myTouch 4G

The myTouch 4G Slide is a well designed phone offering a spacious keyboard, a terrific camera, a fast processor and a Wi-Fi calling app that charges you voice minutes.
First, the good stuff. The phone’s showpiece is its 8-megapixel camera. It is still not a replacement for a quality point-and-shoot camera, but it is better than most phone cameras.
Part of the camera’s usefulness comes from its photo software controls. It has basic portrait, night and action modes, but also has a manual mode that allows you alter the exposure, contrast, saturation and sharpness. It also has an antishake setting to decrease the blur you might see in low-light photos.
Some of the camera features still need work, though. One is an H.D.R. setting for unevenly lighted subjects, like a room with sunlight pouring in the windows. It did not work very well in my tests. The camera also claims to have no shutter lag, so that it snaps the instant you touch the shutter button. It was quicker than most, but hardly at zero.
Also in the plus column, it has an expansive sliding keyboard with nicely raised keys in a case that is not absurdly thick. There is a snappy 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, and an Android operating system that can play both HTML and Flash animations.
Other standard features include the Genius button, which activates the voice controls, a group text feature and access to Netflix.
But then there is built-in Wi-Fi calling, possibly the least favorite feature I have seen on a mobile phone.
Anyone familiar with Wi-Fi calling apps like Skype and Fring knows that the VoIP programs allow calls to be made using your own Wi-Fi connection, so calls do not go across the voice or data channels of your carrier. That means no voice or data charges. In some cases, VoIP calls are completely free (apart from the cost of your Wi-Fi, of course).

This is a very good phone with a superior camera, but for Wi-Fi calling, stick to Skype or Fring instead.

Bootstrap, an online toolkit for twitter developers

 Twitter  released Bootstrap, an online toolkit for developers looking to build new web apps, or even clean up some of the code they already have.

Bootstrap is an open source set of files written in CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets, a programming language used to dictate how a website or web app looks and works) that covers some of the building blocks of most web apps, such as buttons, tables and forms, page templates, app navigation and even stylistic matters such as typography and color gradients.

The simple and small tools (at about only six kilobytes in size) released by Twitter, on the popular code sharing site GitHub, are the same basic tools used by Twitter developers for the social network's own webpages and apps, Mark Otto, a designer at Twitter, said in a blog post.

Google adds weather layer on Google Maps

Google adds weather layer onGoogle Maps that displays current temps and conditions around the globe, and will hopefully make travel and activity planning easier.
To add the weather layer, hover over the widget in the upper right corner of Google Maps and select the weather layer from the list of options. When zoomed out, you’ll see a map with current weather conditions from weather.com for various locations, with icons to denote sun, clouds, rain and so on.

Facebook Feature Shows You Your Old Status Updates From 2010 & 2009

Facebook has quietly rolled out a new feature that displays status updates you posted exactly one or two years ago.
The feature appears as a small box in the right-hand column above the advertising, either titled “On This Day in 2010″ or “On This Day in 2009.” We’ve typically found that the “On This Day” box appears while you’re browsing a photo album.
You can also click the “Show More” button to see more status updates from exactly one or two years ago, if you posted multiple status updates on those days. The feature only seems to go back to 2009. That makes sense — Facebook just didn’t have a lot of users in 2008 or 2007.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has tried to help uses discover their past activity on Facebook. It also has a feature for surfacing photos from your past.

Facebook Chat reverses changes made to online friends list

Facebook announced the change in a "status message" on its company profile page, citing "a lot of feedback that people missed seeing all of their online friends" as the reason.

"Today, we made a change so that Chat now shows the friends who you message the most, as well as the rest of your friends who are currently online," the status message read.

While many of the people who commented welcomed the change, just as many called for the chat system to be taken further back.

"If it aint broke, dont fix it," said one user in a comment.

The change comes two days after the social-networking giant announced the release of a new app for Apple's iOS (which runs on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch) and Google's Android called Facebook Messenger. The app  lets users send Facebook chat messages to Facebook friends, as well as to people in their smartphone's contact books as text messages.

Over the last couple of months, Facebook has been making changes to its messaging system that seek to blur the lines between text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook messaging

Free Minesweeper, Sudoku come to Windows Phone 7 in the US

Microsoft has announced that ad-supported versions of Minesweeper and Sudoku are available to download, free of charge, right now on your Windows Phone 7 device. There's only one stipulation: you've gotta be a US resident.

Both titles feature Achievements and multiple modes of play -- in Sudoku, you've got Classic or Lightning mode, while Minesweeper boasts Classic and Speed modes. You can download each by following the links below