Disclosure: I use AppBrain.  I find it very useful to browse apps online & then easily sync/install on my Captivate.  Looks like they’ve been pretty hard at work filtering out the crap, though, & have some interesting things to say on the state of the Android Market.  Apparently, out of the total 70,000 apps that Google states are available, the number of craptacular apps has risen from 30% in March to 50% today.  Yep, 20% increase in 4 months.  Thankfully, they’re working to improve their search algorithm to filter these spam-tastic apps from their search results.  My question is: why isn’t Google taking up the lead on this?  Kudos to AppBrain for their efforts.

Microsoft’s Mobile World Congress is just about four weeks away now, & WMPowerUser is heavily speculating (along with many others) that Windows Mobile 7 will be announced at the annual conference.  That’s announced, mind you; I don’t see any devices showing up with it on board until Q4.  Though WMPU has quite a compelling list of reasons, DigiTimes (which is known for being accurate on these sorts of things) is saying that it won’t be the new version 7 that will be trotted out, but yet another interim release, version 6.6.

Seeing as how we’ve just seen 6.5.3, plus its threaded email glory, hit the interwebz, & that DigiTimes says that 6.6 will be the same ol’ plus capacitive touch screen support, I can definitely see this line of thought playing out.  The disheartening bit in the DigiTimes piece is that WM7 may be sloughed off till 2011… but would anyone really be surprised about that at this point?

Guess we’ll see in four weeks….

Today’s the day that Google is expected to officially announce its Nexus One Android phone, custom built by HTC.  The details & rumors have been swirling for over two months now, & Google is expected to make some waves today, just two days before CES kicks off.  According to the link above, the press conference is scheduled to begin at 10am PST, so to tide you over until then, why don’t you read Engadget’s official review?  Lots of good stuff in there, including a side-by-side-by-side web browser loading times with the Droid and iPhone.

After a few betas & as many release candidates, Mozilla has finally released Thunderbird 3.  It packs all kinds of new features like tabbed emails & a schpankity new search function.

I knew it was a bit of a crap-shoot with my twenty-some add-ons, but I was genuinely surprised to see that Lightning no longer worked when I did my update.  D’oh.  I definitely need my GCal sync back in TBird, so hopefully they’ll come up with an update soon.  I also freaked out a bit when I was in the default “smart folder” view, but it was simple enough to switch out of that view at the top of the left pane.  One final gripe is that the new IMAP sync process seems to be taking a while on the first go; not unexpected, but still a bit of a pain.

Go get you some scary early-adopter goodness here.

**Follow-up:  holy hell is the “synchronization” feature unbelievable.  I may not be a typical case, but I’ve got five IMAP accounts setup in Thunderbird, & after installing TBird 3.0, it automatically proceeded to “synchronize” all of my accounts (two of them GMail accounts with thousands of listserve emails).  Know what that does, boys ‘n girls?  It turns your accounts into a sort of POP3/IMAP mashup so that you can access your emails “offline.”  I couldn’t even get the program to slow down long enough to stop it from trying to “download” multiple tens of thousands of messages (locally, to my PC), so I had to kill it from the task manager… twice.  At any rate, I finally managed to get the settings changed so it would quit downloading all my emails, but it’s still going ahead & indexing them (something that’s needed for the new search feature).

I have my accounts setup as IMAP for a reason!  I’m sure I’m mostly to blame for this, since I really only glossed over the “synchronization” settings, but here’s hoping this warning will save someone else out there from making the same mistake.  I’m seriously questioning why this setting would be the default…

**Update – as you can read in this post, the Lightning/Sunbird team is hard at work on the compatible release.  I just downloaded & installed the latest nightly build & it’s working so far.  They also have a nightly build for the Google calendar provider available.  The only hiccup I’ve noticed is that creating a new event (in my “Home” calendar) won’t show the event on the main calendar page, but it does show in the “Today pane”).  Other than that, I’m happily back in action.

[editors note:  Personally, any phone that has cutting edge Text to Toast and a coffee warmer is on my christmas list.  Screw the iPhone, I'm an xPhone fanboy now!]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mein gott!  It even does VHS!

Via Giz

Anyone who anticipated the release of ET:QW will know that this bit of news from developers Splash Damage is par for the course.  Fall it is, then!

Like many titles as of late, Splash Damage apparently needs additional time to polish this title prior to release.

Oh, & I guess in an attempt to make up for the delay news, they’ve finally released some official footage of the game.  Looking good, boys… needs more tapir.

The ExpReview crew have run the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat benchmark on a rig in both DirectX modes to point out that differences do indeed exist.  The shadows look a bit more realistic, and the tessellation in DX11 brings a bit more details to some of the textures.  There’s a slight performance hit for the increase in eye candy, but that’s to be expected.  Check out their results, including nice, big 2560×1600 screenshots.

AMD’s newest top-of-the-line huge honkin’ dual-GPU beast of a graphics card has been officially released today, & the reviews are hitting the interwebs.  The verdict?  AMD’s made an enthusiast card that enthusiasts will appreciate not only for eye-bleeding speed, but overall build quality as well.  That is… if they can find one to spend their hard-earned money on…  On to the reviews:

• Anandtech
• Guru3D
• TweakTown
• HotHardware
• PCPerspective
• the [H]
• techPowerUp
• Hexus
• BSN

Looks like Infinity Ward’s move away from dedicated servers hasn’t helped much in the realm of cheating; the, ahem, main goal of the move.

The Call of Duty hacking website has published a video that shows their latest hack in action. The hack appears when activated, shows the position of all players, reduces recoil on the guns and adds aiming/firing accuracy.

Good thing IWNet’s already banning all those hackers!  Oh, wait, they’re not?  Oh.  Moving on then.

A tidy sum of just a hair under $3 billion.  I’m not so sure that adding 3Com’s gear to their ProCurve gear will make any sort of dent in Cisco’s market share, but then again, I’m not a major business analyst, either.