We know you’ve been saving up your Rubles for the new LG BL40 Chocolate Touch , but in the meantime we thought we’d hep you to this pretty extensive review they conducted over at Mobile Review . And sure, at first blush this thing seems to be extremely noteworthy: that 21:9 display, the S-Class UI, the haughty demeanor — what’s not to love? The real question, of course, isn’t how attractive the handset is, but how will it fare in the real world? For the reviewer, a big sticking point was the phone’s dimensions. This thing is huge — at over 5-inches tall, you’re going to need a purse (or some sort of rugged man purse) to haul it around. Then again, at 25,000 rubles (about $795) you’re probably not the kind of man who feels self-conscious about carrying a purse. And that isn’t the only complication this form factor provides — the extreme width (or really, extreme lack of height) means that, in landscape mode, the QWERTY keyboard takes up pretty much the entire screen, leaving you only one line of text to work with. And the display quality here can’t compare to the AMOLED offered by Samsung. It’s “pleasant,” the reviewer said, “but nothing more.” But there is more to this review, which can be found at the read link. And you know what? It’s a real page turner. [Thanks, Vinicius] Filed under: Cellphones LG BL40 Chocolate Touch reviewed, deemed ‘pretty OK’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments

You’ve been waiting for it. You’ve been talking about it. You’ve sent long, rambling letters to Jodie Foster about it. You’ve been calling your local Congresswoman about it: It’s the Sony Daily Edition e-reader with built-in wireless. Erick Schonfeld is on the scene live and we’ll be reporting once the doors open at 10:30am EDT. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

David Recordon , the Director of Corporate Development at Six Apart, is leaving the company to join Facebook after two years at the company. Recordon made the announcement on his blog , where he writes that he is joining Facebook’s Engineering team as a Senior Open Programs Manager, and will continue to work on open source and open standards inside Facebook. Over the last two years at Six Apart, Recordon was the Open Platforms Tech Lead. Besides Six Apart, Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID . In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol on the web. According to Recordon, Facebook has always been built on open source software, has released powerful open source infrastructure technologies such as Thrift, and this year become an active member of the Activity Streams and OpenID communities from a standards side. So Recordon will continue to focus on open source and standards at Facebook. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Who said Microsoft’s mobile strategy has to be limited to Windows Mobile? Redmond has just announced OneApp , a comprehensive framework for delivering apps on a variety of featurephones — largely in emerging markets — where processor horsepower and memory are both at a premium. The solution is deployed in harmony with partners (carriers, primarily) that work to offload app processing and storage into the cloud and keep the on-phone footprint as small as possible (Microsoft is quoting a scant 150K for the OneApp executable itself). At present, OneApp is up and running on South Africa’s Blue Label Telecoms where subscribers have access to Windows Live Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS apps among others; more launches are planned around the world “within the next year” at which point an SDK will be made available to devs who want in. Behind the scenes, the app is based on web standards — think Palm’s webOS — and is currently compatible with a variety of S60-based Nokias, Sony Ericsson featurephones, and Samsung’s U900 Soul . And no, don’t worry, this isn’t Windows Mobile 7 . Filed under: Cellphones Microsoft delivers OneApp app framework for featurephones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read  |  Permalink  |  Email this  |  Comments

SocialToo, a startup that lets you manage your personal connections on Twitter and Facebook, has launched a new Facebook application that lets you post updates to your Facebook wall, to Twitter, and any Facebook Fan Page you manage. This feature is particularly interesting after Facebook just released a feature that will allow Facebook Page owners to syndicate their updates from Facebook to Twitter — something that users have been asking for for ages. At the moment, it’s unclear whether Facebook will be extending this feature to Facebook Profiles. Here’s how it works: after installing the application on your Facebook profile, you will be given a prompt in the Publisher’s drop down menu to publish via SocialToo Status. After authorizing your (via oAuth) Twitter accounts, you will be able to select a publish to Twitter option each time you post an update on your Facebook feed via the SocialToo Status option. You can also publish to various Facebook pages (if you are the administrator). When you publish via SocialToo Status, your updates will appear in your personal stream, along with a link to each destination, i.e. Twitter and Facebook Pages. There will also be a little green SocialToo quote icon with each post, differentiating the posts from a regular status update. There a couple of other roundabout ways to publish updates from Facebook to Twitter that have emerged. An app called FB2Twitter lets you Tweet from Facebook’s Publisher to Twitter. But when trying the app out, I wasn’t able to publish to my Facebook feed. Another way to update Twitter from Facebook by pulling in the Facebook RSS feed into TwitterFeed but the whole process sounds confusing. SocialToo’s app seems like one of the easiest ways to post from Facebook to Twitter at the moment. That is, until Facebook allows the ability to do this from your profiles and news feed. But its unclear if and when this will happen. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors