I’ve been fiddling around with the HTC One S for a few days now, and I have to say it’s stolen a little piece of my heart. The hardware is just about perfect, with a 4.3-inch qHD display and a slender aluminum unibody shell, and software like HTC’s Sense 4 overlay and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich only sweeten the deal.

But, as per usual, there’s plenty to consider out there. The wide world of mobile only grows wider by the second, with hot new phones launching left and right. Just today, Sprint’s Galaxy Nexus and the LG Viper landed on store shelves, and lest we forget that the iPhone 4S is ready and waiting while the One X is mere days away.

So many options.

To help, we’ve put the One S up against it’s greatest competitors, the HTC One X and the iPhone 4S, in a spec showdown. Who will come out on top? Well, my dear readers, that ball is in your court.

Admittedly, the One S has lesser specs than both the One X and the iPhone 4S, but it makes up for these inadequacies in the little things. And it’s the little things that count, right?

The iPhone 4S has the superior display, to be sure, and the One X is a close second to Apple’s precious in terms of ppi, but there’s something to be said for screen size. The 4.3-inch display on the One S is juuust right, as Goldilocks would say, and the phone feels super comfortable in the hand.

This is because HTC found a way to walk that fine line between being lightweight and feeling cheap. It’s quietly brilliant.

Of course, the brilliance of iOS can’t be had on the One S, nor can Apple’s premium design or 64GB of onboard storage. But maybe Apple isn’t your favorite flavor.

Might I suggest the One X? Especially if you’re an AT&T loyalist — the One S is only available at T-Mobile for the time being. This phone is for the giant-handed Android fan who appreciates a solid design and a well-spec’d device.

Luckily, pricing is about the same across the board here, so it really comes down to what suits you best.

What’ll it be, guys?

iPhone unlocks are usually a tetchy experience – you have to have the right firmware on the right model iPhone at the right time. Now, however, thanks to a method that spoofs the activation server, you can unlock almost any iPhone semi-permanently.

The system, called Subscriber Artificial Module or SAM, requires a jailbroken iPhone and Cydia. To run it, you de-activate your phone, insert a new SIM, and then activate SAM. SAM spoofs the activation process, convincing the phone that it has been unlocked properly and without issues.

Built by hackers Loktar_Sun and Laforet, the process isn’t for the faint of heart and it takes twenty-eight steps. You can follow along at iClarified where they’ve outlined the entire process in meticulous detail.

Because you’re not really unlocking the phone but in fact activating it using an unsupported SIM, expect some wonky server issues. You will also have to go back and reactivate the device later if you decide to switch SIMs. It’s a small price to pay for freedom.

I’ve got several terabytes of local storage available on my Mac and assorted attached hard drives, but somehow always seem to be hunting for more. That’s exactly what Gemini is good for.

It’s a Mac utility that scans any location on your computer, like a folder or entire drive, and automatically highlights the files that are duplicates. This allows you to cull through them, eliminating unnecessary clones of your files and freeing up valuable hard drive space.

The scanning portion of the process is easily the longest segment of the entire process, as it does take a while, especially if you’re scanning a huge primary drive like I did. Once the scanning process is complete, though, you’re presented with a beautifully arranged list of files that you’ve got tucked away in more than one place.

Once you’re browsing the list of files, Gemini breaks them out for you into folders, photos, videos and other common types of files. This makes it easier for you to winnow down the exact types of duplicates that you suspect are hogging space.

The automatic selection option tasks Gemini with rooting through your selected files and automatically selecting a duplicate to delete. It does this well if the files are located in the same directory, having been automatically renamed by OS X when you copied them in. That means that it works for files with a [1] or some such tag appended, not just ones with the same name. The automatic selection won’t work for files that have wildly different paths though, as you will need to tell Gemini which one is in the right place and which one is not.

If there’s one thing that I wish you could do it’s selecting an entire swath of files at once and delete them, regardless of location. This would make the process less ‘safe’ but quicker if you don’t really care where they are, you just want them gone. Perhaps a toggle that would let you turn this mode on.

Once you’ve selected the files that you want out, you click the remove button and are treated to a scrollable list of the files that you can examine for errors. Once you’ve decided they’re gone for good there is a nicely animated shredding procedure that feels satisfying.

Gemini is one of those single-serving apps that you probably won’t use every day, week or even month. But when you do need to tackle duplicate files, it works cleanly, beautifully and without prejudice. When you reach for an app like this, you don’t want to have to fiddle and mess. You want to open it up, have it do its job and be on your way. It could have looked like a dog and I would still have enjoyed the way that it worked, but having it look and feel as great as it does is a nice bonus.

