apps
Chevron WP7 Shuts Down Windows Phone Unlocking Service
Chevron WP7 the Windows Phone 7 unlocking service has officially been closed. The company which is run by Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh, Long Zheng and the Windows Phone Team at Microsoft had already sold 10,000 unlocking tokens to owners of devices running the Windows Phone OS in just 2 months since it was up and about. What the service essentially did was to allow users to unlock their device and enable the installation of homebrewed apps or maybe even develop their own. However the team found that many people never moved beyond the sideloading part to become a published developer thus negating the point of the concept anyway.
The team received a lot of emails to let them know how much users of the Windows Phone OS supported them and in return, they have allowed current users a free one-year membership to the Windows Phone App Hub. The $99 fee will be credited to customers who sign up for developer access within 60 days beginning on April 13. The gift also has been extended to those signed up for the unlocking service from January 1st 2012 until now. For more information, head on over to Chevron’s website, here.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!