One of the reasons the BlackBerry PlayBook never got much traction is because of its lack of third-party apps (actually, first-party apps as well; think email). Anyway, the PlayBook OS 2.0 update that’s expected to arrive this month will try to mitigate that shortcoming: it will finally include the long-awaited BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps. Basically, developers can repackage their existing Android apps and submit them to the BlackBerry App World, so they will run on the PlayBook and upcoming BlackBerry 10 devices.

In order to encourage developers to actually do this, RIM has announced that it would be giving out free PlayBook tablets to all developers who submit an Android app. Presumably, if you have an Android app, you’d just need to head over to the Android tools site, repackage your app and submit it to the BlackBerry App World.

The deadline is February 13, so if yo...

MIUI is not the ROM for everyone, we get that.  But for those that do enjoy using it, things just got a little better -- Xiaomi has decided to release the source code changes and is in the process of open-sourcing the project.  As of the time of this writing, you'll find the core patches to things like the framework and the make files as well as code for the file explorer, notes app, compass app, and sound recorder at MiCode's github pages.  An official sounding announcement on the MIUI Android blog says to expect code for more applications in the "very near future".  Hooray!

MIUI is more than just a custom ROM.  Xiaomi builds and releases phones in China running the heavily customized version of Android, and through the hard work of their development team and independent developers, the builds have been modified to work with many p...

The United States government has agreed to use Google’s mobile operating system Android this week for future secure phones and has promised updates inside 2 weeks. Each time Google updates the most basic build of Android, it can take upwards of a half a year before legacy devices will be brought up to speed – with the shortest time this author has ever seen being several weeks at least. What Information-security director at George Mason University Angelos Stavrou, a contractor on the project, has said is that they can get it done in just 14 days!

This would be an absolute miracle to see an update flash out so quick it’d made users heads spin, but given that the US Government would certainly accept nothing less than to work right up elbow to elbow with the software developers they plan on running with, we must assume that they’d have a bit of a leg-up on manufacturers and carriers. These...

Once again Ray gets to be in our video of the week, but who can blame him? hes a funny guy! Enjoy RWJ on his comeback after of more than 2 weeks.

While searching through a huge number of folders, it is common for users to miss the one one they are looking for. This is due to the fact that, when faced with a lot of similar looking items, the ones with the same color are categorized together by the human brain. The default yellow color for folders chosen by Microsoft to be used in Windows Explorer is pleasing to the eyes, but it also makes differentiating between all the folders a difficult task. Folder Colorizer is an application for Windows that enables you to easily categorize and differentiate folders from each other by applying a different color to each folder.

The application provides you with a number of pre-selected colors to choose from, as well as a tool to select custom colors. After installation, the application adds a Colorize! sub-menu to the right-click context menu of Windows Explorer. To change the color of a folder, right-click it, open Colori...