You read right folks! The Rogers HTC Magic, and HTC Dream have been rooted thanks to a user over at the XDA Developpers Forums.

The user known as Haykuro has single handidly rooted both devices, and has supplied instructions on how to do it and what the benefits are.

For the HTC Magic

For the HTC Dream <— Instructions have yet to be provided as root was just obtained this morning!

Rooting is a process of obtaining root access to the devices in order to load custom ROMs to the device.

The benefits of loading a custom ROM are large in number.

A lot of people install custom ROMs to speed up the device, and remove any “bloat-ware” that may be loaded onto the device by the carrier *Cough* Rogers *Cough*

Ahem!

With this new found power, the device truly is open source and can be customized on a much deeper level.

Think of it as having a good looking girlfriend / boyfriend, and being able to modify his /her personality to your liking!

Happy Rooting Folks!

You can donate to Haykuro’s work ——– Here
You can follow him on Twitter ————- Here

It’s OK if you’re not familiar with Opera. Last I checked they only have a 2.3% market share. But you should know that a lot of those feature you like in your browser, from speed dial to tabbed browsing to something as simple as deleting private data, all of that was first seen in the Opera browser.

Now with Opera 10 they are innovating again. Their newest innovation is called Unite or Opera Unite. Unite will run anywhere Opera runs; Windows, Mac, Linux and reportedly later on mobile platforms. But, what is Unite and what does it do? Well according to Opera:

Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

In An introduction to Opera Unite on Opera’s developer site Chris Mills list some of the interesting possibilties of Unite. Sharing files from your hard drive without additional applications. Working collaboratively with others on data and images. He even claims to have seen a rough prototype in action of an application that controls a remote car across the web. I recommend reading the article as Chris goes into more detail concerning setting up and running Unite for the first time. Also while you’re over there you can also read Hans S. Tømmerholt’s Opera Unite developer’s primer.

Unite is still in alpha, but be sure that we will continue to update you as we find out more about this new technology coming from Opera.

This article is a small sample of things to come here on NerdyBlog.com

Thanks to Rogers Wireless, I have had the chance to play with an HTC Dream, and have not been able to put it down since its unnboxing. Full coverage and review will follow, but I thought I would give my initial impressions.

Price

$149.99 on a 3-Year commitment.

The price is fair, and in line with most other smartphones with this feature set.

Features

Tri-Band 3G (850 / 1900 / 2100)
Quad-Band Edge (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900)

Google’s Android Platform
Google Applications Built In
Built-In GPS
Wi-Fi
3.2MP Camera with Autofocus
 3.2″ TFT LCD
Stereo Bluetooth Support
Support for Micro SD Memory (Up to 16GB)

The Good
The Android application store loads quick, and features a lot of fantastic applications, however the paid applications are unavailable for one reason or another.

The Android platform is quick, stable, and really nice to use.

The phone has a good weight to it, however some may consider it bulky. Personally I like a phone with some weight to it. It makes the phone feel less delicate and fragile. 

The sliding mechanism to flip the screen out has a very unique and sturdy design that I think will be able to stand the test of time and usage.

Call quality is pretty good, however I did notice that the earpiece when the volume is full tends to crackle the audio. Not sure if this is just mine or an issue for all HTC Dreams.

The Bad

Strangely enough I don’t have a whole lot of bad about this phone. Just a couple inconveniences.

Mail application. All of my accounts are either GMail accounts, or Google Apps for Domains Accounts. That being said, I really wish I had the option of adding more than one account to the GMail application instead of using the Android mail app which has to poll my mail server at a designated interval thus causing massive battery drainage.

Battery life is pretty bad with this unit. I’m not sure why it is so bad? I make sure any services that I don’t need aren’t running (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS etc.) but for some reason I can’t get any more than a day out of this phone without a charge.

As previously stated, this is just a small sample of the coverage I hope to provide on this unit. The phone has a lot more good, and a couple more bad points to go over but in the end it is definitely a great smartphone!

