Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is designed to run on phones and tablets that don’t have physical buttons. Instead, the Home, Menu, and Back buttons are on-screen icons that automatically rotate when you change your grip on the screen.

For some reason Google decided to do away with the dedicated Search button though. Originally the search button was a key component of any Android phone or tablet. Over the last few years we’ve seen a number of devices ship without search buttons — and to be honest, I don’t actually use the one I have on my Nexus One smartphone all that often.

Google did replace search with another useful button: recent apps. Instead of tapping-and-holding the Home button in Android 4.0 you can now bring up a list of recent applications by tapping the dedicated button.

But if you can’t live without a dedicated button for bringing up the Android search function, you may not have to. Developer Paul O’Brien is putting the finishing touches on a modification that adds search back to the button bar in Android 4.0.

It looks like there’s plenty of space for all four buttons to peacefully coexist.

via Android Community

Siri is one of the most talked-about features of the new iPhone 4S. Sure, Apple’s latest phone also has a dual core processor which offers better performance than the chips found in the iPhone 4 or the latest iPod touch. But Apple’s new voice-assist service which lets you ask your phone questions — and get real answers is the show-stopping feature that makes the iPhone 4S special.

But it turns out that there’s really no technical reason Siri couldn’t run on older iOS devices. Apple just doesn’t offer it for any device other than the iPhone 4S.

That’s despite the fact that Siri was a standalone, third-party app until Apple bought the company that makes the software and incorporated the technology into iOS 5.

In fact, hackers have been trying to figure out how to port Siri to run on older iPhones and other iOS devices for the last few weeks — and now Steven Troughton-Smith has managed to get it working.

Up until now, we’ve seen a few folks get the software to start running — but since Siri needs to contact Apple’s servers to actually answer your questions, it wasn’t fully functional.

Troughton-Smith managed to grab some files from an iPhone 4S, copy them to an iPhone 4 and show Siri working perfectly.
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You know how some iPhone apps which aren’t optimized for the iPad’s larger display can be run in a small window in the center of your iPad? Independent developer Aaron Ash decided to go one step further and see if he could run two iPhone apps side by side on an iPad.

Surprisingly, the answer is yes. He’s working on an app that will let you run two apps at once, although you’ll clearly need to jailbreak your iPad to get it working. The project is still a work in progress. Audio doesn’t currently work and there are accelerometer problems.

Clearly there’s little reason to actually run two games of Angry Birds at the same time as shown off in the screenshot Ash has shared. But imagine running a web browser in one window while watching a video in another. It’s something that Windows 8 will support, but mobile platforms including iOS, Android, webOS, and BlackBerry Tablet OS all require you to look at one window at a time, even if you have other apps running in the background.

It could be a few months before Ash releases his app for running multiple programs side-by-side on the iPad.

via MacStories

Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS hackers start looking for ways to jailbreak it — but usually not without issuing warnings. If you rely on a carrier unlocking utility, for instance, you typically need to wait a while before you can upgrade to a new version of the iPhone operating system or you may lose the ability to make calls on your preferred network.

So what happens if you fail to heed that warning and update your iPhone software anyway? Or what happens if your iDevice doesn’t run as well after updating the software? Can you go back to a previous version? Sometimes.

It’s a lot easier to upgrade from one version of iOS to the next than it is to downgrade. But ih8sn0w, the developer behind the sn0wbreeze tool for jailbreaking and customizing iDevices has released a new tool called iFaith which makes the process a little easier and more reliable.

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While Android smartphone makers seem to be involved in an arms race to see which company can produce the phone with the largest screen, a group of independent developers may have the winning strategy. They plan to release an app soon which will effectively turn a 3G capable iPad into an enormous phone.

The PhoneItiPad will be available from the Cydia store soon, allowing you to make phone calls, send text messages, and initiate FaceTime video calls using a phone number on a jailbroken iPad.

The developers have a good track record of enabling extra features on jailbroken devices. They’ve also released apps that lets you use Apple’s FaceTime video calling service in officially unsupported countries and on officially unsupported devices such as the iPhone 3GS.

There’s no release date or pricing information available for PhoneItiPad yet.

via iPhone Download Blog
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Netflix finally released an Android app yesterday allowing subscribers to stream thousands of movies and TV shows to their mobile devices. The bad news is that for now only 5 phones are officially supported. The good news? If you have a rooted Android device it’s not that hard to trick the Netflix app into working on your phone.

Bear in mind, there’s a reason Netflix is only supporting 5 phones at the moment. The company has extensively tested those devices to make sure everything is working properly, so you may run into problems running the app on unsupported devices. But if you’re cool with that, you fan find instructions at reddit for changing your phone’s build.prop file to identify itself as a supported phone. This basically tells the Netflix app that it’s safe to run on your device.

Unfortunately this won’t work with all devices. HTC Thunderbolt users, for instance, have reported problems. And there’s no guarantee that the app won’t crash or work improperly.

There are also reports that the Netflix app runs without any modifications on the Droid X and Droid 2.

The only phones that are officially supported for now are the HTC Evo, HTC Incredible, HTC G2, Google Nexus One, and Samsung Nexus S.

Well that didn’t take long. Yesterday a pre-release version of the firmware for the upcoming HTC Sensation smartphone was leaked. Today xda-developers forum member capychimp released a custom ROM for the HTC Desire HD based on the new software.

That means the ROM comes with HTC Sense 3.0, a new version of HTC’s custom Android software including new apps, widgets and 3D animations. You might want to hold off on actually installing the ROM since it’s still pretty buggy, but it does give us a good idea of where things are headed, both for HTC and for the custom ROM building community.

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The iPhone Dev Team has released an updated version of ultrasn0w which allows AT&T users who have already unlocked their iPhones for use with different wireless carriers to upgrade to iOS 4.3.1 without losing the carrier unlock.

The latest tool isn’t designed to work with newer phones with the latest basebands. Instead it’s designed to let users who have already unlocked their phones upgrade to the latest iPhone operating system without losing the ability to use their phone on their network of choice.

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