I just read on Mashable that the original Prince of Persia is coming to the iPhone/iPod Touch as Prince of Persia Retro.

I was but a young-un when the game came out, but it was my first real experience with video games, and certainly the most memorable. Maybe that and Stunts.

My point is that it was awesome. Great graphics (you know, for the time), fluid animation, swords, puzzles, a princess… it was like man-Mario.

And now all you lucky iPhone owners get to take one of the greatest 8-bit adventures ever told around with you in your pocket. And you don’t even have to worry about fiddling with extended memory or floppy disks. You darn kids have got it so easy.

The game should come out some time before June 2010. Sadly, the price is not yet announced.

So you just bought the Android 2.1-powered Droid Incredible, or locked in a pre-order for the HTC EVO 4G.. and now Google’s gone and announced Android 2.2. Great.

Don’t fret; if your phone started shipping in 2010 (read: the Droid Incredible, myTouch Slide, EVO 4G, Desire), it’ll almost certainly get the upgrade treatment, according to HTC.

The gents over at AndroidCentral reached out to HTC for comment, and got the following back:

[...] if your phone was launched this year, we will most likely offer an upgrade for it to the Froyo version. This includes popular models like the Desire and Droid Incredible as well as hotly anticipated phones like the Evo 4G, MyTouch slide and upcoming models. We will announce a full list of phones and dates once we are closer to launching the upgrades. We are working closely with Google and our other partners to ensure we have the earliest access to everything we need to provide a complete and solid Sense experience on Froyo. We expect to release all updates in the second half of this year but can’t be more specific yet.

Of course, that leaves plenty of handsets unspoken for. While it’s reasonable to think that HTC might eventually stop supporting some older handsets, what about those that are just outside of 2009? The Droid Eris was released in November of 2009 — will it get to ride the train to upgradeville with all of its friends? As usual, we’ll have to wait and see.

The best part of all of it: the bit about them expecting “to release all updates in the second half of this year”. Sure, it’s not as specific as the update-hounds might want — but considering that the second half of this year begins in just a little over a month, it could be a whole lot worse.

Back in February of this year, Eric Schmidt used his keynote at Mobile World Congress to disclose an interesting tidbit: between Google and their hardware partners, they were then shipping a collective total of around 60,000 units per day. Not too bad, right?

Its gotten even better.

In a shareholders meeting yesterday, Eric took the time to update the number: three months later, they’ve climbed from 60,000 per day to 65,000 per day. By our math, that’s around 8% growth. If they keep steady at this rate, they should be pushing between 5.5 and 6 million Android handsets shipped per quarter.

As with the last time, unfortunately, it’s unclear what Schmidt’s definition of “shipped” is. “Shipped” and “sold” are generally two entirely different things, with “shipped” just implying that they had been built and sent out to distribution partners, whether or not it ends up getting sold to an end consumer. However, distributors don’t generally continue buying things if they’re not selling — and seeing as they’re buying more of these things than they were before, we can assume that most of these units are getting snatched up.

For good ol’ comparisons sake: In their last reported quarter, Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones. That’s roughly 2.9 million per month, or 96,000 per day.

Well, that was one wild journey. After a dozen or so false starts and a seemingly endless gaggle of leaked memos making promises that couldn’t be kept, Android 2.1 is now officially (really!) available for the Sprint Samsung Moment. Still no word on the update for the Sprint Hero. You hear that sound? Thats the sound of a million Hero owners collectively grinding their teeth.

The good news for Moment owners doesn’t come without caveats, though.

It’s not an over-the-air update, so there’s a bit of manual labor involved. Additionally, this update will wipe everything you’ve got on your device. Before partaking, make sure to back up all your apps, ringtones, pictures of your cats in people clothing, and any other crucial goodies you might have laying around. Text messages can’t be backed up, and aren’t synced to the cloud — so if you’ve got a text you like to turn to when the nights get cold and lonely, make sure to forward it to email or something.

Ready to dive in? You can find the update software here.

We’ve seen thin-film speakers around, but generally they make for pretty poor replacements for regular speakers. I mean, think about it: for bass frequencies, something actually has to move, like, an inch back and forth. I don’t care what kind of promises these gadgets make about turning your wall into a speaker, they’re just going to be completely missing out on a whole segment of sound. But what’s a device that’s never had, and likely never will have, any bass? Yes, every mobile phone ever made.

It could be that they’re just looking into it, but it really makes a fair amount of sense. Instead of a tiny “real” speaker, the whole back of the phone could be a speaker, and perhaps even double as the vibrating element as well. Sure, your music won’t sound great, but it’ll sound better than whatever comes out of that tiny-ass little thing you’ve got right now.

The method they’re attempting to patent is a way of easily mass-producing electret loudspeakers and integrating them with, one assumes, a phone chassis. They get more into the actual theoretical implementation in a separate patent.

Sure, why not?

[via WMPowerUser]

And so it begins: Samsung has just released the first build of the SDK for Bada, their built-in-house Smartphone platform. The SDK comes complete with it’s own user interface creation tool, debugger, simulator, and API set. Alas, it’s currently Windows-only.

Developers are one of the most key ingredients to whether or not a platform succeeds. Developers flocked to the iPhone, and seem to finally be warming up to Android. Just about every other platform, however, seems to be having a hard time pulling developers into their camp. Will devs embrace Bada?

Probably not – at least not for the time being. While Samsung has plans to launch a number of Bada phones around the world, they’ve yet to formally announce plans for any outside of the Wave — and they haven’t even confirmed the Wave is coming to the US.

Apple brought a massive market all using one device, with an SDK born out of a foundation (Cocoa) that has been in the works for decades. Google’s Android offers up a constantly expanding armory of handsets that carriers are willing to dump massive ad budgets into as their answer to the iPhone. If Samsung wants to garner the interest of developers, they’re going to have to figure out (and proudly proclaim) what they bring to the table.

[Via Phonescoop]