Samsung Galaxy S II Mini leaks out for Three, plus Nokia X7, Flyer and PlayBook release dates

 

No, not the Galaxy Mini, that low-end Android sprout — this is Samsung’s smaller answer to the upcoming Galaxy S II superphone. We just got handed UK carrier Three’s entire spring-summer lineup, and the Android 2.3 handset certainly stands out, pretending to be miniature in spite of a 3.7-inch screen (think Droid), a 1.4GHz processor (think Pre 3) and 21Mbps HSPA+ connectivity. But that’s the tip of the iceberg compared to what’s in store for Three — it looks like the Nokia X7 is alive, well, and tracking for a June release (not to mention the LG Optimus 3D), and tablets will drop too, with May bringing the HTC Flyer and the WiFi-only version of the BlackBerry PlayBook launching in June. See specs and slated release windows in our gallery below, and join us in hoping these documents portend well for stateside launches as well.

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AT&T agrees to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion

Wowzers! AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have entered into a definitive agreement for the sale of T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in cash and stocks. The combined customer base of this upcoming behemoth will be 130 million humans, though the agreed deal will have to pass the usual regulatory and closing hurdles before becoming complete. The two companies estimate it’ll take them 12 months to get through all the bureaucracy — if they get through, the proposed network merger will create a de facto GSM monopoly within the United States — but we don’t have to wait that long to start discussing life with only three major US carriers. AT&T envisions it as a rosy garden of “straightforward synergies” thanks to a set of “complementary network technologies, spectrum positions and operations.”

One of the other big benefits AT&T is claiming here is a significantly expanded LTE footprint — 95 percent of Americans, or 294 million pops — which works out to 46.5 million more than AT&T was claiming had it gone LTE alone. Of course, T-Mobile has never put forth a clear strategy for migrating to LTE, suggesting that AT&T plans on using the company’s AWS spectrum to complement its own 700MHz licenses as it moves to 4G. You might be groaning at the thought of yet another LTE band, but it’s not as bad as you might think: MetroPCS already has a live LTE network functioning on AWS, so there’s precedent for it. For further details, hit up the gallery below, the Mobilize Everything site, or the official press release after the break.

In the event of the deal failing to receive regulatory approval, AT&T will be on the hook for $3 billion to T-Mobile — a breakup fee, they call it — along with transferring over some AWS spectrum it doesn’t need for its LTE rollout, and granting T-Mo a roaming agreement at a value agreeable to both parties.

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In The Race For More Spectrum, AT&T Is Acquiring T-Mobile For $39 Billion

As anyone who has read a tech blog in the past few years will know, AT&T has been under attack for not being able to match the network capacity of larger rival Verizon. And when they won the majority of the bids for the open spectrum in 2008, Verizon also had a clear path to the future. Now AT&T is taking another path: buying T-Mobile.

Here’s the release with the details of the deal. AT&T will pay roughly $39 billion to Deutsche Telekom for T-Mobile USA. The agreement has already been approved by both Boards, but obviously will have to pass government scrutiny.

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Intel promises next-gen Atom chips at IDF Beijing

We’ve yet to get more than a whiff of Intel’s Oak Trail chips, but the Cedar Trail CPUs are nearly here — in fact, it’s looking like Chipzilla intends to introduce its latest Atom processor at IDF Bejing this year. UMPC Portal noticed that Intel’s got a session titled “Designing a New Generation of Netbooks with the Intel Atom Processor Based Platform” at the April event, which promises to give attendees a glimpse at the “next generation Intel Atom processor based platform.” Details are scarce, but there are a couple of bullet points that might grab your attention. First, Intel will be talking about “WiFi solutions that deliver new netbook usage models,” which sounds kind of like WiDi, and second, the company will be talking up “fanless netbook designs.” Our overactive imaginations are already at work — we’re on a comfy couch, surfing the internet on a big-screen TV, without a hot, bulky laptop to weight us down and nary a tether to worry about. Or maybe a boat.

