Is the MacBook Air radical simply because it has only one USB port, no FireWire ports, and no optical drive? Just you wait, says Andy Ihnatko. Apple’s got considerably far more in store.

Macworld

Amazon may have slashed prices on their selection of 4G smartphones for the holiday weekend, but they aren’t done yet. On Monday, the same selection of phones will drop to the sweet price of free when purchased alongside a new two-year contract. Phones included in the free-for-all Memorial Day sale include the HTC Thunderbolt Nexus S 4G Samsung DROID Charge and the newly released LG Revolution If you’ve been on the fence about committing to a 4G device, the decision may have just been made for you.

[via MobileCrunch]

Android Phone Fans

rel="attachment wp-att-25359" href="http://www.appcraver.com/wfn-fishing-log/wfnfishinglog/"> class="size-medium wp-image-25359" title="wfnfishinglog" src="http://www.appcraver.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/wfnfishinglog-200x300.jpg" alt="WFN Fishing Log" width="200" height="300" />

If you love to fish, and you have an iPhone, you’re likely already obsessed with WFN Fishing Log. On the off chance that you’re not, this is the new app on offer from WorldFishingNetwork.com, the online community/compendium of all things fishing-related. title="WFN Fishing Log on the iTunes App Store" href="http://itunes.apple.com/app/id414329078/?mt=8&partnerId=30&siteID=saW0nB/fQ6o" target="_blank">WFN Fishing Log aims to be a one-stop fisherman’s log book, with tools to help a fishing trip along, from the planning phase to the post-trip bragging.

When the app is started, the splash screen will display the four basic functions of the app: My Trips, My Albums, My Maps, and Tools. My Trips is where you store all the data of a trip, sort of like a personal diary. The formatting is taken care of, so all the user has to do is upload photos, write notes, document the fish caught, and put down other useful data for future reference. The app design is very polished and streamlined– location, for example, can be selected by using the built-in GPS.

Read the rest of href="http://www.appcraver.com/wfn-fishing-log/">Plan Your Next Fishing Trip with WFN Fishing Log

AppCraver.com, 2011. | href="http://www.appcraver.com/">Best iPhone Applications | href="http://www.appcraver.com/picks/">Top iPhone Apps

AT&T chief Randall Stephenson, at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday said that the next wave of growth in the wireless industry will be led by a combination of mobile broadband and cloud computing. Stephenson says customers should be able to buy an application once, and have it work across many different devices – using cloud-based web apps.

Stephenson pointed to texting, which was originally a walled garden whereby users could only text people on the same network. Once interoperability was introduced, however, “demand just skyrocketed and created a business model for companies like Twitter.”

The average customer is OS, device, and network agnostic, he said. They want something seamless and that’s “a perfect example of how this cloud computing and mobile Internet are going to provide a very powerful force” for growth.

“There’s a tidal wave coming … that’s being carried by these 4G networks and cloud computing environments,” Stephenson said. “We as an industry can try to control this tide … but customers are going to do what they want. Our objective is to create a seamless and open environment.”

Mobisante wants to change the way ultrasound is delivered, reports TechFlash. Mobisante uses cell phones and existing wireless networks to transmit ultrasound images from patients in remote areas to hospitals. Here’s Chutani explaining how the technology works on a recent CNN news segment.

Cloud-based processing can now provide supercomputer power to mobile devices.

Elemental’s Cloud processing uses Amazon Web services for GPU processing in the cloud.

There are now over 10,000 medical apps in the App Store; a big jump from the 1,544 apps last year. Houston Neal narrowed it down to a list of the 70 best apps on his “Best Medical iPhone Apps for Doctors and Med Students” website.

Microwave chips aren’t just for communications anymore. They enable new sensor applications.

Imagine an Intel i7 handheld with Nvidia GPUs in a couple years. Like Wordlens for doctors. Nanoscience and metamaterials are opening new worlds.

