While it hasn’t been officially announced as an issue, there have been a few reports around the internet that the badge icon for iPhone users hasn’t been working for about a week now. Notifications still come over and will show up in the lockscreen and in the notification center, but the red dot next to the app icon doesn’t show up. This seems to be the case for both the Facebook app and the Messenger app.

Here’s a thread I found on Apple’s support community about the issue, as well as one I found on MacRumors.

We have reported this issue to Facebook, so we will keep you informed if we get anymore information.

It hasn’t been published on Facebook’s “Known Issues” page yet either.

Remember the HTC Chacha (AKA HTC Status sold by AT&T) or the HTC Salsa? Both were supposed to be Facebook phones that were unveiled as the Mobile World Congress in 2001 back in February and both were a complete bust.

According to All Things Digital Facebook is still entertaining the thought of a Facebook phone and this time the new phone has been dubbed ‘Buffy”, after the television vampire slayer, the phone is planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook as tweaked heavily (scary thought) to deeply integrate its services.

Facebook once again has chosen HTC to manufacture the Facebook phone after also considering Samsung. While the idea may sound “cool” to have a Facbook phone I really don’t see the practically of it. I like most readers here do have a Facebook account and I probably spend more time than I should on Facebook but I really don’t see the need to have a phone designed specifically for just Facebook. When I am out-in-about other than checking-in, I rarely open the application on my phone.

If the reports from All Things Digital are correct, Facebook may follow Amazon.com’s path in creating its own highly customized version of Android to power the phone. The problem with this strategy is, you lose access to core services of such as the Android Market and Gmail. This may be a moot issue to Facebook who probably consider running its own messaging and e-mail services on the device.

Again, going back to my previous statement, the idea may sound “cool” to have a Facebook powered phone but the practicality of it is not there. I have used HTC’s and Samsung’s integrated Facebook applications that sync my whole address book with Facebook and the outcome is always a huge address book filled with a bunch of people whom I maintain little to no contact with.

The Smartphone business is a very competitive business and with this idea still in development stages meaning we would not see an actual Facebook phone for at least another 12 to 18 months which would allow Google, Apple and Microsoft to leap way ahead in innovations leaving Facebook in the dust. If I were Facebook I would file this idea away and work on better Facebook applications for our devices.

As most of us already know, HTC has announced just a short time ago, that they will no longer be locking the bootloaders on their devices. Well this evening, HTC informed the world via Facebook, on what devices will be first to receive the official unlock treatment and also provided us somewhat of a timeline. This should come as good news for those users who happen to have a Sensation or Evo 3D device.

Here’s the full scoop as posted on HTC’s Facebook page:

We wanted to provide an update on HTC’s progress with bringing bootloader unlocking to our newest phones. We know how excited some of you are for this capability, and we’ve put significant resources behind making this change as soon as possible. While we wish we could flip a simple switch and unlock all bootloaders across our device portfolio, this is actually a complex challenge that requires a new software build and extensive testing to deliver the best possible customer experience.

We’re thrilled to announce today that software updates to support bootloader unlocking will begin rolling out in August for the global HTC Sensation, followed by the HTC Sensation 4G on T-Mobile USA and the HTC EVO 3D on Sprint. We’re in the testing phase for the unlocking capability now, and we expect it to be fully operational by early September for devices that have received the software updates. We’ll continue rolling out the unlocking capability over time to other devices as part of maintenance releases and new shipments.

HTC continues its commitment to unlocking bootloaders and supporting the developer community. Because of the importance of this community to us, please expect an update on this about every few weeks as we make progress toward launch. Thank you for your patience and continued support!

So maybe this isn’t the immediate unlock some users were expecting or even demanding, but from our perspective, this at least gives us an idea of when to expect the updates to start happening. It seems we all should be grateful that they are unlocking their bootloaders at all and for them to give us a timeline of when to expect it is even more generous of them. Thanks for the hard work on this HTC!

We will continue to bring you the latest as more updates from HTC rollout regarding unlocked bootloaders.
Are you a Sensation or Evo 3D user who is waiting for this official unlock method?
Will their new policy help you make your next phone purchase decision?

source: HTC via Facebook

There seems to be no shortage of Instant Messaging apps in the Android market these days. A simple search will come up with apps like eBuddy, Meebo, IMO, IMEasy etc. Well, IM+ is yet another instant messaging app. IM+ from Shape Services has to be the most extensive messaging app that I have had the opportunity to use and believe me, I have pretty much tried them all.