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Androidify Demo [March 2011] [Female Hair Update]

The brand newest version of Androidify is out and it’s hairtastic! Last time we spoke about this app it was back in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2011. We were hanging out in the Google Pod [take a peek at that here]. Now there’s a bit of an update out there for you, again for free, this one containing a few unnamed bug fixes and a whole lock of additional hairs for your Android avatar’s head.

Now the hair additions are what they’re calling “female hair” but you know and I know that any self-respecting hippie this side of the midwest would love to have blaster hair like the likes seen in this new set. Thusly, you must update. To grab the new update, if you’ve not got the app set to update automatically, head over to the Androidify app in the Android Market and hit the update button.

This newest version was uploaded yesterday (March 18, 2011) and is version 1.01 – Take a peek at the video demo here! And yes, feel free to submit your own Androidify avatar to the [ANDROIDIFY YOURSELF NOOOW] thread in the discussion forums!

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OMG/JK: Storming The Paywall

It’s time for a new episode of OMG/JK, the weekly show where my colleague MG Siegler and I talk about the latest news in tech.

We both just got back from South By Southwest, and we have plenty to say about the promotions, product launches, and other news (or lack thereof) that came out of one of year’s biggest tech events.

We also take a look at the new paywall that will soon be implemented by The New York Times — a move that many other publishers are watching closely as they look for new revenue streams.

Finally, we talk about Twitter’s move to discourage the development of more third-party Twitter clients, which has led to significant backlash from the developer community.

Here are some recent stories relevant to this week’s episode:

• At SXSW, Advertising Was This Year’s Twitter, iPad 2 Was This Year’s Foursquare
• GroupMe Won The SXSW Group Messaging Wars, Says Infographic
• Marissa Mayer: 40% Of Google Maps Usage Is Mobile (And There Are 150 Million Mobile Users)
• All You Need To Know About The NYTimes.com Paywall
• The Google Loophole Has Become The Facebook/Twitter Loophole
• Twitter Drops The Ecosystem Hammer: Don’t Try To Compete With Us On Clients, Focus On Data And Verticals

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Gillmor Gang 3.19.11 (TCTV)

The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — or at lest 4/5ths of them were decked out with iPad 2s. That didn’t prevent the usual argument from breaking out about the New York Times’ pay wall. The Grey Lady announced a social plus subscription model, and @dannysullivan was having none of it. It’s 2011 but the battle lines continue to be drawn over publishing v. the Web. Many believe the subscription wall will destroy what’s left of the print business model without replacing it with an iPad alternative.

Others (me) think the Times has got it just about right, leaving a gaping hole through social media (Facebook and Twitter) to consume the newspaper as before while creating a pool of found money around the iPad version. As social @mentioners create an authoritative stream of Times citations that do not trigger a sub request, the resulting high-value audience will migrate to a reasonable iPad based environment where those social signals can be harnessed through realtime chat, video, and other engaged value adds and attendant revenue opportunities. Whether it will take 15 years or is already a formidable tipping point will be left to the viewer to decide.

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Wanita Power: What Women in the US Could Learn from Indonesians

JAKARTA– I’m mid-way through a trip to Indonesia at the request of the State Department, and I’m finding a hard time putting the experience into words. You’d think after two years of writing about other countries it’d be easy. I can’t remember if it was always this hard, or there’s just something different about this trip.

Maybe it’s the added surreal layer that this time, I’m flying around between seven far-flung cities in the world’s largest Muslim country talking about the importance of more Indonesian women starting companies.

Most people know the topic of “WHY AREN’T THERE MORE WOMEN IN SILICON VALLEY?” isn’t my favorite. Far too often the debate degenerates into grandstanding, whining and pointing fingers at all those evil male gatekeepers like, you know, TechCrunch. Never mind our company is run by a woman, our editorial group reports to another woman and more than half our senior staff are women.

