GSMA, the organizers of the annual, massive Mobile World Congress, have announced a couple of new developments this morning. For one, the organization is to expand the developer-focused programme at the event to include new elements such as Macworld Mobile and the Brand App Challenge. In addition, the organization has announced new speakers, including Sir Martin Sorrell, chief exec of WPP and HTC head honcho Peter Chou. At Mobile World Congress 2011, the GSMA is partnering with IDG World Expo, organisers of Macworld, to produce Macworld Mobile, a mobile developer-focused event that will center around the iOS platform. GSMA says the Macworld Mobile iOS Developer Conference will provide full-day, in-depth training on the platform, with technical sessions, targeting tools and applications specifically designed for mobile application developers and engineers. The GSMA expects more than 10,000 developers to visit App Planet, the “event within an event” at Mobile World Congress that centers around the mobile applications market, during the four days of Mobile World Congress. At the next event, App Planet will also feature new elements, including the Brand App Challenge, which is essentially a competition / networking opportunity focused on mobile application developers creating “brand apps” for a select number of global consumer brands. Finally, GSMA has expanded its line up of keynote speakers at Mobile World Congress, announcing today that the following speakers were added to the programme: Daniel Hajj, CEO, America Movil and Telcel; Peter Chou, CEO, HTC; Vittorio Colao, Chief Executive, Vodafone and Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive, WPP. They will join previously announced speakers like Randall Stephenson, Chairman, CEO and President, AT&T; Li Yue, President and CEO, China Mobile; Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google and Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter. The event will be held on 14th-17th February, 2011 in Barcelona. We’re looking forward to it.

In case you missed it, iOS 4.1 was made official and released to developers on the first. Seems that Apple might have made a slight misstep when they released it however; the version that went it works with any iPhone/iPod Touch, not just the developer units. The upshot is that if you don’t want to wait for the general release, you don’t have to – you can go to the Uneasy Silence forum and download it. There’s also quite the support discussion built up on that forum, so if you have any questions about iOS 4.1, odds are the answer is there.

See that shot above? That was taken with an iPhone 4. Don’t believe it? See how in the video after the jump. Armed with nothing but a $7 mini-microscope and the cheapest (around $3) back-protecting iPhone case they could find, the guys over at Crabfu managed to convert their iPhone 4 into an on-the-go microscope camera capable of taking shots at a 12x zoom level. Ten bucks for at least a few hours of wandering around my house looking at everything way closer than I probably should? Deal. [Via Giz]

Android Police noticed today that the minimum requirements for Flash Player 10.1 actually exclude the original Motorola Droid, even though it was one of the devices Adobe showed off in their early Flash Player 10.1 demo videos. What isn’t clear, however, is whether or not the minimum requirements will apply to the Droid from now on (meaning, Droid users no longer being able to download it), or if they’ve just made an exception to these requirements in the case of the Droid. My gut tells me it’ll be the latter, but Android Police have reached out to Adobe for clarification, just be sure. We’ll let you know how it turns out. The hefty minimum system requirements serve as a reminder that Flash probably doesn’t have a home on mobile phones, as much as we’d all love it to.

If you’ve been following the news trickling out on the Nokia N8 over the last few months, you’ll be pleased to hear that Nokia’s Senior Comms Manager, Tapani Kaskinen, today confirmed to Finland’s favourite* newspaper, Kauppalehti [link in Finnish], that pre-orders for the device will ship out come September 30th. Further to this, Nokia blog Nok Nok, believe that eager folks in the UK will be able scoop up the device from September 27th from Nokia Online. While Nokia aren’t anywhere as cool as they used to be, at least you know you’re getting a good camera, right? [via Engadget] *Probably not really Finland’s favourite.

Google may no longer sell the device in the US, but that doesn’t mean that love their baby any less, with a new build for the Nexus One appearing over the weekend. While not yet officially released, the ever-diligent folks over at XDA Developers have unearthed a spanking-new build for the device that reportedly brings with it some speed improvements (as can bee seen in the benchmarks above), as well as some improvements to WiFi that help establish a connection faster. As is expected in the fast-moving Android Dev world, you can expect this build to start making its way onto community ROMs for handsets other than the Nexus One very soon. Keen to get this onto your Nexus One ASAP? MoDaCo have a host of files ready and waiting for you as we speak, or else check the original thread over at XDA for some more info. As is often the case with leaked builds, you will lose access to the Android Market, unless your seasoned enough to know how to fix that problem. Google’s your friend here. [via Engadget] [image via MoDaCo]

