Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Welcome to Crack 2.0.  Clearly this stuff is more potent as this past weeks antics suggest the game is at a whole new level.  What am I talking about?  I am talking about what they did and said and tweeted this week.  Here is made me fall of my stool, if, you know, I sat on stools:

• Google’s Gmail adds yet another marginally useless tool in the lab
• HTC says they release 4 to 1 million new Android phones
• XM/Sirius make world’s first iPhone app that behaves like a radio.  Check that, no they didn’t.
• Nokia’s mosh gets moshed, looses tooth, knocked out cold.

GMail undo: techie five second rule

This ranks up there with the beer-goggle drunk email test that is in labs too.  Our Robert Nelson posted GMail’s latest victory and frankly, celebrating this is like giving a Woot! out to the iPhone for adding copy and paste.  The new feature allows you to pull back an email for up to five seconds after you send it.

If you are like me, it takes nearly 5 seconds to blink.  You can’t pick up food off the ground and expect it to be safe as the five-second-rule was disproved by Mythbusters.  Wait, wait.  Maybe I am being unfair to five seconds.  After all, check this video for your favorite movies, all in 5 seconds:

“I’m thinking of number between 4 and 1 million Android phones” - HTC

Oh, brother.  HTC announced they’ll have “more than 3” new Android phones out this year.  Could it be that HTC was feeling left out of the parties the past two weeks with Palm and Apple showing off shiny things you can’t have yet?  I say heck yeah.  Here are my possible reasons why HTC doesn’t have a finger on the exact number:

• HTC phones are brought to them by storks. 
• The whole if-you-build-it-they-will-come thing hasn’t worked out so well for the G1
• They were told “Answer cloudy, ask again later” just before writing the press release.
• If they told you the actual number, they’d have to kill you.  Or at least saddle you with a Moto phone.

Fine, maybe I don’t know why HTC doesn’t know.  Do you?

XM/Sirius don’t know about Pandora app, shhhh!

I feel bad for XM/Sirius.  I liked them five years ago, shout out to Fred on 49.  But times are a changing and competing on the iPhone with an app that more or less duplicates what Pandora and others can offer seems, well, silly.  I should note that I am cheap and hold no allegiances.  Stern fans (he is still on the satellite broadcaster right?) can stop sending me hate mail.

For casual listeners like myself, I just don’t see it.  My latest coup is streaming Pandora though my iPhone to my car stereos.  I love that set up.

Nokia ends the Mosh pit

You have to feel for Nokia.  They just can’t catch a break in the US market.  Their Mosh initiative was aimed at making the Nokia experience more customizable with a program that allowed you to swap ringtones, videos, and more.  It ended up being a trading place for porn and copyrighted music.  So close.

It has got to be frustrating ruling Europe while gaining little traction over here in the US.  Now faced with a tough decision of having to shut down a program cause it got spoiled, as Natesh opined, by a “few bad apples” has to be like a kick in the face.

That is my list for the week.  Join us next week when XYZtells us they XXX their customers, it is sure to be a hoot!