Amazon’s new cloud application, Elastic Beanstalk, manages cloud applications automatically. Developers simply upload their application and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing and auto-scaling.
Perhaps the time has come for an open source competition to Amazon’s Cloud Service, with hooks and interfaces for a variety of mobile phone applications. It would be handy for apps that require, say image processing or a large data mining component.

Open source resource mapping projects like Oregon Explorer (www.oregonexplorer.info) and Willamette Basin Explorer (willametteexplorer.info) can make databases, created by government silos, available to everyone using the expertise of Oregon State’s Open Source Lab. OpenOceanMap (ohloh.net) is an ambitious project to break the ties of traditional geo-spatial data collection and develop a truly cross platform, Open Source, and transportable decision support tool. Their Gulf Project demo shows the utility of combining open source data bases.

Amazon’s Cloud is being used for Ocean Observatories. The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is the home of world-class hosting services for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, Drupal, and more than 50 other leading open source software projects

View full post on dailywireless.org

Motorola has made it known that the Xoom will be hitting Europe Q2 this year. Both 3G and wifi-only versions will landing in the upcoming months, but there’s no word yet what carriers will support the 3G version. And while we’ve seen indications of a wifi-only version, this is the first confirmation from Motorola that a wifi-only version will exist at all without carrier entanglements. Hopefully such an offering shows up stateside, as well. Full press release after the break.
Read More…

Motorola to Release Wifi-Only Xoom in Europe Next Quarter

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Nokia products world-wide hold a respectable portion of the mobile market. Their dumbphone Symbian OS still has the most users globally by most tallies, but their smartphones have had a hard time finding footing…largely because their OS was developed in-house, and they have floundered between several versions. But tomorrow is the day that it will become official: They are either going to stick with their own MeeGo (unlikely), or make the jump to either the Android or Windows Phone 7 OS for all future smartphones.

Whichever choice they make, Nokia throwing in with either Android or WP7 will greatly bolster the marketshare of the favored company, so tomorrow’s announcement will be a big one. And we’ll be sure and let you know as soon as we hear anything.

Nokia Considering Next OS: MeeGo, Android, or Windows 7

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

This weekend brings the Super Bowl and an early teaser level for the upcoming movie tie-in Angry Birds Rio, but you won’t have to wait much longer to get even more new levels to waste away your days on. For Valentine’s Day, Rovio will be offering an update to their Angry Birds Seasons that will bring a whole batch of new, love-themed levels to distract you as you wolf down ice cream and cry about not having a date.

Rovio knows not to mess with a winning formula, so don’t expect any earth-shattering changes in gameplay. If you want to see a bit more skin before you take the plunge, however, here are some sneak peek screens courtesy of AllThingsD.

[via AllThingsD]

View full post on Android Phone Fans

ASUS just showed off a whole lineup of Android tablets at CES, but chairman Jonney Shih is already touting what’s on the horizon. He apparently has the inside scoop one what will be powering the Apple iPad 2 — supposedly a dual-core ARM Cortex A9-based chip — and claims his company’s future NVIDIA Tegra 2 tablets will have the edge. In fact, Shih said, “to really compete it will take [Apple] some time” to catch up to what ASUS is bringing.

Throw Android 3.0 Honeycomb on whatever they have coming up and I’d say Shih might be talking the truth. In fact, his real competition might end up being Android tablets such as the Motorola XOOM and LG G-Slate.

[via Electronista]

View full post on Android Phone Fans

While some hands-on demonstrations of the Motorola XOOM and an extensive walkthrough at Verizon’s CES keynote gave us a good taste of what Android 3.0 Honeycomb will bring in terms of change to the operating system, Google is planning an event to give an even deeper look at the new version of its mobile platform. While Android aficionados are busy picking apart the Honeycomb SDK preview that just came online this week, Andy Rubin and crew are gearing up to give the masses a bit more.

The event, which will take place next Wednesday in Mountain View, CA, will see Rubin first present his take on the new OS followed by plenty of hands-on time with Honeycomb. We are assuming Google has reached a more stable build than the untouchable version featured on the XOOM at CES.

