This week on the podcast, we're prepping for the next Gmail outage, learning a new language in a matter of months, and wondering if an all-in-one home theater is a good idea. We'll also figure out the best time to upgrade to an iPhone, the best format for your music, and how to fix one of Flash's biggest annoyances. More »

BlablaCar, a European carpooling marketplace that connects any driver who has empty seats with paying passengers, has now launched its iPhone app in the UK. The app connects drivers who have spare seats with paying passengers. At the same time its competitor Carpooling.com has released a new app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

BlablaCar’s app features the ability to post a trip then add the number of available seats and price per passenger. You can find a ride, message other travellers, rate your fellow travellers. Members also specify how “chatty” they are by choosing either “Bla”, “Blabla” or “Blablabla”; hence the name BlablaCar…

Munich-based Carpooling.com says it moves over 1 million people each month in 5,000 cities and 45 countries across Europe. Key new features of its app include messaging, online booking, search for rides, and payment with Paypal.

Both BlablaCar and Carpooling are similar to GoCarShare in the UK, and to U.S.-based startup Ridejoy and ZimRide, which also aims to be a carpooling marketplace.

Blablacar raised $10 million back in January taking total funding to $12.5 million and rolled up competitors. It now operates in Italy, Spain and the UK and has over 400,000 drivers among its members.

OS X: There are a lot of tools that'll convert videos for your iPhone, iPod, or iPad (like our favorite, Handbrake), but they aren't always easy for the average joe to use. iConvert makes it as simple as drag, drop, and click. More »

iOS (Jailbroken): Unlocking your iPhone and taking it over to another carrier has been a relatively painless process in the past, but it wasn't always foolproof and didn't work on some modern devices. Different basebands on different phones meant it only worked some of the time. However, a new jailbreak tool called SAM makes unlocking easy to do on any iPhone model capable of running iOS 5 regardless of the baseband. More »

The best way to get someone to spread your dumb video is to include something controversial. That’s day one material in Viral YouTube Marketing 101. And so, Samsung, clearly a graduate of said class tapped that knowledge and took a shot at iPhone users, somewhat calling them sheep for using the same phone as everyone else. Funny? Only in the sense that this lame jab is the high point of an otherwise humdrum video spot. Seriously, this might be the worst teaser in the history of teasers.

Samsung is gearing up to launch the next generation Galaxy S smartphone on May 3rd at a London event. Rumors have speculated that this phone will pack a quad-core CPU, come encased in a ceramic bezel and, like other recent Samsung smartphones, rock a massive screen. And, if this teaser is to be believed, Samsung hopes to sell a very limited number of these phones to prevent owners from feeling like sheep, mindlessly following trends and looking like everyone else.

News.me, the newsreader app hatched in The New York Times’ R&D lab and incubated at betaworks, today added a nifty feature to its new iPhone app, which gives readers instant access to their news offline — whenever they leave the house. The new feature, called Paper Boy, allows users to set their home location using their iPhone’s GPS, and thereafter, every time they leave their digs with phone in tow, News.me automatically downloads their social news in the background so that it’s ready to read offline as they go about their day.

For anyone who uses public transit to get to work and is as as a result without WiFi, PaperBoy’s value proposition should be immediately apparent. While there are hundreds of ways to check news sources, many of them only offer their content when connected to the Web. News.me General Manager Jake Levine tells us that, since News.me is located in New York City, the team often uses the city’s subway system to get around, but found themselves without anything to read while in transit.

Paper Boy was designed to eliminate this pain point, and provide subway, bus, and train commuters instant access to their news while on-the-go. Outside of Newsstand apps, Levine says that News.me is the first app to offer this functionality — to support background downloading of news content whenever readers leave their home addresses.

In the beginning, News.me’s social newsreading experience was iPad-only, offering readers an aggregated list of news stories drawn from Facebook and Twitter, curated based on signals from Twitter and bit.ly, viewable in the context of the original tweet or Facebook comment. The startup also offers a Summify-like email digest of news culled from users’ Twitter streams, which picked up quite a few users in the wake of Summify’s acquisition.

News.me’s email digest turned out to be much more in demand than its iPad app, so, in March, News.me launched a new iPhone app that completely rebuilt the app’s mobile experience from the ground up. As Anthony pointed out at launch, the real goal of re-imagining the app was to bring News.me into the realm of a news-based social network.

