iPhone 4 owners? You may now order the free bumpers Apple promised everyone at the Antennagate press conference. It doesn’t have to be Apple’s option either. Apple enlisted the top mass-market case designers as well. You’ll be able to snag a free bumper from Bumper, Belkin, Griffin, Incase or Spek all the way through the end of September 2010. But you may not like the options. It’s probably not what you were expecting.

If Apple really wanted to silence critics, they have a place to do so. I’ve now seen it with my own eyes. Inside Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, there are a collection of rooms that house 17 giant anechoic chambers. Basically, they’re rooms where no waves (sound or electromagnetic) can reflect off of anything, so there is absolutely no interference when it comes to wireless testing. Apple places their devices from iPhones to iPads in these chambers to ensure the performance is up to their standards. Yesterday after their press event, Apple gave myself and a handful of other journalists the chance to take a tour of these facilities.

HP was apparently working on an Android tablet along with a Windows 7 and webOS model. Yeah, all three at the same time. The Android flavor was even scheduled for a late-2010 release. But the project was reportable canned just like the Windows 7 edition. That’s probably for the best, really. It’s not that surprising to hear that HP had three different versions of the Slate in development all at the same time. The goal was likely to determine which one was best suited for the market and not to release three tablets each on a different platform. It seems, however, the best option won and HP is going with the webOS over Windows 7 or Android.

Consumer Reports today said it won't recommend Apple's iPhone 4 because of major reception issues when users touch the external antenna.

Google lets you sign up for a program called App Inventor that is meant to make Android mobile app creation easy... by getting rid of most of what’s traditionally associated with programming. Google suggests that “[i]nstead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.” [Via Reddit.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's Supposedly Easy Android App Creation ... | Comments][Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay

When you first look at Google App Inventor for Android, it may not look like much. That is to say, it’s ugly. But as with many Google services, beneath a layer of homeliness, there appears to be much more under the surface. In this case, it could be a very big gateway drug for Android app development. Or is it a Doomsday device that will muck up native app development on the platform? The service, unveiled tonight in the New York Times, is basically a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tool for app development on the Android platform. Instead of having to learn code (in Android’s case, Java), App Inventor is a piece of software that allows you to drag and drop certain elements...

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore MobiLens service, reporting key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month average period ending May 2010 compared to the preceding three-month average. The report ranked the leading mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone operating system (OS) platforms in the U.S. according to their share of current mobile subscribers age 13 and older, and reviewed the most popular activities and content accessed via the subscriber’s primary mobile phone. The May report found Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 22.

There has been a lot of talk the last couple of days with Apple’s stance on the gigantic Chinese market. The Lenovo’s chief and founder stated “We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble.” Well, good sir, your troubles might soon begin. Apple plans on opening three stores in Shanghai and is considering more locations in other first and second-tier Chinese cities as well. The first Chinese Apple Store opened in 2008 in Sanlitun, Beijing but these new locations mark a strategy shift for Apple.

A couple of charts I found worthy to share excerpted from Vision Mobile’s “Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond” study which you should definitely read (it’s free – sponsored by Telefonica).

Over the past two years at AdMob, we’ve experienced the rapid growth in consumer usage of the the mobile Internet and applications first-hand.  As it has grown, so has the scope of the topics we’ve covered in our monthly Mobile Metrics Report. This month, we take a look at the major themes that have emerged over the past two years.  In the slideshow below, we reexamine many of the topics we have previously covered in our reports including the worldwide growth in traffic, the rise of iOS and Android, and the emergence of mobile Internet devices.  Take a look at the full deck for details. We’ve included a summary on page 1.

A day after Amazon made it abundantly clear it’s gunning for world domination in the e-reading space by lowering the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189 – following competitor Barnes & Noble’s decision to slash the price of its Nook e-reader down to $199 – chief executive Jeff Bezos sat down with Fortune’s JP Mangalindan for a fairly interesting interview. One of the things Bezos talked about was the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer that is selling like hotcakes and unequivocally poses a genuine threat to Amazon’s burgeoning ebooks and ereader business (and, as some claim, to reading in general). According to Apple, it’s already taken about 22% of the U.S.