While you could say there isn’t much more we could discover about Honeycomb, we are sure Rubin and crew have some surprises up their sleeves. Could this event coincide with a launch of a new web-based Android Market? Google Music? Or will the proceedings be squarely focused on showing off just how awesome Honeycomb really is?

[via AllThingsDigital]

View full post on Android Phone Fans

Any time a big announcement or event is coming up, companies involved love to tease us. HTC did it before CES, and with Mobile World Congress coming up in just a few weeks, it’s not surprising that we’re starting to see some hints dropping of what may be in store for us. This time around, it’s LG giving some previews of what we might expect to see announced at MWC…and in this case, it seems to be 3D handsets.

LG’s invitation to their showing at MWC teases the line “Into the New Dimension,” and when you couple that with their statement at CES that 3D handsets would be making an appearance “sooner than we might expect,” and it’s almost a certainty that 3D handsets will be shown off at MWC in a couple of weeks.

To add a little more fuel to that fire, several sites are reporting on short-lived ad on a Dutch retailer’s website for the LG Optimus 3D. While any of these indicators alone could easily be dismissed as unsubstantiated rumor, all of them combined makes it seem pretty likely that we’re gonna see our first 3D handset in Barcelona. We’ll be watching for the announcement, and we’ll bring you any information we can get our hands on as soon as possible.

LG Expected to Intro 3D Smartphone at MWC Next Month

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Today, the Samsung Galaxy S Support Team has stated on their official Twitter page that an OTA update will soon grace the Nexus S.  The update will address an SMS issue where messages are being sent to the wrong contact.  Apparently, this has not only been a problem for Nexus S owners, but has also plagued other devices running previous versions of Android.  Have you received the update yet?  Let us know if you have received the update in the comments below and whether or not it addressed the issue.

Nexus S Is Getting An OTA “Over The Next Few Days”, Prevents SMS Bug

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Tegra 2 processors were all over CES earlier this month. In the next few weeks, we’ll be seeing a lot of phones launching with the dual-core CPUs. However, rumors are tricking out that we might be getting some information at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month about the next step in the Tegra line. Keep in mind that they’re still just rumors, but there are a lot of dots that can be easily connected to point in that direction.
Read More…

Tegra 3 To Make Its Debut at MWC Next Month?

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

We saw the first BlackBerry App World commercial nearly two months ago with Pageonce, and now we have the next in line with the newly-updated Urbanspoon app. The second in the BlackBerry App World series again shows off a "super app" put through daily use. This is only the second video as far as the app commercials go, but if the BBM spots are an indicator there should be many more down the line. Not much else to say about this one so just watch the video an see for yourself

CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Urbanspoon debuts as next BlackBerry App World commercial

View full post on CrackBerry.com blogs

The stars seem to be aligning for a Sprint iPhone.

View full post on Macworld

According to Jason Kincaid over at TechCrunch the next version of Android after Honeycomb has been confirmed as receiving the name Ice Cream Sandwich. It is said to have been told by the god father of Android himself, Andy Rubin. Check out the excerpt from the post below:

It’s going to be called Ice Cream Sandwich.

Android chief Andy Rubin told me so. Really, he did.

What do you guys think about Ice Cream Sandwich, as well what features would you like to see? Let us know in the comment’s below.

Source: TechCrunch

View full post on AndroidSPIN

One look at the giant Froyo sculpture outside of Google’s offices and you will realize the initial problem with calling a future version of the Android OS ‘Ice Cream’: unless you go with hand scooped the two could be easily confused. So thankfully Andy Rubin  while talking to TechCrunch happened to mention in passing that the next version of Android will actually be called Ice Cream Sandwich. Glad we cleared that up.

Which is the ice cream?

There is still no telling which version number Ice Cream Sandwich will receive. Initial speculation placed it at 2.4, though the current belief is Google may stick with the Gingerbread name for that incremental release. Whatever Android 2.4 is, it is said to be getting its coming out party at this year’s Google I/O. If Ice Cream Sandwich happens to be a true successor to Honeycomb, it could end up as version 3.1 or higher, but unfortunately Andy Rubin didn’t let those details slip.