Leading with a feature called “Reactions,” readers now have the ability to post responses to the stories they find in their streams, with the added benefit of being able to follow other users and comment on their friends’ shared stories. The app offers five pre-written responses — “Ha!”, “Wow”, “Awesome”, “Sad”, and “Really?” — that enable them to respond to news automatically, without having to spend time creating a paragraph-long response.

The startup’s iPhone app is designed to let users share and respond to shared news quickly, while giving them a smaller microcosmic social network in which they can share their thoughts without having to post to their Facebook walls or Twitter streams. It’s an approach to news sharing that puts News.me in competition with Flud, which made a similar play into social newsreading back in December.

Without a doubt, there’s way too much noise on the Web when it comes to news shared across our social networks, and News.me has developed a fairly useful tool for channeling that noise into a signal of top news from our most-used social networks, that is pre-filtered and easy to consume. And since so many of us love to consume news while on the go — when we’re not in the driver’s seat — Paper Boy is a smart, easy way to quench our thirst for news when we lose access to WiFi. (To find it, just head to “Settings”.)

You can find News.me available for download in the App Store here.

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.

Android, by most accounts, is proving to be the most popular smartphone platform when it comes to devices getting sold today — partly due to the sheer variety of devices and price points that are out there. But a new research tool that tracks usage in real-time shows that when it comes to usage, consumers, in the U.S. at least, are far more active on Apple’s devices than on any other.

The numbers come from the ad network Chitika, which notes that in the last 24 hours, iOS devices, covering the iPhone, iPad and iPod models, accounted for just under 68 percent of all usage on its network. Android, meanwhile, accounted for just under 28 percent. Other platforms (Windows Phone, BlackBerry, etc.) were less than five percent of all activity. But there have been periods in the last few days when Android accounted for as little as 19 percent of traffic (on April 19, as it happens).

You can watch the new tool in action right here.

Chitika also breaks out what kind of iOS traffic we are talking about, and it looks like iPad tablet users are sending more traffic to its network — and browsing web sites and apps where Chitika’s ads appear — than iPhone users, with iPod traffic being the smallest of all.

If you look at the graphic on the site itself, you can run the cursor over the line chart to get specific percentages.

The stickiness of iOS and the iPad are also borne out by a separate piece of research from Chitika, which found that users of iPad tablets had the highest click-through rates. Looking at “hundreds of millions” of mobile ad impressions on its network, covering April 9-15, Chitika found iOS devices had a 0.72 percent CTR, and Android had a 0.60 percent CTR.

Within iOS, iPad users had the highest CTRs at 0.80 percent, compared to 0.67 percent for iPhone and iPod had 0.62 percent.

For the real-time research, Chitika explains that the numbers come from monitoring unique impressions on mobile devices covered by the Chitika Ad Network. It says it works in a six-hour delay into the numbers for “maximum continuity of data.”

Does this sound like mobile stat watching gone too far? For the majority it may well be — but this is actually a pretty interesting bit of data for the world of mobile advertising and mobile content in general. It potentially gives ad networks, and advertisers, a lot more insight into planning campaigns on platform versus another and one device compared to another. Publishers can use this kind of data to help decide how it channels resources for serving content to different apps and platforms and devices as well.

I think that we are bound to see some kind of response from the Google camp on these usage numbers, which do not put Android into the best light. It will also be worth watching to see if other ad networks follow suit and offer similarly granular insight into daily/hourly usage.

Update: In the original post I didn’t really go into the “why” behind the numbers because I was focusing on the actual real-time results — but in response to some of the comments below, here is some further detail on that end. As these numbers are based on Chitika’s own network traffic of hundreds of millions of impressions, they are not necessarily a picture of “all” of mobile internet usage. Others below also refer to data consumption varying between iOS and Android. That may be the case but this is not about how much data is used; but traffic from ad impressions. Another person makes the point that Android devices are often bought as cheap “feature” phones and not used as much for their web capabilities. That could be another reason why Android seems to generate less traffic than you would think compared to overall market share.

Lastly, some numbers from July 2011, also from Chitika, seem to indicate that iOS’s traffic share have slightly grown. Those numbers gave iOS a 60 percent share, compared to Android’s 36.3 percent. “Others” have also grown a little since then (it was 3.3 percent in July; now it’s about 4.5 percent).

Gmail is amazing. It's chock full of more shortcuts, settings, and features than you could shake a stick at. Even if you consider yourself a Gmail ninja, though, there are quite a few tricks you might not know about (and some that Google didn't even intend). Here are our top 10 clever tricks built right into Gmail. More »