The worst-kept secret of the season has got to be the Motorola Droid 4 on Verizon. And here it is in our hot little hands. The Big Deal here is that the keyboard once again has been redesigned. The keys are now laser cut (as opposed to whatever medieval method was used previously), and they’re backlit. And they’re pretty nice. Maybe a tad slick, but they’re also pretty new. The backlight’s definitely a nice touch.

Instead of capitulating to the National Transportation Safety Board recommended, iOnRoad by Picitup wants to turn the tables and show how mobile technology can keep you safe and sound on the highways. iOnRoad uses the live camera stream and image detection to monitor for tailgating, cars slowing ahead of you, or lane drift, and sends visual and audio alerts to get you back to the proper distance, speed, and lane where you belong.

Samsung has officially announced three new LTE smartphones, all of them headed to AT&T. The Galaxy Note, Exhilirate and Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD will all appeal to different consumers with varying needs.

Love or hate Apple products, the Airplay feature is an excellent way of sharing your mobile content on your TV. In a not overly surprising move, Samsung are keen to get in on this and are set to show of their SwipeIt application at CES. 

What is Dalvik?  We hear that word getting thrown around a lot on the Internet when talking about Android and its inner workings.  While there’s no easy explanation we can give in just a few paragraphs, we can cover the basics and point you in the right direction if you need to feed your nerdly side. In its simplest terms, Dalvik is a virtual machine that runs applications and code written in Java. A standard Java compiler turns source code (written as text files) into Bytecode, then compiled into a .dex file that the Dalvik VM can read and use. In essence, class files are converted into .dex files (much like a jar file if one were using the standard Java VM) and then read and executed by the Dalvik Virtual Machine. Duplicate data used in class files is included only once in the .dex output, which saves space and uses less overhead. The executable files can be modified again when you install an application to make things even more optimized for mobile. Things like byte order swapping and linking data structure and function libraries inline make the files smaller and run better on our devices. The Dalvik VM was written from square one with Android in mind.

Once upon a time Microsoft ran a little Hackathon in which 40 developers had 40 hours to create an app for the new Nokia Windows Phones. The winner of the Hackathon was Visiarc, which came up with a Pictionary-style game called Duudle. It’s a multiplayer, turn-based game. You draw, your opponent guesses. And vice-versa. 

For you folks who enjoy poking your heads where they don’t quite yet belong, a couple new Ice Cream Sandwich builds have leaked out for the international version of the Samsung Galaxy S II. And, yes, TouchWiz is there. And still looks like TouchWiz.  Of the two alpha versions, KP4 and KP8, the latter is said to be the “better” of the two. (These follow the KP1 build we saw a couple weeks ago.) And both are built on Android 4.0.3, the new official “base” of Ice Cream Sandwich.