[via TechCrunch]

View full post on Android Phone Fans

Image: Jeff Golden

We all assumed it’d be Ice Cream, but, admittedly, an ice cream statue might look a lot like a frozen yogurt statue. TechCruch is reporting that in a conversation about last month, Android’s Andy Rubin let slip the code name Ice Cream Sandwich in reference to the Android release that comes after Honeycomb.

He just mentioned it in passing, and he has in past misdirected us in such matters, referring to the release currently known as Froyo as “Flan” back in 2009, so who knows what we’ll end up with. Icing?

Rubin: Next Android Release will be Ice Cream Sandwich originally appeared on AndroidGuys.

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View full post on AndroidGuys

According to Nordic research firm QAim Oy who has been tracking internet traffic usage for the better part of the last year, Android usage is gaining rapidly on iPhone and Symbian devices in marketshare, and is on track to be number 1 by August of 2011.

Between week 4 of this year and week 41, internet traffic to Nordic pages increased from being less than 1% to nearly 10%, and in just the past 14 weeks, Android has seen a growth of nearly 5%.  If this pattern continues, Android will overtake iPhone in May and Symbian in August.

While these numbers are all regional, they do reflect the trend we keep hearing — Android is really coming into it’s own.  And what’s REALLY impressive is that while iPhone took a chunk of Nordic traffic recently, Symbian has ALWAYS reigned supreme in that market, and has never even been threatened.  Android taking that away from Symbian would indeed be a feat.

More details and all the numbers at the source.

Android Poised to be Most Popular Nordic Phone Platform by Next Summer

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

With all the rage right now about Gingerbread, it’s pretty easy to forget that some people or still waiting to see Froyo on their device. The HTC Legend and Wildfire are two devices in that camp, but a recent firmware update may indicate that 2.2 is on the way. The Wildfire OTA brings it up to firmware version 1.37.405.1, whereas the Legend update gets it up to 2.05.405.2. HTC has said that the Legend and Wildfire would both get Froyo before the year’s end, so let’s hope they weren’t lying.

If you have not yet seen the update, you can check manually by Settings > About phone > System software updates and hit check now.

HTC Legend and Wildfire get a firmware update, is Froyo next?

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Today in Toronto, Rogers is hosting their half-day, TabLifeTO conference to showcase how tablets are changing people’s lives. Be it in how they work, how they play or just simply how they live in general. Having brought in many guest speakers from various companies, Research In Motion’s David Neale, Vice President of Special Projects is among them to speak about the BlackBerry PlayBook. Some interesting news has already come out of the Rogers TabLifeTO event though for us BlackBerry fans. In what is almost a follow up to our CrackBerry Podcast conversation regarding how the BlackBerry PlayBook will be sold, Rogers has confirmed that starting early next year they will be adding the BlackBerry PlayBook to their already existing line of tablets. Pretty awesome!

Source: MobileSyrup

CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Rogers confirms BlackBerry PlayBook sales to begin early next year

View full post on CrackBerry.com blogs

Our friends over at Boy Genius Report are telling us that their source at Motorola has been whispering about the next couple of Android devices being released on AT&T and Verizon.  Interested?  Read on, my friends.

A couple of Tegra 2 handsets will be finding their way to the two biggest cellular providers in North America in the upcoming months, and BGR’s sources have some names – and a few small details.  The Olympus is rumored to hit AT&T in January, and is said to be “very fast,” with a new screen described only as “beautiful.”  On Verizon, you should be able to look for the 100%-LTE-compatible Etna come February or March.

Only time will tell how accurate these rumors are, but you know we rarely steer you wrong.  Stick around, and we’ll bring you more details as they’re available.

