First Android Release Will Have iPhone-Style Crippled Bluetooth, No Google Talk

Over on the official Android Developers Blog, Googler Dan Morrill has news of what won’t be making it into Android 1.0—a full featured-Bluetooth stack and data messaging via Google Talk API. Android 1.0 will work with Bluetooth headsets, but won’t do other things like send files or link up to a PoGo printer, just like the iPhone. Google Talk will be missing completely. Thankfully, the reasoning behind both decisions seems to make sense: Google Talk’s security is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to function as the core IM service for a huge mobile platform as intended, and a full Bluetooth API simply isn’t done yet, but both should show up in future iterations. Apparently any frameworks in the 1.0 SDK would be impossible to greatly change down the road, so it sounds like Google’s taking the smart route and not rushing out inferior code. [Android Developers Blog via PC Mag]

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Apple Gives MobileMe Customers 60 More Free Days

Apple’s tacking on an addition 60 days to the 30 days it already doled out to MobileMe subscribers, which means you’ve got an entire three months extra to wait out the issues you’ve been having. Apple sent out these emails today to MobileMe subscribers, but if you’re one of the ones with MobileMe mail snags, you might not have gotten it. Well you’ve seen it now! Apple has some qualifications, so click on to see if you’re eligible. [Apple]

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Five Reasons Not to Buy the New iPhone

We’re sure that coming up with a list of reasons to buy the new 3G iPhone would be pretty easy (number 1, it’s 3G!). Five reasons not too buy it might be a little more difficult, unless, of course, you own one and have experienced the pain first hand that is the second generation of the most hyped gadget ever.

Tech blogger Thomas Hawk has been running around with his 3G iPhone for about a month now and decided it wasn’t worth the upgrade. Why not? Because AT&T’s 3G network stinks(at least in San Francisco), because the battery life is terrible, and because the data plan is a rip off. Okay, that’s only three of the five complaints, but we’ve got to leave some reason to hit the read link. [Source: Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection]

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How To Tether Your iPhone With NetShare

We’ve been covering NetShare a lot the last couple of days, and with good reason: Apple consciously left the ability to tether out of the iPhone, yet for some reason has no problem letting someone else sell an app that does just that. Some users, though, might find the concept of tethering confusing, or at least intimidating. It’s actually quite straight forward, and the staff at Apple Insider has put together a really handy and detailed step-by-step guide that shows how in just a few minutes you can configure your MacBook (or other Wi-Fi device) to share your iPhone’s Internet connection so you can have truly mobile access anywhere you get coverage. [Apple Insider]

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Hands-on: Spore Origins for the iPhone

In the Electronic Arts booth here at E3, nestled in among the raucous noises of various first-person shooters, is a completely white room with a few cell phones on tables. This is the EA Mobile space, and it was here that we got to play Spore Origins, the iPhone version of Will Wright’s sure-to-be masterpiece.

Like the EA Mobile space, Spore Origins is pretty simple and clean, and stands out as a fairly calm experience among the racket of a lot of other iPhone games. Spore takes you through a civilization from ameoba to space travel, but Spore Origins sticks with just the ameoba stage. You play a creature of your own creation and float through the microbial ether, eating things that are smaller than you, and running away from things that are larger.

Read on for TUAW’s impressions of one of the most anticipated iPhone games, and why it might not be all we had hoped.

The game is motion controlled, and gameplay is pretty simple — tilt to go, and your little guy always just keeps swimming along. After he chows down for a bit (you can line up combos in succession for a slightly higher score), you can level up, and with each level comes a certain amount of customization. The first ding gives you the option to color your character as you’d like (one cool feature: you can choose to colorize your creature with a camera shot from the iPhone’s camera), and others let you upgrade all kinds of biological additions: body shape, pincers, tails, eyes, antennae, and anything else you’d find on whatever was crawling around in the dirt way back when.
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