Verizon Acknowledges Building Excitement Regarding HTC Thunderbolt. Tells Us Nothing.

If you’re impatiently waiting for any and all details surrounding the delayed HTC Thunderbolt, Verizon feels your pain and appreciates you ability to hold off on any current smartphone purchases. But they have nothing specific to share with us yet. Today on the company’s Facebook page, they stated the following

Hey fans, we appreciate all the excitement about the anticipated launch of the ThunderBolt by HTC. We’re excited too! Verizon 4G LTE is America’s fastest, most advanced 4G network & we want to ensure the advanced technology behind our first 4G LTE phone is flawless. We will announce its release date as soon as it is confirmed. Thanks for your support & patience while we work to bring you the ThunderBolt by HTC.

Yes, it’s more of a tease than anything, but a tease we will gladly play along with…

Gigabyte Ships New B3 Sandy Bridge Motherboards.

If you’re into computers at all, you’ve no doubt heard of Intel’s recent SATA controller woes that took quite a tool on their Sandy Bridge platform and more or less caused a massive recall on all previously sold material. While the issue is less of a problem for people only using one or two ports on any given affected piece of equipment, people such as myself who use seven of the eight available ports have a problem with Intel’s previous “fix” — (don’t use the affected ports).

Last week, ASUS began shipping their updated B3 revision hardware to the excitement of PC enthusiasts everywhere. And today, Gigabyte follows with an announcement that their own B3 revision motherboards have shipped.

One thing to be especially observant about on upcoming h67/P67 hardware purchases is the packaging and naming of said hardware. ASUS and Gigabyte are both making the “B3″ verbiage very clear and apparent. Gigabyte is even including it in the official names of their revised hardware — P67-UD7 is now officially called the P67-UD7-B3.

The new B3 Gigabyte H67/P67 hardware should become available for purchase later this week as stock clears customs.

The Current Best Reason To Jailbreak Your iPhone: MobileNotifier

Of all the things many would list as iOS’ largest shortcoming, notifications and their intrusive nature would likely take the win. When first unveiled, iOS lacked any dedicated 3rd party applications that could alert you. But even then, many people who received tons of text messages began raising concerns with Apple’s approach of notifications — you have to deal with each one as soon as it arrives. Since 2007, more notification-capable apps have been added to iOS as well as the market seeing three new competitors in the likes of Android, webOS, and Windows Phone 7.

While jailbreaking your iPhone has always allowed a better notification experience, the latest attempts of Peter Hajas’ MobileNotifier beta 3 is in and of itself, reason to jailbreak your iPhone. As seen above, it’s a very good looking solution that feels at home on iOS. But we’ll stop short of spoiling all the fun prematurely. Hop on past the break for a nice litter gallery and a quick video showing MobileNotifier in action.

[Update 2] AMD’s Dual-GPU Radeon 6990 Graphics Card To Hit The Streets March 8th?

PC enthusiasts have an exciting March to look forward to. Not only is Nvidia’s dual-GPU 590 rumored to be dropping later in the month, but AMD’s own dual-GPU solution (6990) will be coming even earlier — rumored to be as soon as March 8th. Currently, AMD is said to be finalizing the SKU and planning to have partners ready to go for an official release by said date.

For those not well versed in the land of computer hardware, “dual-GPU” in regards to the 6990 (and GTX 590) simply means that their are two GPU cores on one PCB. (Essentially two graphics cards crammed on to one.) This not only allows uses with smaller cases to save space, but also makes tri- and quad-GPU configurations easier and more energy efficient.

Official pricing hasn’t been released yet, but we’d expect the 6990 to ding your banking account between $600-$700. Expensive — yes. But for those who want only the fastest, it is the only option.

Update

AMD 6990 officially outed. Specs, price, and specific release date still unknown.

Update 2

A rear-end shot after the jump…

Verizon’s First Windows Phone 7 Device Spotted On Camera.

CDMA users in the U.S. may not have much longer to wait if it is Windows Phone 7 that they seek. An image of a Verizon-branded HTC Trophy was leaked to Engadget, showing what is believed to be the carrier’s first Windows Phone 7 device. Strictly speaking, the Trophy isn’t anything too exciting in the hardware department (1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250 processor, 576MB of RAM/512MB of ROM, 8GB of internal storage) especially considering the recently announced HTC Arrive heading to Sprint. But for customers of Big Red, we’re sure any news is good news none the less. Right?

Developing: Gmail Experiencing Problems This Morning. Missing Emails, Chat Logs, And More!

If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Gmail users logging in this morning only to find missing items and/or being greeted as if it’s the first time you’ve logged in, you’re not alone. A check with Google’s apps status dashboard confirms that the email provider and search giant is in fact having some pretty serious issues. If you have offline copies of your email, consider yourself one step ahead of the game. Otherwise, it’s all in Google’s hands at this point should you find parts of your digital life missing. Stay tuned for continuing updates as they are posted…

Update

The latest update at 8am says…check back at 10.

Update 2

New update: Check back at 11…

Update 3

New Update: More of the same. Check back at 12…

Update 4

New Update: 12:30 is the new time to watch…

Update 5

Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 10 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.
The remaining 0.012% of accounts are being restored on an ongoing basis.

This out of a total of 0.02%-0.08% GMail userbase.

Have you been affected?

iPad 2 Comes Out To Play With The Camera.

As much as Apple loves to keep secrets, it makes us consumers happy when information about their latest and greatest leaks out. Case in point: the upcoming iPad 2. From the image above (and following images after the jump) we can tell that Apple managed to trim down the overall footprint of their Jesus Tablet by a few millimeters here and there. Overall, the iPad 2 is boxier than its predecessor and features shorter, yet still tapered edges. We should know very soon whether these so called iPad 2 images are in fact legit. But assuming they are, what do the fine readers of GS think? Personally, I’m still waiting for the hardware info before I make any judgement calls. More images after the jump…