Rumors Afloat for Verizon and AT&T’s Next Motorola Devices

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Two new reports have just been published giving us a world-view of just how far Android has come in terms of smartphone market share. While US reports have steadily seen Android pacing and in some cases surpassing iOS and global trends are on the up and up, the latest data gives us a more local idea of where Google’s OS is succeeding.

In Asia, Android has just surpassed surpassed long-time leader Symbian for smartphone supremacy in Q3, according to market research firm GfK Asia. Interesting to note is the rise in overall smartphone sales, up from 1.27 million to over 4.7 million from the same time last year.

In Nordic regions, QAim Oy is reporting that Android is steadily growing. Measuring access requests to Nordic web content, Android holds third place with 9.85 percent, but it is the strong growth compared to an 0.83 percent share earlier this year that has analysts projecting Android to overtake both iOS and Symbian by August 2011.

All is good news for Google and Android users, as continued growth of the platform worldwide can only lead to greater and greater innovations.

[via CellularNews, 2]

View full post on Android Phone Fans

If you’re looking at Motorola to drop Android 2.2 on your recently purchased Motorola Defy, we have some good news. Motorola has confirmed that the rugged Defy will get Froyo, but you’ll have to wait until Q2 2011 to get it.

Today we can confirm that in EMEA we plan to upgrade Motorola DEFY to Android 2.2 (FroYo) in the second quarter of next year and that Milestone XT720 will remain on Android 2.1. Anyone looking for information about this and updates for other
regions should go to our forum.

If you’re wondering what “EMEA” means, it means that the following regions will be receiving the update:

• Europe
• Middle East
• Africa

There’s no word of Android 2.2 for the Defy hitting the United States, but we’re pretty confident Motorola will spread the Froyo love around that same time-frame.

Features of the Motorola Defy include:

• Android 2.1
  • Motoblur skin
• 3.7″ WVGA touchscreen display
• DLNA support
• 5MP camera
• OMAP 3610 processor clocked at 800MHz
• Adobe Flash lite

How do you feel about waiting until Q2 2011 for Android 2.2?

Via: Motorola, EuroDroid

View full post on AndroidSPIN

the New CrackBerry: better looking, easier to nagivate, more fun to use

Please Note: We’re rolling out changes as you read this… things may look a mess for a few minutes as everything pushes through.

Welcome to the new CrackBerry.com! Click around and get to know us – we’re sure you’ll like what you see. We’ve got a new look, new navigation and some great new content areas (don’t miss the BlackBerry Devices section or BlackBerrry OS Superpage – they’re my favorites!). Of course the accessory store and forums have received makeovers and our App store, Canada store, Phone store and m.crackberry.com sites will be getting the redesign treatment soon. All in all it’s a better looking and more professional CrackBerry that’s easier to navigate and more fun to use. And don’t worry – if you liked the old site, you’re going to LOVE the new site as we’ve made sure not to lose any of the crackiness that has made CrackBerry so successful to date. Keep in mind this is the first phase of a larger plan to fully revamp CrackBerry, which means there are even more changes to look forward to in the months ahead.   

Go explore the site and hurry back to this article and keep reading and I’ll fill in the details of what’s new, why we did what we did and what’s coming next. With a major overhaul like this I’m sure there will still be some tweaks and fixes for us to make post re-launch (supporting older web browsers, etc.) so consider us in *public beta* and don’t mind if you run into the odd loose end. We’ve setup a forum thread to report any errors or bugs and we’ll be working overtime to make things perfect. In the meantime, read on for more of the story behind the CrackBerry redesign and let us know what you think of the new CB in the comments!

What’s New, Why We Did What We Did and What’s Coming Next!

Out with the old and in with the new  

the Old CrackBerry – it’ll always have a fond place in our hearts

Since launching CrackBerry.com in February 2007, the site has more or less maintained the same look and feel. Suffice to say we’ve been long overdue for a redesign and it has been on our minds for a while now, though that old adage of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it didn’t have us wanting to change things up simply for the sake of change. So the goal for our three-phase CrackBerry redesign isn’t simply to freshen up the site, but to truly make it better. With that in mind, here’s our framework.

