as a USB keyboard.
The controller can then be used to operate all the menus of the Streak and will work with all game emulators out there says the geek. This is one of the coolest gaming mods for the Streak I have seen.
Halloween is almost upon us, which means that you should really have a costume by now. After all, no one wants to show up to a party in something they threw together an hour before they left. If you want a good costume, you’re going to have to put some effort into it. Take Ben Heck for example, this guy knows how to do it right.
The rather talented modder decided he wanted a Portal-themed costume. Since dressing up like GlaDOS or a cake just didn’t seem like the right move, he decided to put a portal on his chest. Not just a picture of a portal, but one that you could actually see through.
Using an LCD and a rear-mounted camera, he effectively creates the illusion that there is a portal (or just a hole) through his midsection. Suddenly my steampunk costume doesn’t seem quite as cool.
Well now, that didn’t take very long. T-Mobile’s G2 (aka the HTC Vision) has been let off its leash, and there’s no getting it back now. XDA-developers member coolbho3000 has posted his overclock module, which takes an already fast phone and make it considerably more perky. He started at a modest 1GHz, but kept on pushing up to 1.42GHz — though there’s potential to go even higher. All this despite T-Mobile’s attempts at preventing hacking, but certainly seeming to allow for a fair bit of tweaking. You can download all you need at the source link, or if you’d rather just live vicariously there’s video proof after the break.
Sometimes a mod is more than just a mod: it’s a manifesto. When Phawx over at BrainLazy decided to take an X-Acto knife to his Epic 4G’s keypad, he knew what he was doing: both challenging Apple’s place in the world of cellphone-based gaming and encouraging other manufacturers to step up to the plate. Although early on in the design process he mocked up some plastic controller pieces to replace the factory keypad altogether, by the time it came to try the thing out he realized that by simply pulling out the unused keys and making a few minor (very minor) cosmetic adjustments he could give his touchscreen handset a gamepad slider more eminently more playable than your Droid’s Game Gripper — and eminently less mythical than your PSP Phone. Video after the break.
While ThinkGeek’s iCade Arcade Docking Station may have been a clever April Fool’s joke, the concept behind the machine was a good one. And it’s good to see that the Do-It-Yourself crowd out there is doing their best to make that magic happen again. The difference this time around, though, is that this particular modder was called out by Lenovo to come up with “an idea for fun.” That idea happened to be a half-sized arcade machine.
Lenovo is in the process of getting a new website up and running, with the main idea being “What’s Your Idea of Fun?” Lenovo reached out to modders all over the place, and asked them to create something that people would consider fun. This particular modder, Envador, designed the ArcadeDock in a matter of 10 days, and was nice enough to collect all of his design stages on video. Envador utilized an IdeaPad Y560 notebook, and managed to cram it into a case that features a real working joystick, and large buttons. Connect the notebook via USB, and you’ll be able to start playing your favorite games, as long as you have the right ROM.
You can vote for Envador’s ArcadeDock here. And, if you’re interested in seeing how the whole thing went down, then go ahead and jump through the via link below, and watch the 10-part video saga as he builds the ArcadeDock from the ground up.
Looking for a jailbreak for your iPod touch or iPhone running iOS 4.1? Your chariot is named limera1n — assuming you’re willing to risk your device on a software developer showdown. The infamous Geohot just upstaged the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team by releasing a reportedly buggy beta exploit of his own, which you can find at our download link immediately below. It only works on Windows at the moment, hacks only official releases and iPhone 3GS isn’t supported right now, and it claims to be an unpatchable, untethered release for those of you who appreciate what those terms mean.
As you can imagine, rival developers aren’t terribly happy that Geohot’s back in the limelight. MuscleNerd (of the iPhone Dev Team) claims that limera1n will re-lock iPhones that were unlocked by his team’s ultrasn0w software, and recommends you skip limera1n, but the main reason the iOS hacking community is angry at Geohot is because if more than one exploit is released simultaneously, Apple can fix them both in one fell swoop. By releasing first, Geohot has allegedly forced other teams to decide between the good of iPhone users over the short term (by releasing a different, more stable exploit) or over the long term (by saving their exploit for future use) and so far it looks like both teams have chosen to prolong the fight — the iPhone Dev Team is asking folks to withhold its Shatter exploit, and Chronic Dev Team says it will modify its greenpois0n jailbreak to use Geohot’s hack instead. What a weird, wild world we live in.
Update: How might this work on an iPad, given that beta versions of iOS (like 4.2) aren’t currently supported? Good question. We’ve struck all references to iPad accordingly, until the powers that be figure it out.
Update 2: Video after the break! Also, we’re hearing that some folks have jailbroken their iPads successfully with limera1n, and we personally got it working quickly on a pair of iPhones with iOS 4.1… but one of the two was missing icons upon restart and didn’t regain App Store, Maps, Game Center and Calendar even after a restore. Be careful, now!
Clearly a lot of folks out there are pretty passionate about the quality of their cameraphone pics. So too is cellphone modder hyperX, who is developing some custom tweaks to improve the quality of the stills and vids coming out of Nokia‘s latest darling. First is a hack to enable 720p30 video, a slight improvement over the 720p25 default. That’s demonstrated after the break, along with a continuous autofocus mod. More notable, however, is a tweak to enable nearly uncompressed images. Stock JPEGs coming from the camera clock in around 2MB, but the example image he’s provided (on the other end of that source link) is a rather heftier 11MB — truly a hack that won’t do your memory card any favors, but it’ll sure make those pixels shine. Sadly without back-to-back before and after images we can’t say for sure what kind of tangible improvement this makes, but we hear if you ask nicely he’ll let you try it out for yourself.
After yesterday’s Nokia N8 photo compression hack and 30fps silky-smooth video mod, now arch-tinkerer hyperX has outed another tweak to the Symbian^3 smartphone’s optics. He’s added an option to support continuous auto-focus during video recording, keeping footage crisp even as your subject moves around.
Video demo after the cut
Interestingly, he’s also confirmed that the mods so far don’t actually require flashing a new firmware to the N8, which suggests installing them might be a little more user-friendly than we thought. Here’s hoping we see some sort of general release coming soon; after all, availability of the N8 is set to explode midway through this month.
When we heard that the Motorola Droid 2 was the latestAndroid handset to nab the ancient magic of frequency modulated audio using Droid X files, we just had to give it a try, and sure enough, if you’ve got root, the FM Radio app can be yours with a quick download and just a few lines of code. Before you run off to void your warranty, however, you should know it’s got a fairly desirable feature missing — it only plays audio out of the right earphone. But hey, if we’re going old school, we might as well go all the way, right? Excuse us while we go listen to some glorious monoaural sound. Files and instructions at our source links, immediately below.
