Droid X haz root…AND recovery!

We may have been pretty vocal about the slim chances of custom rom goodness on Motorola devices with locked bootloaders, but it appears that the dev community and perseverance have prevailed. Popular Android dev “Koush”, has managed to get Clockwork Recovery up and running on a Droid X by hijacking the int.rc. Now that the recovery is taken care of, Koush says we’ll start to see custom roms for the Droid X as devs jump on board. With 1GHz of power and 4.3″ of screen real-state, I can’t wait to see what they come up with. (Can you say 1.5+GHz overclocked Droid X’s in the wild!?) The Droid X just became a lot more useful.

**Don’t get too excited too fast. The word from Koush is that while we have root, recovery, and custom rom potential, custom boot images and custom kernels can’t be replaced yet. Though, now that we have /system access, “anything is possible with a little hackery”. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, head on over to Koush’s site to pick up the necessary file(s) and knowledge to get the ball rolling.

Fennec beta coming to Android this fall. Big updates in store.

Android users who’ve managed to install Fennec onto their devices thus far have probably come to the general conclusion that it’s slow, buggy, and simply not that great. It’s not without reason though — Fennec was never officially released for Android in any form. But good things come to those who wait.

According to Mozilla/Fennec team member Matt Brubeck, this fall will see the release of Fennec 2 for MeeGo….and Android. Obviously, major performance and reliability improvements are slated for release, namely new features called “electrolysis” and “layers” as well as Firefox Sync. The first, Electrolysis, is simple a splitting of one major resource (as Fennec operates currently) into several smaller resources, which greatly improves performance and is more resistant to crashing. Along the same lines, the GPU of your device will also be called into action with Layers, helping with the aforementioned performance increase by relieving the CPU of being the only worker on the job. The same offloading of tasks to the GPU is finally gaining steam on the desktop front, so it’s nice to see the mobile sphere following the same path so quickly.

Lastly, Firefox Sync is a simple tool to keep your Mozilla favorites, bookmarks, etc. organized across browsers, platforms, and computers. It’s a useful tool that truly doesn’t show it’s real value until you being using multiple computers daily.

With waning market share on the desktop front, can Mozilla’s mobile efforts make up for that slack and win you back over? Or, are other platforms/browsers (iOS and Safari, Android and mobile Chrome etc.) too far ahead for you to care?

Nokia N9 shows off sliding keyboard

Think the N8 is Nokia’s only weapon in the modern smartphone fight? We all know Nokia loves to pump out hardware left and right. While that isn’t necessarily the best approach, I can admire their spirit. With that said, the N8 is a pretty interesting device on paper and when first held in the hand. It’s just the OS still feels a bit antiquated. Can the N9 solve that?

On the OS front, not so much. It’ll still rock the same Symbian OS that’s aged over the years. It will, however, pack a sliding QWERTY keyboard underneath. To some, that’s the ticket. Either way, there’s no guarantee the so called N9 will ever come to market seeing as how Nokia hasn’t officially taken the wraps off of it yet. But given the polished nature of the images and willingness to release handset after handset, I’d say the chances of seeing an N9 w/ QWERTY out and about are fairly high.

What do you guys think — better than the N8…enough to make you buy it? Hop on past to check out a few more images.

HTC Mozart takes a stride in front of the lens…

It may not be hot off the press, but a story it is nonetheless. The HTC Mozart, the first Windows Phone 7 device to ship later this year, has come out once again to tease us phone aficionados. This time however, the images come with a few specs to wet our whistles. To get the ball rolling — the battery will top out at 1400mAh. A tad small I’d reckon. Though Microsoft’s new OS and accompanying hardware is thus far untested. We’re in uncharted waters, so you never know, perhaps Windows Phone 7 will be a battery sipper. Moving on, the HTC Mozart will not come with an SD card slot for expandable storage, and will drop on a GSM carrier initially. (That pretty much means AT&T here in the states.) And last but not least, HTC has managed to keep things rather plain this time around, as there isn’t a custom UI image anywhere to be seen. It’s straight up Windows Phone 7.

On that note, I’d say Microsoft was pretty adamant about keeping “their image” plain and easily distinguishable from other competitors on the market. That’s an awesome idea. As nice as some Android skins are, at the end of the day they end up making the platform less useful as they slow down updates, with some (read: Samsung’s TouchWiz) skins simply looking downright god awful.

That’s it for now. While you chew on that late night cookie, hop inside for a trio of pictures…

Solar panels of the future to be sprayed on.

When people talk of vast solar farms in 2010, the common image that penetrates our minds is that of a massive piece of land housing thousands, if not tens of thousands of individual solar panels. It’s certainly a site to behold. Even much smaller scale farms look immense when a birds eye view is taken. But a new technology will drastically cut down how big a solar panel is and how it’s made. Not only that, it will change what solar panels are… (Hint: Spray on tan)…

Toshiba crams 2.5TB into each sq. inch of prototype hard drive. (Will they ever die?)

Just when you thought the end had been reached, when platter-based hard drives could improve no more, Toshiba comes along and proves us all wrong. A prototype technology called “bit-patterned” media breaks up the usual continuous surface of your typical hard disk into small sections. So small in fact that the current ~540GB/sq. in. currently enjoyed in hard drive technology will pail in comparison. With bit-patterned technology, the stakes rise to 2.5TB/sq. in.!

For SSD supporters, Toshiba is simply delaying the inevitable. To some extent, that’s true. But don’t tell me you wouldn’t be excited to see a 10TB hard drive for $300 while equivalent storage options in SSD dressings cost 4x-5x more. As it seems, platter-based hard drive still have a bit of fight left in them. Look for the new tech to drop in 2013 if prototypes fair well.

Installing Android on your iPhone just got a lot easier: iPhoDroid

You may be wondering who on earth would want to put Android on their iPhone. To tech noobs and non-geeks, I’ll agree it seems rather stupid. On the flip side however, there are plenty of people just like me who want to do it, and do it just because they can. Until now, the process of actually getting Android up and running on your iPhone was a fairly length, involved project reserved for all but the most talented devs. Not anymore thanks to iPhoDroid.

The whole package is still in it’s development stages. But if you simply can’t resist the open Android goodness infiltrating the locked land of iPhone, this easy install is right up your alley. Just please understand that you can seriously jack some things up. With that said, complete noobs and code haters should probably hold off.

Get the files for iPhoDroid here.

**Hop inside to see a move of iPhoDroid in action…