Redesign Goals - Think of today’s changes as our version of RIM’s BlackBerry 6 redesign. We’re still working with the same backend system (or OS if you will) but have really revamped and enhanced the user interface, optimized things to help the performance of the site, and added some great new content areas. We had a few key goals in mind while working on the updates you see before you:

• Update the look and feel: The old design worked, but it was time for a change. We wanted something that better represented who we are… professional, friendly and hip, and 100% BlackBerry Addicts!!
• Kill the drop down menus: The old CrackBerry site utilized drop down menus for navigation, which tended to hide content from users more than help them find it. It also tended to mess up in rendering on some web browsers (especially mobile ones).
• Have an indicator of where you are on the site: On the old site, you never really knew where you were. Especially for a first time visitor landing on a page straight out of a search engine. And if you don’t know where you are, it’s hard to know where else to go. We wanted to fix that.
• Make non-today content more discoverable: We post a lot of content on the CrackBerry blogs on a daily basis, but once it’s off the homepage it tends to be difficult to find unless you search for it or know exactly where to look. With the redesign, we wanted content to be more discoverable, have more opportunities to feature good stories and articles and make it more intuitive for new users to find that content.
• Get ready for BlackBerry in the land of tablets: With the introduction of the BlackBerry PlayBook and the new BlackBerry Tablet OS, it’s going to get interesting (messy) organizing content on the site. We wanted the new site design to be more ready to handle PlayBook/Tablet OS content as it starts to hit in the months ahead. 
• Introduce New Content Areas: With the old CrackBerry design, for sections like BlackBerry Help and BlackBerry Downloads there was no dedicated landing page as you were forced to choose an option from the drop down links. With the redesign, we wanted to add section landing pages where there were none before and add some news areas to boot, like Videos and BlackBerry Devices.
• Speed up page load times: We’ve already made good progress here in the last few weeks with database optimizations, and we’re doing some clever things on the new site design to help make things quicker as well. 

What’s Coming Next – Coming in the not-so-distant future, we’ll actually be upgrading our backend systems (think of it as our QNX/BlackBerry Tablet OS overhaul) that will bring with it some new features and a platform upon which we’ll be able to add a lot of further features and enhancements. We have lots of exciting stuff planned here. From there, we’ll turn our focus back from the main website experience to visiting CrackBerry on your BlackBerry with improvements to the mobile-optimized experience (both visiting via web browser on device and via full out CrackBerry apps).

Having been actively using the redesigned CrackBerry site for a few weeks now as we approached going live with the redesign changes, I personally believe it’s a much better site. There’s always a bit of shock when a website gets a new look, but give it some use and I’m confident you will agree!!

Some of our Design Decisions Explained

I already detailed what goals we had in mind with our redesign and what’s coming next, but you might also be interested in some of the specific design decisions we made in putting together the redesign so figured we’d go through some of more noticable changes here. While the original CrackBerry site was launched under my direction and the help of two friends on the graphics and coding (James & Tom), for the redesign I worked closely with our new Miami-based, Smartphone Experts design team. Offline sketches by David Lundblad, Head of Design for SPE, got the ideas flowing, and from there we went through weeks of non-stop back and forth as we brainstormed and tried different things and worked through dozens of mockups.

Planning the online updates began with offline sketching

During the design process we tried a lot of things – we looked at both major design departures and more minor ones, and eventually came to a place that made sense and everybody was happy with. With a lot of passionate cooks in the CrackBerry redesign kitchen it wasn’t always easy, but the process was always interesting and fun! 

Color Choice – It didn’t take us long to discover that without both orange and purple, you just don’t have CrackBerry. We actually tried a lot of designs where we got rid of the purple altogether (even a few designs where we scrapped CrackBerry orange), and as soon as we didn’t see the purple/orange color combo together on the site somehow it just didn’t feel like CrackBerry.com anymore. With the old site having too much purple and orange, on the new CrackBerry we use it in high impact areas and balance it out with other colors. We use a lot more black/grey now which aligns a bit more closely with the actual look of BlackBerry devices, and I’m happy we worked in some green as a call to action color, which ties in nicely to the CrackBerry-green table that has been used for countless BlackBerry device and accessory reviews. Blue for active links is easy on the eyes and helps tie it all together. All in all the colors are bright, clean, professional, friendly, funky and approachable – and that’s what CrackBerry is all about!