IM+ is an all-in-one Instant Messaging solution. One of the greatest features of this application is that there is no longer a need to be running multiple chat applications at the same time. Everything you might need is right there in IM+, all wrapped up into one well rounded application. It is a simple idea but very well executed in IM+. If you are the kind of social butterfly that enjoys chatting with several friends or co workers at one time, then this app is essential for you.

For those who are coming from the iPhone, you will know that IM+ is one of the most popular IM apps in the Apple App Store. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Skype, push notifications, and many more unique and useful features. So how does the IM+ for Android stack up against the competition? Can it stand out in a somewhat crowded corner of the market? Let’s have a look, shall we?

After initial install, the first thing you’ll want to do is to add your IM accounts. Current networks supported by IM+ include MSN, Skype, Facebook, AOL, Gtalk, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ and mySpace. There is no Twitter support for the Android version of the app yet, despite it being available on the iPhone version.Once you have all of your IM accounts setup and configured, you will find all of your contacts listed in a single window. In this list, an icon identifying the network each user is on will appear next to each user in the list. Keeping it clear who’s on which network.

User Interface
In my honest opinion, IM+ Probably has the nicest user interface of all of the IM apps. The contact list fills up the whole screen, without wasting any space with useless designs or borders. Another plus, is that the font size is big enough to read with ease and the thumbnail pictures of your contacts are crisp and clear. Any incoming chat will be moved to the top of the window to make it easy to access. If the app is not active, you will also receive a notification in your status bar.

Chat Interface
Each conversation is well arranged and also color coded for easy navigation. For MSN Live Messenger, you can even start a group chat. This is one feature not available in most IM apps. It also supports a good range of emoticons.
Another outstanding feature of IM+, is how you can set your visibility for each account. For example, you want to chat with your sister on Facebook but aren’t crazy about the idea of chatting with chatty Aunt Kathy on AOL? IM+ lets you control which accounts are running and who you want to talk to.
Also a great and original feature I liked, is the ability to view and export your History log. As someone who switches between different computers and mobile devices, I hold conversations with different people at different times, on different devices. In order to track the conversation, I have to sync my history logs so they appear on all the devices and screens that I am using. Most mobile IM apps don’t have a history log, let alone the ability to export them. With IM+, you can easily export the history log to, let’s say a Dropbox account, and access it from your desktop at any time.

Some features and Settings:
Set a custom status
Many IM apps only come with the usual “Online” and “Away” status, but IM+ comes with “Online”, “Away”, “I am here”, “Invisible”, “Offline”. What’s even better, is you can create your own custom status very easily within the app.
Create your own custom message templates
Another great feature would be that IM+ allows you to create custom message templates that you can use at any time (such as, “I am busy now. Talk to you later”).

– Whether to show offline contacts
– Change status
– Show or not show the current conversations
– Whether to show groups
– Whether to show the date and time before each message
– Send messages using the “enter” key
– Whether or not to show the icon IM+ in the notification bar
– Whether to display notifications of messages received in a small window at the bottom of the screen
– Enable or disable the vibrate mode and / or audio notifications for new posts
– Activate the “Text to Speech”
– Enable or disable the battery saving function. A message that if you enable this feature, you will be disconnected when unit goes into standby
– Long press on a contact: delete, block and / or rename the contact, view conversation history and view the contact info

Usefulness:
Nowadays, it can be a complex task to chat and stay in touch with each and every buddy, pal, or friend, with them each using a different IM or chat application to stay connected. IM+ brings all these and more into one application, saving you the trouble and device’s resources of having to run multiple programs to stay in touch with everyone.

Ease of Use:
IM+ is pretty effortless to use and to setup. You simply connect to your accounts, select your contacts and you can begin chatting right away. It also allows you to handle multiple chats on different accounts at the same time, saving you the hassle of switching between different applications for each conversation.
The user interface is laid out very well. It makes sense to use and therefore is very intuitive to operate. It gives you direct access to what’s important for usage and doesn’t complicate things with unneeded settings and options. I would say that a lot of time was spent designing how this app can bring all of the important features of a good chat or IM client to you, in one small, easy to use, application. To switch between your contacts, chat streams and accounts, you just simply slide from side to side. The overall experience was very good. No bogging down and no major glitches that I experienced.

