By Spencer A. Beckett II

You know those cleverly designed mailers NetFlix sends you? Well the postal service is fuming over them. The U.S. Postal service claims that the mailers are costing them $41.9 million in additional labor cost to process them. Huh? Yeah I don’t get it either… The Postal Service wants NetFlix to redesign the mailers or cough up $0.17 per mailer to send. This would really dip into NetFlix profit earnings, so expect to see new mailers and new pricing plans. The Postal Service knows that they’ll get their way with this absurd claim. As many postal employee will tell you, the machines often kick back regular mail. That’s just apart of the process. Penalizing NetFlix is just a way to dip into their pockets knowing that they’ll have to bend. How lame is that? Let us know what you think. Leave a comment below.

By Spencer A. Beckett II

I decided to hack my iPhone this past weekend after seeing a demo by a salesman at a store. He moded his iPhone and told me how easy it was to do. He showed me this elaborate demo of all the programs he had on his phone. Naturally he had the Nintendo emulator, personalized menus and even a downloader program that updates all current 3^rd party apps. Most impressive was the Etch O-Sketch Ant MOD. Ants crawl on the menu screen and start to take over your iPhone. When it gets too much to bear you can shake the phone like an Etch-O-Sketch and the ants fall off the screen. I went home, thought about it a bit, and thought to myself “Hey, I have enough money in my account let’s try to MOD this thing.” I already knew that I upgraded to 1.1.2 and that upgrade had its pluses and minuses. One great thing is that the update brought back the MP3 ringtone functionality. The minus? Well it killed the TIFF hole which allowed you to tap into the phone to add 3^rd party apps. I knew I had to downgrade the firmware and I’ve read every blog and site there is to downgrade to 1.1.1. When I tried to downgrade everything went fine and it downgraded to 1.1.1 but I no longer had a cell signal. I did everything I could to get the signal working again but nothing. Went through every program there is to reactivate it and still nothing. Now I’m a geek but I’m not that geeky. I didn’t want to do anything else to the phone to mess it up any further so after a weekend of not having a phone I decided to upgrade back to 1.1.2. Signal! Great!!! Now let’s sync the phone with my computer. Doh….! No Signal! Ouch…. After this back and forth, back and forth, I figured I couldn’t use my settings from my saved profile. I had to manually add the contacts and info back again to a fresh phone. It worked! Wheww… So no iBrick over here but I’m nervous if Apple sends an update will brick the phone? I don’t think so but it was a scary thought to think $400.00 gone… Let us know what you think. Leave a comment below.

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By Spencer A. Beckett II

So all the speculation over the Gphone was just that speculation. Google announced an open sourced mobile platform today named Android. This is far from the well anticipated Gphone we heard of earlier this year. We have to say….this phone…umm.. mobile OS (sorry) sounds promising. The OS will be the first mobile OS to support an open development platform, allowing developers free reign to develop products and apps for the phone. Just on the heals of Apples decision to make a development kit for the iPhone, it seems that Google is taking notes. This announcement seems very anticlimactic but we’ve yet to see what this mobile OS can do. As far as the hardware we know that HTC will be developing a touch interface. Being that HTC is in the game maybe by Q4 next year we’ll see a real Apple competitor.