Big Header, Dedicated Sub Menus - Regular CrackBerry readers tend to follow the site via RSS or their phone on the m.crackberry.com site, and for those who visit the full site daily they simply keep scrolling down the homepage until they reach stories they have seen previously. Knowing that, we expanded the size of the site header and navigation to allow us to feature more content at the top and provide more value-added navigation. The main featured block at the top will be reserved for BIG stories or contests (it refreshes on page load), while the three-story rotating article block will be updated regulary with article content. Off the homepage, the sub-navigation menus change based on what area of the site you are in. To keep you noticing what’s in the sub-menus, the look and feel of them change slightly from section to section based on the needs of the section. For example, the forums sub-menu is heavy on links, which allow for quick forum use, while in the Help section we’ve gone for big visual buttons that beginners can’t miss.

Big Article Headers, Easy to Read BIG Comments - When it comes to stories on the homepage, we’ve included big article headers that make it easy to spot new stories at a glance as you scroll through. When viewing a full article page, we’ve kept the story itself in our standard, more professional font, but have then relaxed things out in the comments with a bigger font. People love to browse the comments on CrackBerry, so we’ve made them easy to read while kicking back in your chair.

We went through a ton of sketches and over 30 mockups to get to final form

Anybody who’s gone through a major website redesign will attest it’s no quick and simple process. The devil is in the details, and we pretty much gave thought to every one of them. If you have any specific questions on anything, be sure to ask us on the CrackBerry redesign forum thread. 

We could go on for ages about each little design decision made. Some decisions we’re easy and there’s others we still may revisit and tweak a bit as they were that difficult to decide upon. But in the end, we’re pretty happy with the look of the new CrackBerry and the use of the site!

FeedBack and Ongoing Improvements

We’ve always been committed to our CrackBerry community, but moving ahead we’re going to be even more committed. Expect to see some posts in the future from David Lundblad, Smartphone Experts’ Head of Design, as he works with the community to get feedback on the new CrackBerry and works with members on testing future improvements.

In the meantime, if you come across any bugs or tweaks that need to be made on the new site, be sure to let us know on this thread.

Enjoy the site!

I hope you enjoy the new CrackBerry.com! With the coming of the BlackBerry PlayBook and QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS we’re entering a new era of BlackBerry, so it’s really exciting for us to follow suit with a new era of CrackBerry. We hope you like the changes so far, and stay tuned for the further improvements to come.

A lot of people were involved in the CrackBerry redesign process, so before we get back to our regularly scheduled programming I wanted to give thanks again to all those who have contributed. On the design and graphics side, BIG THANKS go to David Lundblad, Jose Negron, Johan Steen and James Falconer. On the coding side, props to go Tom Roof for working on the CSS and HUGE THANKS to Tom Kaminski for the late nights working on the community site coding changes. Props go to Stephane Koenig and Mike de la Morena for doing their thing on the accessory store, and to Sebastian Dimjarescu on the app store. Thanks also go to our Inverness-based e-commerce team for their feedback and ongoing support. More thanks also go to Dieter Bohn, Andrew Carton and Marcus Adolfsson for their contributions, feedback and for putting up with my frantic ways throughout the process. And finally, the last round of thanks go to Adam, Bla1ze and entire CrackBerry editorial and forums teams who’ve kept the content coming and site running smooth these past few months while I’ve been focused on the redesign. 

That’s it. Enjoy the site. Keep Crack’n!!!

CrackBerry.com‘s feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Introducing the New CrackBerry.com – A Site Redesign for the Next Era of BlackBerry!

View full post on CrackBerry.com blogs