Last week we reported on the new almost-an-EVO from HTC that’s making its way to Verizon in the near(ish) future. And I have it on pretty good authority that you loved it. So, you’ll be pleased to know that the upcoming (but still nameless) device has had its required photo-shoot with the FCC, and we have some more photos for you. As you can see from the photos, it’s sporting some Verizon-red highlights on the keyboard, and has a removable battery. The test that the FCC ran confirm that it will run on both CDMA 2000 and GSM 850 bands, and will rock Bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n WiFi at 2.4GHz. …and that’s it. We’ll keep you posted with any more details as they leak their way out over the coming weeks. In the mean time, however, check out the gallery, below. [via Engadget]

Who says Android phones need to be expensive? The Wall Street Journal reports that T-Mo is working with Huawei to add an inexpensive Android phone to their product line up, the Ideos.T-mobile would be the first carrier to have a phone made by Huawei, and the Ideos would be available for less then $200, vs. the $500 most Android phones cost without a contract. The Ideos does have a smaller screen at 2.8 inches, but it still features GPS and Wi-Fi. Currently the Ideos runs Android 2.2 with 3G mobile hot-spot functionality, making it a sure winner for T-Mobile if the talks are successful. Huawei is also in talks with Cricket to bring the Ideos to their network. [via Electronista]

Just days ago, Palm revealed a bunch of details surrounding webOS 2.0, which, as the name implies, is an upcoming major update to their webOS platform. Shortly thereafter, they released a big chunk of webOS 2.0 to a small section of their development community as part of a Beta program. Almost immediately, someone unearthed one little bit that Palm didn’t intend anyone to find: a lingering mention of a virtual keyboard — something which webOS doesn’t have, and that Palm has yet to confirm as a feature. So, what do you think Palm did? Did they pull the stone-face routine, and say they don’t comment on rumors and speculation? Did they send out an e-mail saying “Hey guys, we gotta be more careful!” and move on? Nope. They freaked the hell out. That Beta program we mentioned before? It’s now closed until further notice. Earlier, Palm’s webOS Developer Connection team tweeted out: Because of the leak, we are freezing new admissions to early access for the time being. If you’re in queue, you’re going to stay in queue followed by: for now, if you didn’t get access, you can thank the leaker for causing this delay in us getting you access. sorry about this, folks. Yep. Because one person had loose lips and decided to share something they were excited about, Palm is keeping a bunch of people who are eager to make crap for their platform from doing so. Palm, who has been having a hard time getting people to make stuff for their platform, is actively turning away (or at least cold-shouldering) people who are interested in making stuff, and pinning the whole thing on one guy. What. The. Hell. To make things worse, this leak is about as trivial as they come. Palm has a webOS-powered tablet coming. Unless Palm’s expecting everyone to lug around a keyboard or their tablet is going to have some sort of monstrous keyboard built in, webOS will have to have a virtual keyboard. Look, Palm. I love you. You’re the very bastion of breaking the mold, and I cheer for you to the point that MobileCrunch readers have often accused me of being crazy or on the payroll — but this.. is absolutely, jaw-droppingly stupid. Leaks happen. Every single day, to every single company who is actively working on anything even remotely interesting. Even if you’ve got the nastiest NDA in the world, it dilutes pretty quickly as thousands upon thousands of people begin to carelessly sign it. If your goods aren’t leaking, it’s for one of three reasons: you’ve got insane security practices, your team is tiny, or because no one cares. The fact that someone was interested enough to tear through your SDK for hidden morsels and that media outlets started picking it up is a compliment. This is akin to that goofy kid in school shouting “NO, I HATE YOU!” and running away the first time they get invited to sit at the cool kid’s table. Here’s what you do, Palm: Don’t want people knowing about something? Don’t put it in your SDK. If you forget to pull something, as seems to be the case here, just play it cool, remove it from the next build, and ride the hype-wave as people argue about whether such and such feature is actually coming. Don’t let employees comment on it, don’t go bonkers, and most importantly, don’t punish the people who actually seem to love your product. While it’s confirmed that the @webOSDev account is run by someone at Palm, it’s hard to believe that this is Palm’s official response in the matter. We’ve reached out to Palm for something a bit more.. sane. Update – What Happened: We just got off the horn with Palm communications, whose official statement was… well, that they don’t talk about rumors or speculation, including stuff like this. However, we also had the chance to speak with a source of ours who happened to have some inside knowledge of what all went down. Yes, the Twitter account in question is run by one of Palm’s Developer Relations guys. With that said, none of today’s events (from the finger-pointing tweets to the shutdown of the Beta program) were approved by the those who would generally make such decisions. One employee knee-jerked, choosing to punish the entire community for the actions of one. Update #2 – Betas Back Palm has just announced via the same Twitter account that the Beta has been reopened, saying that there is “No reason to make everyone pay the price here.” We obviously agree.

