T-Mobile joins the club, offers up $15/month tethering plan.

If we look past the fact that being forced to pay extra for tethering plans is double dipping on the carriers part, we may be able to actually take T-Mobile’s new tethering plan prices in stride. Speaking of which, the 4th largest U.S. carrier has announced that starting November 3rd, both post and pre-paid customers can get access to smartphone tethering and hotspot features for $15/month — on top of your stand alone data plan. While it is the same structure as every other carrier that offers tethering, it still isn’t right. Though if you want to stick it to the man, there are ways to get tethering initiated without the double dip pricetag…

But such things are better left for another day and another post.

JooJoo adopting Android. Ver. 2 due this spring.

Lawsuits and bad sentiment be dammed, the JooJoo and it’s creators will not give up. While their first stab at this whole tablet thing was pretty pathetic, the company hopes that version 2 will be a much bigger hit. Helping to accomplish this goal is the abandonment of their own, in-house OS in favor of the latest and greatest flavor of Android (we hope the latest at least…).

The only differentiating decision that will surely set the JooJoo 2 apart form other Android tablets, however, is the lack of any Android Market access. Instead, the Fusion Garage team will be tweaking Android to tie into many different web services such as Gmail and Facebook, leveraging the open web and ignoring stand alone, native apps.

Sounds risky enough. Just one question: Does anyone want a tablet without dedicated apps these days…?

Mission Control looks nice and all, but this is how it should really look…

I’m sure Apple has spent countless man-hours determining a suitable Mission Control UI. Such staple features of a new OS update aren’t taken without immense consideration for a number of varying factors. In Apple’s case, the Mission Control we saw shown off was certainly graphically pleasing to the eye. But it could be so much more.

While I’m generally not a huge fan of the 3D fanaticism that’s currently enveloping the tech market, this 3D-ified Mission Control designed by Zach Forrester is actually pretty unique. As website Beautiful Pixels points out, it may look good now, but how well will it scale to Apple’s assortment of devices and screens?

Given the needed resources and delay in actually switching (due to waiting for transitions and such), I wonder how useful a 3D Mission Control would actually be. Although, if there’s anyone who could pull off a risky UI decision, Apple would be one of my first picks.

What do you guys think: To 3D or not to 3D?

[Update] White iPhone 4 Shows Up In Apple Store App. Release imminent?

Potential Tuesday morning celebration material — An eagle-eyed reader over at MacRumors spotted a nifty little nugget of information whilst browsing through the freshly updated 1.1 Apple Store iOS app. Specifically, the white iPhone 4 that has thus far eluded the general public is now appearing alongside it’s darker counterparts. Excitement shouldn’t ooze freely just yet, however. While the white iPhone 4′s do show within the app for reservation, actually clicking on one produces an error message stating: “Because of high demand, we are not currently taking iPhone reservations.”

So no, we’re not quite there yet folks. But acknowledgement from Apple is at least a step in the right direction. Perhaps we’ll be seeing an Apple announcement within the next day/week or two. Anyone still holding out for a white iPhone 4?

Update

Apple has officially come out to acknowledge the white iPhone 4 after is appearance in the app above. Bad news: Spring 2011. Perhaps I’ll just wait for iPhone 5…

Update

That was short lived. The white iPhone 4 has now been pulled from the app above. “Cancelled” is looking more and more believable…

Possible AMD 6970 benchmarks leak out.

I’m not trying to say the fresh off the line AMD 6850 and 6870 are “poor”. But the honest to goodness truth is that those are mere “mid-range” cards. The real shiny jewel of glory is the 6970. This is the card that is destined to replace the current top of the line, single-GPU 5870.

On that note, a Chinese site by the name of zol.com claims to have some early 6970 hardware in-house, with preliminary benchmarks already completed.

• 3D Mark: 23,499 in Performance mode

• Uningine Heaven: 36.6fps @ 1,920 x 1,200 w/ 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

Not too shabby. For comparison’s sake, the outgoing 5870 scored 19,337 and 17.3 fps respectively, while Nvidia’s hulking king, the GTX 480 managed 21,106 and 29.5fps. Clearly, AMD has gotten something right.

Just remember, these aren’t official nor even confirmed as “real” 6970 benchmarks. But we can only hope…

Review: Proporta Mizu Shell

Another day, another review. This one is a bit different than the iSkin cases that we reviewed a few days back in that it is (1) clear and (2) actually a tad thicker. Normally the clear cases are thinner than the traditional, colored rubber-like case. Not this time. The Proporta Mizu is definitely something you’re going to want to take a look at. But before you scurry off, crawl inside to check it out…

Upcoming Android homescreen replacement looks amazing! #SlickUI

On my year-long stint with Android, I went through my fair share of homescreen replacements. The stock Android homescreen wasn’t particularly bad. It was just laggy. (No phone with a 600+ MHz processor should skip and jump when moving between screens.) And then LauncherPro came into my life. It was fast, quick, and had a relatively light memory footprint. I was in heaven.

But if it was flair that you wanted, LauncherPro wasn’t the right homescreen replacement for you. Unfortunately, a lot of those fancier homescreen replacements had terrible performance. This new homescreen replacement, Slick UI, aims to try to mesh functionality and a pretty face without the usual accompanying performance hits. Can it do it…?