But even worse, the debate has degenerated into pure linkbait. I rarely read anything new or thought-provoking on it. People glorify the need to RAISE AWARENESS, but who isn’t aware? Do you have eyes, and have you ever been to a tech conference? Then you’re plenty aware. We all are. Still hasn’t fixed the problem.

So while a lot of the women I’m talking to are expecting the fancy US expert to come in and tell them all how we’ve figured it out and what they should learn from us– I’m doing the opposite. I’m telling them how messed up it is in the world’s great meritocracy of Silicon Valley. I’m telling them that only about 20% of tech workers are women, despite more women graduating with math and science degrees than ever before. I’m telling them that only 15 Fortune500 companies have woman CEOs despite there being gender parity in terms of management jobs in the US, according to the World Economic Forum. I’m telling them that even though 40% of small businesses are women owned, only 8% of the venture funded startups are.

And then I’m telling them that for all the talk and handwringing about it, the smartest people I know can’t for the life of them figure out why that is. We have no idea why immigrants in Silicon Valley can do so much better in our country than American women can, and we have less of an idea how to fix it.

I tell them all the reasons people come up with and ask them if they face those things here in Indonesia. I tell them why I think some of those reasons are cop-outs and why some– like work-life balance– are legitimate issues that do keep women from starting businesses. I tell them how many professional women– me included–get trapped in feeling like pregnancy is a disability, rather than proof of how strong we are. And we talk about some solutions to make things better.

Most of all, I’m telling them the easiest way to break a glass ceiling is to never create one, and urging groups to work hard to include women in Indonesia’s burgeoning private sector and entrepreneurial ecosystem now, while it’s just getting started.

It’s surreal for me, an American woman, to be telling audience after audience of women dressed in traditional Muslim headscarves that we don’t have gender equality figured out. But it’s more surreal for them to hear it. More than a few women have told me they were shocked. That they’d assumed women could do whatever they wanted in the US. A few have said that after my talk, they think starting a company sounds easier in Indonesia.

Sure, a few times a male in the audience has gone there. One fervently disagreed with my entire keynote saying that it was morally wrong for women to be out of the home and that if the government did anything to advocate this, it would be a nightmare for Indonesian society, birth rates would go into free-fall and all hell would break loose. It was a long diatribe, and my translator clearly gave me the nice version of his comments. Whether it was stated or not, the implication was there: What the hell are you doing out of the house half way around the world, crazy American lady? What’s wrong with your husband?

Another time, a man suggested that the US statistics proved that women shouldn’t start businesses. Turning my argument on its head, he suggested that the US economy doesn’t seem to be missing the participation of more women, and that it’d clearly been a positive for us. I pointed out that studies have shown that women-owned businesses become profitable faster and generate more revenue, and that the US economy isn’t exactly a global role model these days. There’s also the obvious retort– we have no idea what the opportunity cost from more women not participating in Silicon Valley’s economy has been. “Sorry, pal, but the facts just aren’t on your side,” I said, and the predominantly female audience laughed.

These are obviously viewpoints too un-PC to voice in the US, even if many people still believe them. But when each guy made these arguments, the women in the audience didn’t seem cowed or even too concerned. There was definitely some knowing-looks and eye rolling exchanged. “Oh there he goes again talking about how we need to stay in the house…” The attitude wasn’t preventing women from attending these events or the entrepreneurship colleges I’ve spoken at, where more than half of the audience have typically been women.

I’ve known from my previous trips to this country that Muslim Indonesians are very moderate and not at all like the stereotype many Americans would expect, particularly in more cosmopolitan urban areas. But during this trip, I’ve frequently been speaking at Muslim schools in more remote cities. My first talk was in a school so known for demonstrations that last week several classrooms were set on fire. And yet, even there the women don’t fit the meek-and-submissive stereotype as much as a few of the men would clearly like them to.

