We were told earlier in the week by Verizon that the DROIDX Gingerbread (Android 2.3) update would start rolling out today, but it appears now as if only members of the “soak test” through Motorola’s support forums will see it initially.  We had assumed that the soak would have started days ago to test and prepare for the mass update which would start today, so this is a little surprising.  And of course, there is that chance soak test members are just being grouped together with non-soak test members, and the rollout will happen as planned to a bunch of you throughout the weekend.  

Update:  Winner chosen here!

It’s hard to imagine that our first ever Reader Appreciation Week has almost come to a close…

On Monday, we announced that we’d spend the entire week thanking our readers for being the best in the entire Android community through a variety of prize giveaways.  Hopefully we have done a decent job of that with all of the apps, t-shirts, sweatshirts and Android Collectibles that were handed out.  Oh, and of course the Asus Transformer and Acer Iconia – wouldn’t want to forget about those.  It’s been a blast, hasn’t it?

The last of our 3 tablets that will be up for grabs is the Motorola XOOM WiFi, a device that helped launch a Honeycomb and Android tablet craze that will take us well into the end of the year.  This is the “developer” device in a sense, and one that will continue to see updates before any other tablet for the rest of its life.  This is the original, people.  Sure it may seem a little heavy and awkward at times, but man is this thing a beast.   

Swiftkey X has arrived.  We all knew that Swiftkey was almost too good at reading your mind, right?  It’s actually hard to imagine that it could get better at it, but it just did.  You may remember a beta version that went into testing a little over a month ago that analyzed your Facebook, Twitter and Gmail accounts?  Well, that version has now become public as version X.  In the past, Swiftkey would simply analyze all of the texts you would send, but with the ability to analyze all of your social networks, it can truly learn from the way you talk to your friends, family and random iPhone friend.  It truly is one of the best keyboards on Android.  

We have done it! HTC’s CEO, Peter Chou has confirmed in a quote from the HTC facebook page that they will no longer be locking the bootloaders on their devices. This could be the first step to other companies following suit. We can only hope. Here’s the quote from Mr. Chou.

“There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we’ve listened. Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience”

So there you have it. Expect a lot more news stemming from this shortly. Congratulations everyone who wanted this so badly.

Via: HTC’s Facebook

Cheers Everyone!

When the Motorola Atrix 4G first came out with its “qHD” display, we were all expecting it to be the second coming of some religious figure, but after being analyzed by sites like AnandTech, the term “PenTile” was brought into the light and quickly became the downer it word of the moment.  So naturally, when the DROIDX2 (our hands-on) was released to Verizon and sporting that same “qHD” display, we started digging into it to see what we could find.  

Google Wallet was introduced this morning as the next big thing in mobile payments, but without many NFC phones available in the market, there are very few people who would be able to take advantage of this new technology that should roll out this summer.  So what does Google plan to do to make it more widespread?  Stickers.  Yep, they plan to make snazzy little single credit card holding stickers that can be attached to the back of your phones.  The stickers will have enough technology in them to transmit a signal between the Google Wallet app and the credit card machine at the store you are visiting, giving you at least part of the easy-checkout experience.  The downside is obviously the fact that you can only use one card, but at least it lets the rest of us join the party, right?

Via:  TechCrunch

Everyone’s new favorite cloud streaming music app (Google Music) has an update available in the market that brings one major feature which was curiously missing from the start:  song deleting.  If you have been making songs available offline, you have been unable to remove them afterwards – well until now.  All you have to do us go back into your “Make available offline” settings and unpin whatever you want removed.  It should wipe them out of your cache folder after doing so.

Market Link

Cheers Mark!