A while back, we found out (to no one’s surprise) that Verizon was locking down the bootloader on the Samsung Galaxy S4, but we were surprised when we found out AT&T was also doing this. Thankfully, the development community has pulled through and found a way to work around this. Dan Rosenberg (djrbliss) had unlocked the bootloaders on the AT&T and Verizon variants already, but just Thursday he published an explanation of how the unlock works and a Git repository to aid developers.

The new features for Gmail just keep coming. In this month alone the Gmail team has announced the ability to send money to users via email, merge your storage with that of Google+ and create calendar events from email information. Some companies would hold off and bring these features under one "revolutionary update" for maximum news coverage. Not Google, though - it releases them when they are ready and make a simple announcement through their respective product blogs, including Thursday's announcement of revamped search functionality in Gmail.

We have seen floating notifications before from many different services and programs. Back in January 2011, Google announced desktop notifications for email and chat messages. We still use this notification system today, but now Google is taking it a step further. The Google Chrome team took to its blog Thursday to announce it is bringing "richer notifications" to Google Chrome and the feature is already available through the beta channel.

Samsung's Galaxy S IV already has a Google Edition of its flagship available sans the locked down bootloader, so why announce that developer editions for AT&T and Verizon "coming soon?" At least two reasons come to mind: the Google Edition is only compatible with GSM networks (thus Samsung is throwing Verizon customers a bone), and the Developer Edition will have all the TouchWiz-based goodies since it does not come with stock Android out of the box.

Russel Holly, who accurately predicted the Galaxy S IV Google Edition (which many of us thought would never happen as recently as one day before its announcement at Google I/O), now has unearthed new evidence that HTC may follow suit with its One flagship and may even announce it within two weeks.

Samsung had already sold 10 million Galaxy S IV phones in the first month without the help from one of the world's largest carriers, and today Verizon has jumped on the global dogpile. The Galaxy S IV is finally officially available on Verizon, although it had been shipping out to some pre-order customers and had already been available on Amazon since Wednesday.

As Droid DNA owners in the rooted community are well aware, Verizon updated the phone's firmware to version 2.0.4 over two months ago, blocking the bootloader unlock and S-Off that had been achieved with the initial firmware. Anyone who later bought the phone with version 2.0.4 out of the box had no way to unlock the bootloader, flash a custom recovery or a custom ROM - they were stuck on stock until the new firmware could be hacked. On Wednesday, XDA Recognized Developer and RootzWiki member beaups teased that S-Off (thus bootloader unlock) has been achieved and the new method is "coming soon."