For $7.99, Gemini may be on the upper scale of price for a utility app like this, but it flat out works and it gained me back hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive space without the hours of manual clicking around I would have had to do otherwise, and that’s priceless.

Gemini for Mac

Facebook has revealed that its HTML5 site has twice as many users as its iOS and Android apps combined. But that’s actually a problem, because Apple and Google’s mobile browsers don’t support photo uploads or high-performance animation for HTML5 — features that are crucial to getting Facebook mobile site users sharing more and convincing app developers to port to HTML5 where Facebook can tax payments.

To encourage mobile browser advancement, Facebook formed the W3C community group, but Apple and Google, the two partners it needs most, have refused to join. Since these oft-rivals to the social network own the dominant mobile browsers Safari and Chrome, Facebook’s efforts may have little impact, HTML5 apps and games will stay inferior, and both Facebook and the end user will miss out.

The audience for great HTML5 apps could be huge. When Facebook stopped reporting the user counts of its iOS and Android apps to AppData, Android had 95 million MAU, iPhone had 105 million MAU, and iPad had 20 million MAU. Given their trajectory they could now have well over 235 million combined monthly active users, and so could its HTML5 site. As of a few months ago, Facebook was driving 120 million visits a month to HTML5 apps. This all means Facebook has a big financial incentive to push the advancement of mobile browser standards.

Facebook doesn’t view its HTML5 app support as a traditional mobile app platform like iOS or Android. Rather it thinks of itself as a social layer that’s integrated into iOS, Android, and HTML5, but that happens to support payments for mobile web apps. The core of Facebook’s business is advertising, but it still makes healthy revenues from the 30% Credits tax on its web game canvas. As more and more gaming shifts to mobile, though, it would help if HTML5 was good enough to support advanced apps that Facebook could then offer viral distribution for and monetize in return.

To fill us in on how it’s trying to jumpstart mobile browser progress, Facebook recently brought several journalists to its headquarters to meet James Pearce, head of mobile developer relations. This year Facebook released the open source Ringmark mobile browser testing suite that shows how many of the core capabilities necessary to build HTML5 apps does a browser support. To date, no browser or device has completed Ring 1, which includes camera access, DRM, and accelerated canvas for graphics-intensive games.

Safari and Chrome could probably become Ring 1-complete if Apple and Google really wanted them to, but they’re focused on their surprisingly successful native app platforms. Better HTML5 support would also mean developers could port their current iOS and Android apps to HTML5, giving users options beyond the app store where Apple and Google can’t monetize payments.

In hopes of persuading them to juice up their mobile browsers, Facebook created the WC3 community group to galvanize support from app developer, carriers, and OEMs, and the rest of the mobile industry. Mozilla and Opera are on board, but they don’t have enough distribution to make that significant. If Facebook can amass a enough rabble-rousers maybe it can get popular mobile browsers to do comply.

Pearce didn’t address the two other web giants with “Yo”, but he did tell us Apple and “Google [are] the audience for what this community group is producing. Its output is a series of prioritizations about what the browser vendors need to do. It’d be wonderful if in the future we saw Ring 1 browsers. Everyone in the industry has the motivation to see this be successful. We’re not swimming against the tide here. There’s not necessarily a need for us to beat anyone with a stick. They know this needs to happen.”

Apple and Google should put politics aside and the user first, devote more resources to mobile browser development, and bring mobile Safari and Chrome up to snuff. There’s certainly some shortcomings to HTML5, but Apple and Google employ some of the smartest people in the world. Even if it helps Facebook, it’s the right thing to do. Maybe one day an Instagram or even an Infinity Blade could run straight from your mobile browser.

Postscript: Unfortunately, despite their app sales revenue being dwarfed by Apple mobile hardware and Google mobile advertising, these two still have a vested interest in seeing HTML5 lag behind native apps. Don’t expect them to pour money into HTML5 until they absolutely have to.

There’s no shortage of apps on modern day smartphone platforms that allow you to find out the location of your friends and family, both Apple and Google have released Find My Friends and Latitude respectively.

However, the apps require the person you wish to locate to have installed them, which is limiting if they haven’t installed it yet or their smartphone or tablet runs on a platform that doesn’t support the necessary tool.

