Barclaycard’s Rollercoaster Extreme is now even more exciting. As well as new multiplayer and ghost racing game functionality, we’re now available for download on the iPad! Even better, you can now also be in to win yourself an iPad, a trip to Las Vegas and even £50,000*!

Simply download Barclaycard’s Rollercoaster Extreme game for free, submit your top score to the Barclaycard Rollercoaster Facebook Leaderboard and you could be a big winner! Every month Barclaycard will be giving away an iPad to the player with the highest score for that month. They’ll also be sending the four all-time top scorers on a trip to Las Vegas for the Rollercoaster Extreme game playoffs. Once in Vegas they’ll play each other for the chance to win £50,000 at NYNY Hotel – which has its very own rollercoaster.

To re-cap the new and previous game features:

• NEW. Multiplayer functionality, challenge the person next to you on all eight tracks
• NEW. Ghost racing mode, try to beat the times of our top racers all over the world
• Race around a 3D New York City
• Unlock new areas in the game
• Interact with the game environment on every ride
• Tilt the screen to dodge obstacles or grab speed boosting energisers
• Collect special Rollercoaster Extreme rider badges at every level

This new game is inspired by the Barclaycard Rollercoaster TV ad. If you missed it, you can check it out atwww.youtube.com/barclaycardcreate. You’ll also find a demo of game there, so you can see just how fun it is!

*Competition closes 4 January 2011. See terms and conditions.

“Dear iPhone 4 Users,

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple’s history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design.

At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this?

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.

We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. For the vast majority of users who have not been troubled by this issue, this software update will only make your bars more accurate. For those who have had concerns, we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused.

As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.

We hope you love the iPhone 4 as much as we do.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Apple “

If you ever wonder what would be your dream holiday matching your personality just go to Halifax Holiday Matchmaker and find out your best holiday destination.

Here’s what Facebook for iPhone 3.0 looks like—pretty nice. Besides the new giant button home screen, you’ll be able to actually RSVP to events and create new photo albums. No push yet, but here’s the full list:

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

And so it continues. Geohot has returned with some help from hacking buddies chronic, posixninja, and pod2g with news that the same “24kpwn” exploit used to cracked open the iPod touch 2G will work on the iPhone 3GS. That means a jailbreak and unlock can be launched just as soon as the existing tools are updated for the iPhone 3GS (which won’t be long). As George Hotz laments,
“On a personal note, I’m sad. Apple, it took me a week to break through your new defenses. And to let us reuse an exploit like that; 24kpwn was so 5 months ago. Although I imagine it must have been painful watching the devices roll by on the assembly line, knowing they all had a hole in them and you couldn’t fix it.”

AdMob serves ads for more than 7,000 mobile Web sites and 2,500 applications around the world. AdMob stores and analyzes the data from every ad request, impression, and click and uses this to optimize ad matching in the network. This monthly report offers a snapshot of the data to provide insight into trends in the mobile ecosystem.

Five days after its launch, the iPhone OS 3.0 represented 44% of iPhone ad requests. In contrast, only 1% of iPod touch requests came from devices running the iPhone OS 3.0.

Worldwide, Apple iPhone’s share of smartphone traffic hit 49% in May 2009, up from 43% in April 2009:

In the U.S., Apple iPhone’s share of smartphone traffic hit 69% in May 2009, up from 59% in April 2009:

These numbers, of course, predate the release of Apple’s iPhone 3G S which was released on June 19, 2009.