Video, and App Reviews to Come!

So I just spent the last hour and twenty minutes watching a wonderful demo of  Google Wave.

You’re probably wondering the same thing I did when you saw the nameGoogle Wave. What is it?

Waveis what happened when Google asked them self, “what might email look like if it was invented today”.

What they came up with is pretty amazing.

There are so many features that I’m just going to hit on some of the big ones. For those that want to know, it was built using HTML5 and Google Web Toolkit. It’s open source. And it will be released later this year. Waves, the documents you create using Wave, can be so much more than simple emails or conversations. Though it will act as both. During a conversation you can choose to see what the person is typing almost letter for letter. Developers have said this allows for nearly 100% of your time spent reading or writing and therefore faster conversations. Other users can be added to waves at anytime. If knew users wish to see who made what edits to a wave by using the playback feature. Users also are able to place links, drag and drop photos and other files.

The waves are stored server side and can be edited by multiple parties at the same time, live. You have discussion and content collaboration in the same tool. With Wave you can develop blogs, wikis, forums and much more. I have to say the possibilities are somewhat overwhelming.

Google Wave is high extendable through client side extensions and server side robots. During the demo the Wave team had a conversation between two members, one typing in English the other in French, all being translated on the fly by a server side robot that Google has developed for Waves.

I suggest everyone goes to the Wave site to check out the video them self. You can also check out the Offical Google Blog with much more info than I’ve provided here.

Hello again kids! Are you all sick of new posts yet? Good!

This post is just a quick one to give you all a way to stay up to date with everything that is NerdyBlog. You can follow us the below mentioned social networks, as well as some of the writing staff who so choose to be on said networks.

Twitter

Paul Dukes: @Dezynergod
Andrew Goldenberg: @Agoldenberg
NerdyBlog: @NerdyBlog

Facebook Group

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8455951593

Thanks for following us guys, and we hope to follow you as well! Please feel free to send any tips or stories to @NerdyBlog or to Andrew@NerdyBlog.com

Hello NerdyBloggers!

Did you miss us? We’re coming to you live from NerdyBlog HQ with an update as to how things are going on this end and why we haven’t been around in so damn long!

Recently the blog has been on hiatus due to a huge workload at my “day job” as well as a lack of writing staff! I am however happy to report that we are back in full swing and are kicking things off with fantastic coverage of the Starcraft II beta from Blizzard Entertainment.

Join Myself, Myles Goldenberg (Game Tester and Balance Genius) as well as Paul Dukes, our Senior Editor and designer extraordinaire as we go deep into the beta and bring you everything you’d like to see and more! To the members of the Starcraft Community, please feel free to leave a comment on this post of the things that matter most to you about Starcraft II and we will make sure to adress and answer any and all questions!

We have a lot of plans, including a live LAN party on Justin.TV to give you a true view of the multi-player experience.

See you on Battle.Net!

I guess when reviewing a game based on a movie, it would help to have seen said movie. Well, I haven’t. Instead, my opinions of X-Men Origins: Wolverine are based on its own merits.

A few complaints upfront. There is no subtitle option. I personally don’t play games at high volume as a courtesy to those around me, so subtitles help me keep up with the important bits of the story while keeping the sound low. They would have helped at times when music and sound effects drown out the dialog, even with my TV louder than usual, the dialog volume at maximum and the sound effects and music turned down below the halfway point. It’s a minor detail, but it would have been a nice asset.

The jumping puzzles in this game can be quite annoying. I’d like to point out that I love platformers such as Super Mario Brothers, The Jak Series and Little Big Planet. Ratchet and Clank is one of my all-time favorite game series. But here the platforming doesn’t work. A lot of the puzzles require a switch to be flipped or a crank to be turned, leaving a short amount of time to move between platforms before they disappear and you have to start over. The reason it doesn’t work is because even with the great camera it can still be more difficult than necessary to jump accurately enough to complete these puzzles. Thankfully, there aren’t many of them, and most don’t result in death upon failure.

