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Whether you are too busy (or too, ah, incapacitated) to get a drive home, RideCharge want to take you home. RideCharge allows you to schedule pick ups, pay for them, and even keep online receipts all from a mobile phone. Available rides come in taxi, Sedans, or even shuttles for when you

One of the big, ongoing stories we've been following here relentlessly at WMExperts is the Qualcomm/HTC video driver issue--specifically it looks like a lot of the current generation devices make use of software as opposed to hardware accelerated Direct3D drivers. Exceptions to this are the new HTC Diamond and Touch Pro devices.

In our forums, Jeff Kirvin (long time tech geek and guru) has found an interesting gem on the Sprint Treo 800w: namely under \Windows is a file called "D3DDemo.exe" (which also has a Texas Instruments icon to match the TI chipset on board).

What happens when you click it? You get that cool little spinney cube thing going on along with the very important to know Frames Per Second (FPS). In Kirvin's pic it shows 35.45 FPS and we've hit 38.79 FPS on our device (tweaked out for speed). That's fast.

So besides the Palm tweaks you can rest assured that you have some serious graphic acceleration going on to keep things zippy. Perhaps that's why it trounces the Tilt in a Internet Explorer scrolling contest, eh?

Anyone up for some Doom or Quake III? Call me.

It turns out that the HTC Diamond's lack of support for the US bands we need to use the thing reliably may not be a hardware limitation. wmpoweruser [via] has unearthed this thread from XDA that includes a new Radio ROM. See -- there's the ROM for your smarpthone and a separate ROM for the radio. This new ROM enables support for the 850 band for EDGE, meaning the Diamond has suddenly become a viable (though EDGE-only) phone for most of the US!

Those readers have some cause to rejoice - an updated Radio ROM (V100.25.05) leaked by XDA-Developers hackers manages to activate the hidden 850 Mhz radio, allowing GSM and EDGE connectivity to work on all the GSM networks in USA. Unfortunately there is still no support for US 3G, but one is left only to wonder whether this is very far behind, seeing how HTC is planning to release the HTC Touch Diamond on the Australian Telstra network, which uses the same 3G bands as AT&T. - wmpoweruser

Indeed, if the enterprising hackers at XDA can unlock EDGE's 850 band, mayhap they can get this battlestation fully operational here in the US sooner than the rebel alliance, er, HTC does!

Yes, you want it, go get it at http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/. If, for some crazy reason, you don't want to just install Opera Mobile 9.5 yourself, you can read all about it here, where'll you'll find that you're missing out on a great page overview default, faster browsing, improved pan and zoom, page saving, and a completely new UI.

Sure, it's been a long wait, made even longer by a last-minute, 2 day delay for extra bugfixing, but we're hoping it's worth it. We're hoping, but we don't know. We loved it on the HTC Tilt (see a hands-on here), but we're wondering if it will work on less herculean devices. To that end we'll pass up testing it on the Treo 800w (a certified speed demon) and try it out on the Mogul. Stay tuned...

One device we won't be testing it on is the Q9h, as Opera Mobile 9.5 doesn't appear to be available for Standard edition yet. Bummer.

Thanks to ShuckyD for the tip!

We know, we know, you had set your alarm for Midnight tonight and were planning on constantly refreshing Opera's site all day tomorrow (the day we expected it) so you could download the holy grail of Windows Mobile browsers: Opera Mobile 9.5. Or maybe that was just us.

You can go ahead and reset your alarm clock, because Opera's going to take a couple more days to hammer out some last-minute bugs on the browser before they unleash the beta on the world. Killing bugs before a Beta release? It's almost like a software company cares about user experience and killing bugs. Actually, it's exactly like that, because this is Opera we're talking about.

As you can imagine, we encountered a few bugs last week that we needed to fix before we launch. Our engineering team worked through the weekend to fix the bugs. Even though our release is a beta, we'd rather spend the extra time to fix them, thus giving you a better experience. The fixes are almost complete now, but we need two more days to run the build through our quality assurance testing. The new launch date is now set for the 17th.

read: my.opera.com, via the::unwired