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• All IM chats in one simple application.
• Easy to use interface.
• Smooth, intuitive UI
• Group Conversations on Skype and MSN.
• Can run in the background.
• Good range of connection options.
• Status settings.
• Geolocation.
• Handles all major IM and chat accounts.
• Custom notification settings
• Newly added support for image and audio sharing.**

Cons

• Well, I had just a couple cons originally. However, by the time I was done doing this review, my biggest con was taken care of with an update from IM+. You can now share images and audio files within the application, something that was not possible before. Now if we could just see other file types added to this feature, I would say there is nothing left out.

IM+ is available in the Android market in both the Free and Pro version. Both versions are essentially the same except that the free version is ad-supported and the paid version helps support the developers and helps keep them motivated to bring us such great software.

Changelog

Version 4.1
• Contact list search
• Photo and sound files sending
• Multi-accounts for Facebook
• User interface improvements
• Customizable chat font size
• IM+ auto launch upon Android device starting
• Emoticons disabling
• Chinese Traditional localization
• Many bugfixes, tweaks and overall improvements

Is IM+ the application for you? If you like chatting on multiple platforms, this app could save you a lot of time and aggravation trying to manage multiple chats with different friends on different messaging platforms. IM+ is quite simple to use and a pleasure compared to most other messaging apps I’ve used. So, if you are the type that likes staying in touch with your social network accounts and chats on your handheld, IM+ is the must have application for you.

Shape Services

IM+ Pro

IM+

Some of you may have noticed in Facebook’s changelog that they supposedly enabled push notifications a few versions ago. This wasn’t working for most people, actually, probably 99% of people. Lots of people loved that feature on the iPhone. As a workaround, I always setup SMS/Email notifications, but its just not the same as getting native notifications. Since last week, I’ve seen a few reports of people saying that push notifications are starting to work for them, and others saying it still wasn’t. Mine just started working today.

You definitely need Android 2.2 or higher to get push notifications. In my settings, I have the “refresh interval” set to Never but I have Notifications checked. I’m using a Google Nexus One with the latest CM (CyanogenMOD) 7 nightly build (which is Gingerbread). I also have the app installed to the internal memory, not moved to the SD card like you can do with Froyo/Gingerbread.

Start reporting if its working for you guys or not. Make sure you tell us what your device is and what ROM you’re using.

HTC has announced quite a few new Android devices coming out later this year. There’s even a couple that have a dedicated Facebook button (I know, I don’t see the point either since you just need to put a shortcut on your homescreen, but whatever works). There’s the HTC Salsa, ChaCha, Desire S, Incredible S, and Wildfire S. There’s even a tablet, the HTC Flyer.

First up is the HTC Salsa. Here’s the demo video:

600MHz processor
3.4-inch touchscreen with 480 x 320 resolution
512MB internal storage
512MB RAM
Bluetooth 3.0
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
micro-USB
5MP camera with auto focus and flash
VGA front camera
microSD
1520mAh battery
HSPA/WCDMA 900/2100MHz
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE:850/900/1800/1900

The HTC ChaCha (sorry, no video of this one):

600MHz
2.6-inch touchscreen with 480 x 320 resolution
512MB ROM
512MB RAM
Rear 5MP camera with auto focus and LED flash
VGA front camera
1250mAh battery
microSD
Bluetooth 3.0
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
micro-USB
HSPA/WCDMA 900/2100 MHz
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz

Then we have the HTC Desire S:

This phone will have a 3.7″ WVGA display, 1GHz Snapdragon processor and rear and front-facing cameras.

Next is the HTC Wildfire S:

This phone is probably an entry-level Android phone. It features a 3.2″screen with a resolution of 320×480, 600MHz processor and 512MB of ROM/RAM.

The HTC Incredible S:

This phone has a 4″ WVGA Super LCD display, 8MP rear camera with dual LED flash, a front-facing camera, a 1GHz processor, 768Mb of RAM, and a 1450mAh battery.