The brutality of Indonesian life– whether it’s 350 years of colonial domination, dictators, poverty or a never-ending assault of natural disasters– have forged these women into pure steel. Friends in the US have remarked at how intense it is that I’m here traveling city-to-city, lugging suitcases up and down jetway stairs in the tropical heat, delivering keynotes for more than three hours per day. Indeed, for an American pregnant woman, it is a pretty intense schedule. My ankles have morphed into thick, bloated stumps. Last week a clerk at a maternity store refused to let me carry a small bag of clothes to my car, I haven’t washed a dirty dish or stitch of laundry since my husband found out the news, and Paul Carr regularly takes my backpack from me when I try to leave the TechCrunch offices every night.

And yet, I met a woman the other day who runs a company delivering goods and services to remote villages. She has seven kids. When she was nine-months pregnant with number seven she was loading up her motorbike with supplies and winding around Indonesia’s crazy highways and dirt roads to continue her work. That, ladies and gentlemen, is intense. Is that woman going to be stopped by a man telling her she’s not strong enough to run a company? The idea made her laugh. She was sitting in the front row of one of my keynotes, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman so confident and self-possessed. She was not only badass, she was well aware of just how badass she was.

Unlike shrill women advocates in the US, these women don’t care whether male gatekeepers try to keep them down; it doesn’t seem to affect them. They shrug and go after what they want anyway. That’s stunning because generally Indonesia is a culture that looks to the government to solve most of their problems for them.

I spent the afternoon in Jakarta the other day with a group called IWAPI– which translated stands for the Indonesian Businesswoman’s Association. The woman who runs it commanded the room with intense features, a bright red headscarf and an elaborate green silk dress. (She’s center in the picture to the left.) Throughout the meeting she snapped at her assistant– a man– to bring the water, fetch her bag, bring more chairs. My male state department guide looked a little scared. Before I could say anything she started to grill me on my qualifications. I knew one thing immediately: I never want this woman on my bad side.

But she uses that intensity to create opportunities for the 40,000 members of this organization that was started the year I was born. For instance, while some entrepreneurs in the country are complaining that new Asian trade agreements will flood the domestic market with cheaper Chinese goods, IWAPI is organizing its own collective trade missions to surrounding South East Asian countries, looking for new markets to offset the risk. The woman in green told me what she tells young women in Indonesia: The literal translation for the Bahasa word for entrepreneur is “a person who makes things happen.” “If you want things to be done for you, you’re not an entrepreneur,” she said. “You work for the entrepreneur.”

Many of the women I’ve met– including those at IWAPI– appear to do a much better job at the thing we fail at most: Women helping lift one another up. Last week, I visited a co-op in Surabaya, where women jointly run a hotel, a grocery store (below) and a sort of local Indonesian street vendor food court. They pool that money– and money from outside investors– to grant more than $1 billion rupiahs (or more than $100,000) in monthly microloans to their 12,000 women members. Operating well before microloans were trendy, this co-op has been in business 30 years.

It was a hub of activity– women working at the various businesses, women helping watch one another’s kids, women in the computer lab learning how the Internet could help fuel their businesses, women in line to make payments on their loans. No one is worrying too much about work-life balance, because it’s a given many of them will have half-a-softball-team of kids. If they want to work, those issues are just reality. One of the many challenges of Indonesian life. One woman (pictured at the top of the post, waiting to make her monthly loan payment) had been a member for 20 years. She owns her own businesses and has seven kids and was welling up in tears telling me about the impact the co-op had made. That without it, she simply wouldn’t have been able to start a company. With it, her business had thrived and she’d never missed a payment.

The co-op’s board member opened my talk with a cross between a cheer and call-and-response prayer. Roughly it translated to:


How are your businesses doing?

“AWESOME!” The women yelled back raising fists in the air.

Are you paying your loans back?
“YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!” they yelled.
Are you going to default?

“NO WAY!” they yelled, together dismissing the thought physically with an emphatic wave of their hands. As each of them told me their stories, the women clapped at every success milestone– nevermind they’d heard these stories all before.

