tehkSEVEN Blog

Today, the iTunes store reached the milestone of 10 billion downloaded songs. iTunes was launched back in 2003 and it took Apple five years to reach the first five billion songs downloaded, but only two years for the next five billion songs. In other words, Apple reached 5 billion songs downloaded in June of 2008 and 10 billion songs today, on Steve Jobs’ 55th birthday! Happy birthday Steve!

If you had been following the countdown to 10 billion songs, you would had known that Apple was awarding a $10,000 iTunes giftcard to the person who downloaded the 10 billionth song. The winner is yet to be announced.
 

The Motorola Devour gets reviewed by Engadget. The Android powerd aluminum small brother of the Motorola Droid is quite impressive spec wise. Even thought the device doesn’t have the latest and most hardcore tech specs, the Devour can most definitely hold its own in the hands of tech users – and besides, it wasn’t made to compete against say the Nexus One or the HTC HD2. The Devour is an extremely well built and versatile machine for the mid-range market, and was recently featured in a Superbowl commercial starring none other than Megan Fox. The Devour is coming to Verizon in March for $150 on selected plans after a $100 mail-in-rebate. However, for you anxious folk, you can pick it up at BestBuy on February 25th, tomorrow, for $99.00.
 

Leaked pictures of a supposed Symbian^3 phone are circulating the web. It is codenamed the “Nokia X10″, which has a form factor is very similar to the Nokia X6. According to the rumours, it has a Qwerty keyboard and AMOLED touchscreen.

First off, it’s a side-sliding QWERTY keyboard design. It will be powered by a Cortex A8 CPU at 600MHz and have 256MB of RAM, with 16GB or 32GB of internal memory. The screen on the Nokia X10 is said to be a 3.2″ AMOLED capacitive touchscreen. Other specs are a 5MP camera with LED flash and 3G with HSDPA/HSUPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and an accelerometer for UI auto-rotation.

Why, hello all! CNet AU has reported that Vodafone Hutchison Australia just stated that the Nexus One will be coming out sometime this year.

“Our agreement with Google covers all Vodafone geographies.”
“Details relating to Vodafone’s Australian launch of Google Nexus One will be announced in due course.”

The Australian Financial Review reported VHA chief executive Nigel Dews as saying it would need to optimise its network to ensure all of Google’s services available on the device worked. Vodafone will also be launching the Nexus One in the UK in a few weeks so keep an eye out for that one!

To HTC fans who are more or less dissatisfied with the Google Nexus One, the newly announced HTC Desire is the answer! Although the Nexus One was designed by HTC, the Desire seems to be HTC’s take on “what the Nexus One could have been”. The specifications are nearly identical, except the Desire has swapped the trackball for an optical touch pad (similar to the newer Blackberry devices) and Android 2.1 running the new HTC Sense UI.  

9to5mac reported this afternoon that someone is selling part of a 5th avenue New York City apple store stair on eBay. Incase you do not know what the full staircase looks like, you can view an image of it here. The seller of the unique object wrote on his or her eBay listing the following:

A couple by the names of Joshua and Ting Li had a wedding on Sunday, Valentine’s Day, at the 5th avenue Apple Store in New York City. Being the apple fanatics they are, Joshua read his wedding vows off his iPhone and gave Ting an iPhone instead of a ring. The person marrying the couple even dressed up as Steve Jobs, and quoted Steve Jobs while marrying the couple.

The MWC 2010, Mobile World Congress has begun! Headlining Phoneage today would be one of the most interesting devices to shine from MWC, which is the Samsung i8520 – aka the Samsung Beam, or the Samsung Halo. The Samsung Halo has pretty impressive specs as seen below. Another device unleashed by Samsung would be the Samsung Wave. Both devices use Samsung’s own Bada OS powered by Android 2.1, and both feature a “Super AMOLED” display. If you thought AMOLED technology was cool, you should seriously check out the Super AMOLED these devices are packing. The Samsung Wave’s Super AMOLED screen was compared to the AMOLED equipped Google Nexus One. Needless to say, the Wave’s screen “pwned” the Nexus every way imaginable! All this and more in this episode of Phoneage! All of the articles, videos, and links can be found in the YouTube video’s description.

See you guys on Wednesday! Tomorrow!
 

Nokia at Mobile World Congress has announced that Maemo and Moblin has merged together to form MeeGo. “MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity. MeeGo integrates the experience and skills of two significant development ecosystems, versed in communications and computing technologies. The MeeGo project believes these two pillars form the technical foundations for next generation platforms and usages in the mobile and device platforms space.” We should be expecting the first MeeGo device in Q2 of 2010. “Meego complements Symbian for Nokia. Symbian will continue to address the broad market of smartphones” MeeGo will target a different audience than Symbian. Kai says there will be no delays to Maemo timeline as a result of this merge. “Today Nokia announced a rather bizarre partnership with Intel. Namely, the two companies are merging their odd, half-finished, Linux-based OSs into one crazy little package called… MeeGo.” Engadget says, 2010 should be an interesting year.

Windows Phone 7 (Windows Mobile 7) was announced today by Microsoft. Windows phone 7 is the succeeder to Windows Mobile 6.5 and has integration with Xbox Live Mobile and Zune music and video. Windows phone 7 has a complete code redesign, unlike previous versions of windows mobile. Also, instead of being called “windows mobile 7,” the new series is called “windows phone 7.” The main new features are hubs and real-time tiles.