And finally the HTC Flyer:

This is a 7″ touchscreen with a stylus…yes, we said a stylus, although they call it a Scribe pen. It has an aluminum unibody shell and a 1.5GHz processor. It won’t ship with Honeycomb, but it looks like there will be an update available at a later date.

UPDATE: HTC also launched a 1.5GHz, 7-inch Android 2.4 Tablet

What sticks out to us about this tablet is that it will have Android 2.4 over Honeycomb. Rumor was Sense wasn’t going to be put on this device, but HTC has put a different version of Sense in it actually. Some other features include a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, 1GB of RAM plus 32GB of flash storage, an aluminum unibody construction, 1024 x 600 resolution and of course the tablet-optimized version of Sense.

Source: AndroidCentral

So do any of these phones catch your interest? What do you think about the tablet compared to the other ones on the market already?

UPDATE

The rumor spreading about the suspected “Facebook” phone have been shut down. There is no more speculating to be done. Facebook came forward and denied the rumors that a FB-branded handset was going to be announced.

Dan Rose, head of business development at the company however did say, “This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs (application programming interfaces) and integrated them into their device in an interesting way. The rumours around there being something more to this HTC device are overblown.”

So there you go geeks. Don’t you love when rumors are proven right or wrong?

END OF UPDATE:

Some people in this day in age just can’t get enough of Facebook can they? At least that’s how I look at it now, especially with HTC being rumored to have their very own “Facebook” phone. This device is said to be accounced at The Mobile World Congress show which will be very soon, February 14th through the 17th, in Barcelona, Spain.

The source of the information says that the rumors are true and HTC could possibly even show more than one “Facebook” phone at the MWC show. We aren’t sure how true this is but if so, HTC would potentially be increasing their revenue even more with all of the facebook fans out there. What do you think?

Some of the features rumored are that the phone will run on a tweaked version of Google’s Android operating system and will prominently display users’ Facebook messages and news feed on the home screen. Also suspected is the option of being able to call or email friends from information stored on their Facebook page.

Is there really a need for this? Would you get one yourself? We want to hear your thoughts. Let us know what you think in the comments box below.

Source: IM & CAM

According to sources at Mobiledia.com,  Social networking site Facebook and Internet telephone provider Skype have been in discussions to combine their services. The new partnership is expected to be announced within the next few weeks.

Following the integration, Skype 5.0 will be released with these functions already incorporated. Facebook users will then be able to access Skype through their Facebook accounts also being able to text, voice chat and video chat to friends on Facebook via Skype.

Skype currently has 560 million registered users and if incorporated with Facebook’s 500 million members this will only amplify each other’s popularity, especially in the international arena where Skype is already very popular.

Source: Mobiledia

In the first week of February, Facebook 1.1.0.14 from the smartphone Marketplace was pulled by a XDA user and made available to us touchscreen users. Well now Microsoft has made this app officially available for touchscreen devices. The blogosphere is calling it v1.2, but its really 1.1.0.17 on the About screen.

You can download it from the Microsoft Marketplace here.

* Touch Optimized Interface
* Profiles management
* Facebook integration
* Google Maps application support
* Customizable today plugin
* Categories/Companies groups operations available. Send SMS/MMS to all members in group
* SMS Chat and Call History
* Keypad Hot Key
* Quick search using Keypad
* Call & SMS Statistics
* Assign photo to a contact
* Send Contact VCard

The program loads very fast.  It reassigns your right softkey to its contact app instead of the built-in Windows one.  In the Start Menu, you’ll find a new folder with direct links to Favorites, Options, MS Contacts, etc.

Scrolling is very smooth, as it is with most Resco apps.  It is very finger-friendly and easy to read.

There is one feature which I couldn’t get to work, and that is the Facebook Integration.  After using TouchFlo3D v2.1, it integrated nicely with my contacts and updated their status and profile pictures.  No matter if I was connected to 3G, WiFi, or ActiveSync, it would hang on “Downloading Users”.    I browsed the Resco forums and saw where people had the same issues, but no resolution.  This is the only negative thing I could find with this app.

It functions very similar to the free iContact, but if the Facebook Integration would have worked, this program would have it beat.  So if you can get the Facebook Integration to work, and its imortant to you, then it might be worth the $25 for this app.

I gave it a 3 out of 5 stars for now until Facebook is fixed.

You can buy it at the PPCG Store here!