Some of the fights in this game can feel very long. I’m sure this was partly done to give the game a more epic feel, but there are times when it’s more of an epic fail than an epic fight. I’m sure that it’s quite hard to tune fights around an indestructible juggernaut like Wolverine and sadly the boss battles can be hit-or-miss. As mentioned on a recent episode of CO-OP, it would have been nice if the fight against the Sentinel was more like a battle in Shadow of the Colossus. The whole event is masterfully built up as you move through the factory housing the Sentinels, culminating in a fight where you essentially hack away at its feet incessantly until it is over.

Wall of text this way »

Yesterday Twitter, the insanely popular microblogging service announced that you will again be able to start receiving SMS notifications from Twitter based on your friends tweet settings. If you have device updates enabled, you will now be receiving messages from Twitter as friends update their statuses.

Needless to say this is fantastic news for the Canadian Twittershere, as the device update service was disabled some time ago leaving Canadian Twitterers in the dark.

Now almost all Canadian carriers have made a deal with Twitter to allow the service to operate in Canada.

From the Twitter Blog:

We’ve made more progress with SMS in Canada, this time with our friends at Rogers and Fido. Starting today, if you are a Twitterer as well as a customer of Rogers or Fido, then you can update via SMS and receive updates from Twitter via SMS. Your tweets are treated as standard messages. There are no additional charges—tweets are free and will remain free.

If you haven’t activated your mobile to work with Twitter, it’s easy to do from your Settings page. The Twitter message limit of 140 characters was based on the limit of 160 characters imposed by SMS in general—we just needed some room to include your name in front of the message. It’s this simple constraint that allows Twitter to work well in so many places.

A driving idea behind Twitter has long been to extend the power of a real-time network to mobile devices everywhere through the simple technology of SMS. We’re thrilled to activate full, two-way SMS to many more people in Canada with no additional fees and we’re working on the rest of the world right now.

Awesome news! Thanks to everyone who made this happen! One small step for Canadian wireless carriers in the right direction!

The M340 is everything a good point-and-shoot camera should be: reasonably priced, easy to use, and small enough to fit in your pocket.

When I was told I was going to be reviewing the Kodak Easyshare M340 I thought, “Not another camera!” If you read my last review you can probably understand why, but after playing with it for a few minutes, I found myself getting rather excited. When you first select the mode you want to use and power on the camera, the mode’s name is displayed followed by a short description of the context this mode is designed for. Thanks to this functionality, you never have to worry about getting the settings right manually. There is also a scene mode (SCN) which has specific settings for virtually any situation. Because of this built-in functionality, any worry about whether your camera is going to take the picture you want is virtually eliminated and you are free to just enjoy taking photos.

Another great function of the M340 is the grid. What this does is place a grid on the display. This makes lining up your photos very easy.

It’s a small thing, but another feature I like about this camera is the USB to AC adapter that comes with the camera. One thing I hate about most electronic devices is all the cables you are required to have to use them. This eliminates one of those. Which to me is a good start.

The only drawback I found with M340 is the lack of a view finder, so when you’re outside on a sunny day you have to turn the screen brightness to high. Doing this drains the battery rather fast. The battery itself is rather solid. I spent many straight hours taking photos, and I have still not gone through my first charge.

If I was looking for a new point-and-shoot, I would seriously consider picking this one up over other cameras more than twice the price.

Keep an Eye Out for a Car That Looks Like This!

According to THIS article by the Ottawa Citizen, there have been multiple sightings of Google Streetview cars around the city.

What does this mean for Ottawans such as myself? Google maps will soon be Ottawa-Enabled allowing us to find our way around this city at the street level rather than the crappy Satelite photo level.

Check out the article! We’re pumped here at NerdyBlog!

I’m off to investigate Google maps to see what I can find!