Back at IWAPI, four of the women told me that not only were their husbands supportive of their companies– they’d done so well that their husbands had quit their jobs and were now working on the wives’ entrepreneurial dreams. Even my Indonesian state department translator was stunned to hear it. “There are two types of IWAPI husbands,” the uber-intense woman in green told me. “Those who are silent partners and support their wives, and those who become actual partners in the business.” Another woman in the group was living the harsh flipside of this statement. Her husband left her a single mother, because she refused to give up her fashion design company and sit at home while he worked. Her life isn’t easy, but she has no doubt she made the right choice.

I don’t mean to paint the picture of some gender utopia. In each case, these were women that opted to attend a talk about entrepreneurship, so it may not be a relative sample of the population.  And to be sure, questions come up about pressure from society to raise kids and men not taking them seriously; the same issues women talk about in the US. When I’ve brought up some of the issues we face, there’s a lot of head nodding in the audience and commiserating laughter. Some of this is just international, it seems.

But the difference among the women I’ve met so far in Indonesia is they just don’t seem to dwell on it. They’ve got more important things to do.

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HTC Thunderbolt Full Root and Bootloader Unlock Instructions

Uh Oh, looks like HTC has failed again. For some odd reason all these manufacturers insist on trying to lock down these devices. I think they should just embrace the custom ROM and hacker community. After all it’s extremely popular and has totally helped Android become what it is today. I’m just waiting for CyanogenMod Phone One to be released so we don’t have to ever worry about rooting ever again. (Happy Face)

 

The Thunderbolt was one of, if not the most locked down device from HTC to date. Apparently they made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They locked the memory too. As always the developer community has done what they do best, and that is completely take care of all the hard work for you. It is now fully rooted, as well as S-OFF. Fully unlocked. Team AndIRC has been working on this for the last 72 hours almost non stop. So feel free to thank them, or buy them a drink. Now we just have to wait a few weeks and you will all be able to run CyanogenMod 7 and overclock your Thunderbolts to 1.5+ Ghz. 

Now I’ve talked way to long. I’ll just go ahead and skip to the good stuff. I must mention that this is NOT for the faint at heart. These instructions are new, and just released. I’m sure easier ways will eventually show up, but for now this is it. Most people that will do this I expect to know what they are doing. As always, take extreme caution with anything in adb. Remember it voids your warranty, and enjoy it. Android Police, or AndroidCommunity hold no responsibility for your actions.

Rooting The ThunderBolt – Version 2

Pros

* Root with read/write access to /system
* Ability to downgrade and flash any RUU (i.e. signed firmware)
* S-OFF
* Fully unlocked bootloader
* All ThunderBolts survived testing

Cons
* Voids warranty
* Could brick your phone if you aren’t careful

• **** Remember to take your time and fully read all instructions. Make sure you have a full battery before starting.

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Droid 3 Photos leaked, shows redesigned keyboard

Photos have leaked of what is reported to be the new Motorola Droid 3 sporting a redesigned keyboard. The slide up QWERTY has five rows, rather than the smaller 4 row design featured in the Droid 2. The buttons look fairly large for typing and it’s an impressive outlay considering the phone shown looks fairly thin. There also looks to be HDMI and microUSB ports as well.

But other than that, there isn’t really much to go on. It looks to have a stock 4″ TFT screen, and if were can infer anything from the previous Droid 2 specs and the current state of the Android art, we can probably expect top maybe go up to a qHD screen. And since the Droid 2 runs a Froyo flavored OS, it would certainly need to run Android 2.4 (Gingerbread) at the very least.

Other possible specs to dream about …. maybe maybe boosting to dual core for that 1Ghz processor? Replacing the 5MP camera for a a 8MP camera with full HD recording? Or jump on the dual camera bandwagon? That doesn’t seem likely since the images don’t really show a front facing webcam for video chat. At the very least we’d also expect 4G/LTE connectivity. What would you like so see?

• [via Unwired View]

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