Aaron Iba, an iOS developer, has sought to make it easy to locate friends and family, regardless of the smartphone they use. Space-time is an iPhone app with a simple interface that uses SMS and HTML5 location to pinpoint a person’s whereabouts, as long as they have a smartphone with a GPS locator and a modern browser.

When I say it’s simple, it’s just a case of clicking the “Request Someone’s Location” button, choosing a contact and then sending a text message (or iMessage if they also own an iDevice). The recipient receives a customized link and all they have to do is provide permission for the HTML5 web app to pinpoint their location.

This completes the process and the location is then sent back to you.

What the recipient sees:

What you will see when their location is sent:

It’s a process that takes just seconds, and the only potential cost is that of a text message (for you, the sender). The recipient obviously needs a device with a data connection and a GPS chip, so it won’t locate your mum’s 10-year-old Nokia.

Space-time prompts for a user’s permission each time their location is requested, and if you don’t want to click the link, you don’t have to. It’s not like Latitude and Find My Friends, which can poll a location at any given time.

The app could be a perfect solution for surprise birthday parties, where a message is sent to a friend to disclose their location and notify people how long it will be until they return. But really, it’s more than that, it’s a guaranteed way to locate someone regardless of their smartphone OS using your iPhone, and all it takes is a text message.

Space-time is a free app that is iPhone-only at the time of writing.

➤ Space-time

After a period of unnerving quietness, the Apple rumor mill is back up and running at full capacity producing two somewhat credible rumors over the last 24 hours. The next iPhone will not be announced until October if the latest rumors are believed. A separate rumor is just so wild that it might be true: The iPhone 5, or whatever it’s to be called, will be made of LiquidMetal, which will allow for a unique unibody construction.

But again, these are just unfounded rumors. Please proceed with caution.

Gene Munster, analyst for Piper Jaffray, stated that chipmaker Qualcomm is gearing up to supply the LTE chipset. However, per Qualcomm’s CEO yesterday, unpredicted demand has caused supply issues. Munster believes this sets Apple up to launch the iPhone in October, conveniently a year after the iPhone 4S’ announcement.

Korea IT News recently reported that the iPhone 5 will be housed in a LiquidMetal casing. This material, an alloy of titanium, nickel, copper, zirconum and other metals, is said to have a feeling of glass despite having the physical strength of metal. The material is perfect for use in smartphones. It’s physically tough and naturally resistant to wear, scratches and dents.

However, unlike traditional metal fabrication, LiquidMetal objects can be formed with a sort of injection molding similar to plastic. This allows for a wider range of applications and physical forms — perhaps a stronger unibody casing.

Phone manufacturers have recently turned to different material to set their phones appart. Motorola used a bit of carbon fiber on the back of the RAZR phones and Samsung is said be employing ceramic for the upcoming Galaxy S III. But the benefits of LuquidMetal would set the iPhone 5 apart and Apple has the exclusive rights to the material for use in consumer electronics.

It’s safe to say that the next iPhone will be something different even if it doesn’t employ LiquidMetal. The current iPhone design has been used for nearly two years now and has had its share of problems. Even glass touted as tough as gorillas is a poor material for a phone. So sometime in the coming future, perhaps this summer or maybe in October, Apple will announce the sixth generation iPhone.

AT&T can't stop fiddling with their prepaid plans, Apple gives MobileMe users a little help getting ready for iCloud, and it gets harder to watch HBO even with a subscription. More »

I’ve tried a dozen different apps that allow you to browse Instagram on the iPad, and some of them have been very decent attempts. Iris, however, is on another level entirely.

Built from the ground up to faithfully translate the Instagram experience, the app is absolutely made with care. A clean design that keeps consistency with Instagram’s layout and interactions, full commenting and liking features and wonderful sound design make it a lovely way to browse through your photos and the ones in your stream.

The main view allows you to comment and like photos, which so many other clients do not. It has a single layout that the developers kept consistent with Instagram’s way of doing things on the iPhone. I’d personally like to be able to switch to a smaller grid of images, to see more at a time, but I respect that they wanted to mimic the stock experience as closely as possible.

The comment pane slides out from the side, letting you keep the image in view while you add your take. A single tap brings up the image in a larger lightbox view, with access to a geolocation map, which is nice. 

Your profile gives you access to your list of followers and the folks you’re following. It makes it much easier to bounce around among big lists of followers to check out their streams and profiles than on the more cramped confines of the iPhone.

In the popular selection, the grid is smaller, allowing you to see more images at once. The refresh mechanism, which is a pull lever in the bottom right, is also clever and lovely to use. Every action you perform also has a cool little sound associated with it, making it satisfying to even tap on buttons.