Verizon’s got this crazy challenge going on over at the teaser page for the R2-D2 Edition Droid 2, wherein users are given clues that lead to special codes. Once one person finds and inputs one of these special codes, everyone gains access to a new section of the site, and the original finder scores themselves a free handset. Fortunately for D2-devotees everywhere, the force was strong with a gent named David Holt. Following the clues lead David to a Star Wars book on Amazon, and copying that book’s ISBN into the code input screen unlocked a handful of pictures of the R2-D2 Edition Droid 2′s thematically-matched dock. (Want to know how it all breaks down? You can follow the trail of clues here.) It’s essentially just a white dock with “Star Wars” scribed on the back — but you know what? Sometimes, including this time, simplicity just works.

Oh my, how I love some good ol’ fashion mudslinging. “Flash Websites? There’s A Phone For That.” To any ne’er-do-blog-read layman, the full page ad that Motorola just put in the New York Times might just seem oddly worded. To anyone who has even considered considering themselves a gadget geek — or has, at least, turned on their TV anytime in the past year and a half and seen Apple’s “There’s An App For That” campaign — there’s no question who this one’s aimed at. This isn’t the first time Moto has done this. Heck, it’s not even the second. Moto pulled out two separate full page ads (here’s one, and the other) during the iPhone 4 Antennagate madness, lambasting Apple with tongue planted firmly in cheek. This one isn’t quite as clever as either of the first two; the whole matter of Flash on the iPhone is neither original nor fresh, by any means, and “There’s an App for that!” jokes are up there with “Yo Momma” jokes and Borat quotes on this list of “Jokes that one guy just won’t stop using”. But Flash is something that nearly all consumers would recognize (Thanks, Youtube and/or Farmville!), so juxtaposing your handset’s support for it against the competitions lack thereof probably isn’t a bad idea. Even if Flash on Android doesn’t really work that well. Image credit: Ben Forta on Twitter CrunchBase Information Apple Motorola Information provided by CrunchBase

It seems that when the Twitter for iPad app launched a few days ago, a few users were accidentally blessed with push notifications. Those privileges have since been revoked, but it seemed to confirm that the option would be coming soon. We’d dug up hints of this late last night over at TechCrunch, and were able to confirm with Twitter that push notifications are, indeed, coming to the iPhone/iPad soon, but it’s still being tested internally for the moment. Twitter’s confirmation: “When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users,” wrote a Twitter spokesperson. We’ve stopped sending push messages, but users may see an option to turn on push until we release an updated version of the app.” “We’ve been testing push notifications internally,” the rep continued. “Push isn’t ready yet, but we look forward to rolling this out soon.” This means that users of the app will soon get real-time notifications on certain types of messages — eg DMs or Mentions — making the app that much more useful as a communication tool. And this comes so soon after we wrote about Notifio.

Last time we wrote about Notifo, we called it a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything” — and really, that’s probably the best way to describe it. You take your iPhone, install the Notifo app, hook it up to your favorite services (like Twitter, or GitHub) or any of the “Projects” (read: plugins, like Growl alert forwarding, or Chrome-to-Notifo ), and bam! You’ve got push notifications coming down to your iPhone from just about anything you could imagine. All that notification sending takes two things: users to send the messages to, and a message pushing backend to handle all the heavy lifting — the same two things, as it just so happens, that one would need to create a basic instant messaging service. And so they have. In an update to their iPhone app that went live this afternoon, Notifo launched a service they’ve had in the making for about four months: free text and picture messaging. Alas, it’s only built for messages from Notifo-user-to-Notifo-user, rather than Notifo-to-phone-numbers — but with all that messaging going on between users and the backend, connecting users with each other was really just the obvious next step. Notifo seems to be less excited about the user-to-user messaging, however, than they are about something else this outbound messaging enables: bots. Now that Notifo users can send messages back to the backend, developers can build services that can “do anything” at a users command, using Notifo as the message handling middle-man. Additionally, Notifo has tweaked their Twitter alerts system, Push.ly, to use Twitter’s just announced Site Streams beta, making them one of the first to do so. Wondering what the heck that means? In a nutshell: real-time push alerts from Twitter. Yep. Now you can learn what celebrities are having for lunch the very second they tweet it out. CrunchBase Information Notifo Information provided by CrunchBase