Back in May, Google showcased the next version of Android, codenamed Froyo. Chuck full of new features like Flash support, the ability to turn your phone into a Wifi hotspot, and huge speed gains, Android users have been eager to try it out for themselves. Some of them already have — Google rolled out Froyo to a small number of Nexus One years in late May, but most people didn’t receive the update. Now, Froyo is finally rolling out to all Nexus One users over the air, with plans to have it deployed to most people by the end of the week. From the Nexus One blog: Starting today, Nexus One users will begin to receive the Android 2.

Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is debuting its free music cloud service today that allows you to sync your entire music collection across Android phones and PCs/Macs to the public today. The service, which was launched into private beta in May, streams music to your browser and Android phone. Here’s how it works. The service’s application that operates in the background of your computer managing the upload and day-to-day syncing of your music library. In addition, it can upload playlists, coverart, ratings and song information you may have entered using iTunes. The application will manage your music for you, making automatic updates whenever changes occur in your library, and on...

Apple this morning announced that it has sold over 1.7 million of the iPhone 4 through Saturday, June 26, three days after its launch on June 24. The company went as far as to call it the “most successful product launch in Apple’s history”, citing its iconic chief executive Steve Jobs. Bloomberg had predicted Apple would sell over 1 million on launch day alone, but the Cupertino company has not disclosed sales numbers for June 24 specifically. Just for your reference: it took Apple 28 days to sell 1 million iPads, 59 days to sell 2 million of them and 80 days to sell 3 million. Jobs also says in the press release announcing the first iPhone 4 milestone that he’s sorry about “all those...

Opera has released its latest State of the Mobile Web report, and once again it has registered reasonable growth, with Opera Mini users increasing by 4.2% compared to April 2010. Since that month, page views have also gone up 7.7%, Opera says. For this report, Opera analyzed one 24-hour period to see how Opera Mini is used throughout the day in the top 10 countries (Indonesia, Russia, India, China, Nigeria, Ukraine, South Africa, the United States, Vietnam and the United Kingdom). Turns out that for all of those, regardless of differences in economy, culture or location, the four hours between 8 PM and midnight apparently account for a disproportionate amount of mobile data consumption.

Yesterday, Microsoft communications head Frank Shaw put up a post on The Official Microsoft Blog rattling off some numbers regarding many of Microsoft’s products. The intention was obviously to lend some perspective to some of the negative coverage Microsoft has been getting recently. There’s no way around it, the numbers are impressive. And I think it’s smart for Shaw (and Microsoft) to do things like this. That said, I wish Shaw would just come out and say what he really means, rather than literally letting the numbers speak for themselves. Sure, most major company executives will never directly call out their rivals in such a public forum.

Apple twierdzi, że Flash to kiepski produkt. Adobe obraża się na Apple i zapowiada, że jeszcze pokaże. Na tej bójce korzysta HTML5, ale sama specyfikacja to nie wszystko, potrzebne są jeszcze narzędzia. Tych ani Apple ani Adobe jakoś nie pokazują, więc korzysta na tym… mały startup. … [odwiedź Spider's Web by przeczytać więcej]

For many years I’ve been heavily involved on the mobile application aspects of mobility; the app layer and the network layers. Most recently I’ve been spending quite a bit of time managing the development of a new product called Mobile Broadband ServiceView; development that has exposed me to a new point of view when it comes to mobile. Today my customer is the network operator themselves in the areas of “device activation, management & support aspects” (where device is a handset and/or wireless modems). One aspect of interest is the impact of Mobile Broadband (MBB) which is globally exploding like crazy– an explosion caused by increase in use of smartphones and PC wireless modems — 3G,...

As everyone on the Web knows by now, Steve Jobs does not think too highly of Flash and therefore you cannot watch Flash videos on the the iPad (or the iPhone). Apple’s position has stirred a lot of debate about how much video on the Web is iPad-friendly. It turns out that about two thirds of new videos are currently being encoded in the H.264 format, which is playable on the iPad, but media sites still need to either package that video in an app or in an HTML5 video player viewable in the iPad’s browser. Streaming Media decided to shed more light on the issue by surveying 1,147 online media professionals about their iPad and HTML5 video plans in a report available here.

U.S. residents have significantly increased their online social-networking activities via their mobile phones, making these sites and applications one of the hottest in the mobile space, according to comScore.