In your profile view, you’ll notice a small toggle that allows you to swap between a larger and smaller size of image grid, which I would like to see ported throughout. I appreciate the fidelity that the developers were trying to maintain between Instagram for iPhone and Iris, but it’s a shame not to use the larger screen real-estate more fully.

The ‘earth’ button toggles a fun view, which allows you to see all of your images mapped out by location. It also works on other people’s profiles, letting you see where they snapped the shots you’re looking at. In a nice attention to detail, the developers also added a ‘Share’ button which allows you to send a well-formatted email inviting others to follow you or any other user you think is cool.

While there are a few things that I would like to see tweaked about the way that Iris displays images, it still ends up being the best Instagram app I’ve seen for iPad. If you’re a heavy user of the service and have been looking for a great lean-back experience for managing, commenting and viewing on the iPad, then Iris is it.

➤ Iris App for iPad

As bad as Nokia’s financials look right now – a $4 billion drop in sales won’t make anyone’s day – don’t consider the Windows Phone move a failure just yet. They’ve done what many phone companies have thus far failed to do – namely change swiftly with the times – and, more important, they’ve done it quite admirably.

If you’ll recall, the first real Android phone was HTC’s G1. Considered a clunker by all but the most die-hard of users, the device sold fairly well (1 million in 2008). But it did something more important than make T-Mobile the first Android carrier – it grabbed a certain contingent of user who understood Android, understood the framework, and would follow Android to the grave. The popularity of the G1 was a direct reaction to the burgeoning iOS platform. The same thing happened in the WebOS space, but WebOS was exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time and is a disaster distinct from the Android launch.

Over time, the maker of the G1, HTC, got better and better at making Android phones. The experience gained from the G1 allowed manufacturers to rejigger their sales strategy, leading to the famous Droid marketing campaign and the hysteria for Google’s Nexus line.

Nokia is in a similar space. An outside software product is trying to take market share and will probably flounder for the first few months. Nokia has pivoted completely. Their popular Symbian smartphones are essentially dead and their Windows Phone line is curtailed until popular adoption grows. Most important, they’re taking a bath on the Lumia line by pricing it at or below the comfort level of most casual smartphone buyers

They’re essentially selling loss leaders in order to gain market share. Microsoft knows it and Nokia knows it and I assure you HTC, Samsung, and LG know it. They only folks who shouldn’t be worried – yet – are Apple yet I suspect Microsoft is definitely on their radar.

I can say one thing without equivocation: Windows Phone is than Android. WinPho is monolithic, there are no issues of branching or hardware compatibility, and UI familiarity will soon be bolstered by millions of Windows 8 installs around the world. Android is great if you’re a small manufacturer and you just want to dump a stack onto what would have once been called a feature phone. Windows Phone is great if you want the largesse, the popularity, and the trustworthiness of Microsoft behind your product.

So ignore Nokia at your peril. Their strategy is just right at just the right time. Remember: nobody ever got fired for installing Microsoft. Not even Stephen Elop.

Looks like Apple might be loosening its grip even more on voice recognition apps? Or, it simply just feels that the competition is not as good as its own native Siri. We’ve just gotten word from Netherlands-based developer Sparkling Apps that its voice-response app, Voice Answer — rejected by Apple for the nearly three months — has been approved by Apple and is now live in the App Store, and usable on any iPhone, iPod or iPad running iOS 4.2 or later.

It took “almost three months of negotiating, tweaking and pushing,” developer Martijn van der Spek tells TechCrunch. Like Siri, the app is based on data from Wolfram Alpha, among other sources, and lets users ask questions by either speaking to the app or typing in a question. It’s priced at £2.49 ($3.99).

He says the company is now going “full speed ahead” implementing more features into the app. These include location-based place finding and email/SMS and more voice function commands. Additionally it’s adding in a bit of sci-fi kitsch: it’s planning to create an animated robot for the interface. You can see the video of how that will lookbelow.

The news comes on the back of other voice recognition apps making a splash and then facing rejection issues with Apple, perhaps most notably Evi.

Sparkling Apps in March had a free voice recognition app, Talk to Eve, also rejected for being “too similar to Siri” that was subsequently approved in March.

With the voice-recognition space currently very active right now, the big question is whether any of these third-party developers will be able to gain traction against Apple, and what they will all do next to make themselves relevant and indispensable to users. Offering APIs to other app developers could be one lucrative route.