Sharp shared some 3D camera goodness with Pocket-lint, just before they announced it at IFA today. In particular, Sharp revealed that they are working on a prototype for the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S that will use two cameras built into a mobile device to shoot 3D footage. The concept device uses a lenticular lens to allow viewers to see an image in 3D without the use of glasses, making it ideal for a mobile phone, or other device. Sharp was extremely close lipped about when and where the new camera would start showing up, but the rep did say they were planning on launching something before the end of the year. Sharp is also showing of two other 3D screens today, a 3.8 and a monstrous 10.1 inch.. Neither of which will require 3D glasses to work.

Verizon announced today that they are now offering Unlimited and 25MB 3G data plans for their pre-paid users. The pricing seems reasonable as well — at least on the unlimited plan, which comes in at at $30. At $10 a month, the 25MB plan is a bit steep. Be careful about overages on that 25MB plan; Verizon will charge you $0.20 per megabyte if you exceed your limit. You can buy the pre-paid plans at Verizon stores today, but they won’t be available online until September 28th. There is one catch though: Verizon is limiting the new plans to most of their 3G smartphones and multimedia phones, including the Blackberry, Palm, and most Android phones. [via Mobile Burn]

Texting has never been so much fun, thanks to the high-speed magic of the keyboard that could: Swype. But I know there are a lot of sad pandas out there who want to Swype, but just can’t because they own a Nokia. Well, you can turn that frown upside down, matey, as Swype is now available for S60 5th Edition through Nokia Beta Labs! Now, now, before you get too excited, I have to let you know that it is currently only available for the Nokia N97, N97mini, X6, 5800, and 5230, with other devices coming later. Do you have one of those phones? Everything you need to install it on said phone can be found here. If you don’t know what I’m talkin’ ’bout, you can check this helpful video (with a peculiar voice-over), below: [via Slashphone]

All the engineers in the audience will be pleased to hear that Globalfoundries today announced that the very first 28nm ARM Cortex A9 dual-processor qualification vehicle has now been taped out. Ah, yes. I know what they’re talking about. Don’t you? Alright, I admit it! You got me! From the press release, it seems that this will help chip manufacturers get their next-gen teeny tiny processors (the ones that will power next year’s HBSF smartphones) to market faster. And that’s good for us consumers. In a different press release, Globalfoundries also announced that the next step will be 20nm processors, and that they should be pumpin’ those suckers out come 2013 (or the apocalypse, whatever happens first). The key to all of this is that lower nm = better power efficiency and performance, which, in turn, equals more awesome in your phone. Yay for progress! [thanks to Engadget for the image]

T-mobile have now confirmed, via their Scoop page, that the upcoming T-mobile G2 will rock an 800MHz Scorpion processor (as part of the new MSM7x30 Snapdragon chipset), run the Android hotness that is Froyo (sans Sense, as previously thought), and will also be “ready” for flash 10.1. Now, those in the audience with an insatiable appetite for teh megahurtzes will probably be disappointed to hear that the clock is a full 200MHz slower than the usual 1GHz Snapdragon that most all high-end phones are gifted with. Well, don’t get too upset yet, as this is a newer CPU than the classic QSD8650 or QSD8250, so the clock speed isn’t a 1:1 comparison. I’d wait for some benchmarks to come out before you start yer bellyachin’. Combine this info with the price leak yesterday, and the release date rumours last week, and we have a near-complete picture of the device. Not long now… [via Android Central]

According to a post at the Windows Phone 7 blog, Microsoft’s latest operating system is now fully cooked and ready to consume. They’ve shipped off the masters to manufacturers. The die is cast. And now they can start work on changing the die up all over again! I mean, chances are there was a feature freeze maybe six months back, and their efforts have been entirely directed at testing, bug-squashing, and so on. Now all those pet projects will be picked back up again, and they can start working on all the apps and features for WP7.1. And so the great wheel turns.

Not a lot to say here. The T-Mobile G2 (by HTC and Google… it’s a collaborative thing, you know), which we just saw official pictures of earlier this week, has had its price leaked: $199.99 with a new contract and $499.99 raw. What don’t we know about this handset at this point? Pretty much just the release date, and we’re pretty sure that’s at the end of September.