Tag Archives: Android
SD#45 The Missing Schmidt
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Behold, the Four Horsemen
We are full of apologies tonight. Oh, and sorry again because we’re going to be talking about upcoming law changes!
SD#43 Facebook Assassins
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And shoot them.
The world has decided that all the news should all happen at once . . . and it chose this week. Hackers are back in action, you need to drive “hands free”, and BitTorrent will save our entertainment! Ten points to the first person to identify that background noise!
Google I/O 2011 – Day 1
Wow. Yesterday was quite the day for Google. I’d like to quickly summarize everything that was announced yesterday, but there was so much, I might miss something. So let’s get started and hope I get it all:
Google Music Beta
Google’s music cloud service was not only announced, but released yesterday (go here to request your invite). Those of you who listen to our podcast know that I was excited when Amazon announced their MP3 Cloud Player, so it is no surprise that this really has me going. However, unlike Amazon’s service, Google does not offer a way to purchase music (… yet).
Initially, this beta is only available for invitation, of which I have not yet received, so I am forced to sit by the wayside and read reviews until I’m blue. Once I get the invitation, I will be able to write a full review. The idea is that you upload your entire music collection (up to 20,000 tracks) and never have to worry about managing your music physically again. It comes complete with a web interface for playing music and creating playlists, which eerily resembles a famous competitor’s interface, plus there is a music player available for download on the Android Marketplace for mobile devices.
On the downside, from some reviews that I have read, the upload time is really slow; about 50 tracks per hour, which works out to about 4 MB per minute; to upload 20,000 tracks would take you more than half a month. Also, once you upload your music, you have no way to download them again. So if you lose your local copies, and Google’s servers get wiped out, you’re out of luck.
On the bright side, 20,000 songs is roughly 60 GB to 100 GB of storage, which greatly trumps Amazon’s initial offering of 5GB free.
More on Google Music later. Moving on…
Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0?)
Up until now it appears that Google has split it’s Android OSs between mobile phone devices and tablet devices. According to the key-note yesterday, Ice Cream Sandwich will resolve that apparent issue. This version of the OS will target both handheld and tablet devices and eventually also be supported on netbook and laptop devices.
Ice Cream Sandwich will include Honeycomb-like features, zippier multitasking, a new launcher, and more inherent features for home screen widgets.
There’s really not much more to say about Ice Cream Sandwich except for… HURRY UP!
Android Open Accessories
This was another exciting announcement. The Android Open Accessories API will add support for USB to Android devices. This API will be included in the Honecomb 3.1 update, as well as the Gingerbread 2.3.4 update. This will allow many types of external devices to directly interact with the OS, including but not limited to audio devices, input devices, storage devices and communication devices.
Along with this, we get…
Open Accessories ADK
The new development kit for Open Accessories will allow developers more control of their software’s interaction with hardware. Google teamed up with the Arduino open source hardware interface which also opens up the avenue for more custom hardware to be built for android. This kit is currently only offering USB support, but will soon support Bluetooth protocols.
Android 3.1
The Honeycomb update was also released yesterday for Motorola Xoom customers and comes with a few hefty upgrades. The biggest hitter in this upgrade is the inclusion of the new Android Open Accessories API. Other upgrades include native resizing of homescreen widgets and support for the Google TV upgrade coming later this year (see below for info on this).
Google TV to Android
It was announced yesterday that Google TV will become a fully supported Android device. Currently, it is based on the Android platform, but does not have access to the Android Market, and does not support most Android apps. This summer, current Google TV devices will receive an OTA update for Honeycomb 3.1 and will include access to the Android Market. We will also see new Google TV devices from Logitech, Samsung, Sony and Vizio.
YouTube Movies
Last, but not least, the ability to rent movies on YouTube was released yesterday. They opened with 3,000 movie titles and will continue to add more each week. Rental prices range from free to $4.99, with most new releases priced at $2.99. Google has signed license deals with Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, Universal and Lionsgate. You can even ‘pin’ a rented movie for offline viewing later on. Android device viewing will be available shortly and will come to tablets first.
Conclusion
The first day of Google I/O was indeed a whirlwind of information. Here is a quick mention of all the other items that were covered during the 1st day:
- Preview of Google +1 button for publishers
- Google App Engine 1.5
- Google Books API
- Android @Home
- Project Tungston
- Style maps and more customization for Fusion Tables
- Google Storage for Developers
- Google Plugin for Eclipse 2.4
- ChromeVox screen reader for Chrome and Chrome OS
- New charts and features in Google Chart Tools
- Improved Google Prediction API
- Announcement of upcoming P2P NFC protocol
- Google Places API
- Improvement to Google Web Fonts
Let me know if you’d like me to write more information on any of these topics.
App Highlight #2
Greetings. Welcome to my second app review. Today’s app is also an Android only, app (sorry iOS users), and it’s one that I have been using ever since I’ve been an Android user. It was among the first apps I downloaded and I haven’t seen a reason to try any competing apps yet (though I probably should just for review-sake).
aCar
This nifty app allows you to track your vehicle(s) fuel usage, maintenance, and expenses of your vehicle. It will show you very detailed statistics of each vehicle you are tracking including: Running cost/day, Distance/day, Total distance, Avg MPG, Total Gallons, and many many more. It gives you informative charts showing you trends of gas prices, your car’s MPG and more. aCar helps people like me by reminding you when you need to change your oil, rotate your tires, and when to do standard or yearly maintenance. Now I can’t blame my dying car on my forgetfulness anymore; the blame will have to go to my negligence and blatant ignorance of clear notifications. And if this app isn’t user-friendly enough, it allows you to import your cars’ stats from many other car tracking programs such as Gas Cubby (iOS), MPG (PalmOS), Fuelly.com (online), FuelFrog.com (online), Vehicle Manager (Windows), just to name a few. Along with the ability to import your data, you can also export everything in full, or choose to just export your statistics if you’d like. You can even export your statistics to an easy-to-read HTML format. The only thing this app doesn’t do is do your car’s maintenance for you. I guess that will have to be in a future update.
Android Market Links:
Free Version: http://goo.gl/XgUp3
This app is not currently available for iOS
If there are any apps you want me to review, drop a comment here, or email [email protected]
App Highlight #1
I am going to start inserting my reviews of certain mobile apps. I will try to do one at least every day. Currently, I have a Droid X, so most of my reviews will be for Android-based apps, but I will try to cover iOS apps as well when I can.
Akinator
This app is a very clever remake of a game that most of us are already familiar with called 20 Questions. Akinator is a confident genie that comes with many mannerisms to accentuate his personality. If he is getting closer to the person you are guessing, he will appear to get more confident. On the other hand, he will start to get embarrassed or angry if he isn’t putting the clues together yet. You can then post the results of your game to Facebook if you are feeling social. Aside from the nice cartoony graphics, and the clever sarcasm that Akinator displays on occasion, this is just another 20 Questions game and appears to only be limited to people or characters, whereas other 20 questions games may focus on a more broad range of subjects. Akinator does require an internet connection to play, and just errors out if you try to play it without. This allows most of the processing to be done on a server, or gives it access to online databases such as imdb.com or tv.com for its character base.
Today, the paid app is free on the Amazon market place, so go pick it up for free!
The free version only allows you to play 5 times per day.
Amazon App Store Links:
Paid Version ($1.99 or Free today only): http://goo.gl/WbctB
Free Version: http://goo.gl/hwdfZ
Android Market Links:
Paid Version ($2.13): http://goo.gl/35pfv
Free Version: http://goo.gl/GmbcG
This app is not currently available for iOS
If there are any apps you want me to review, drop a comment here, or email [email protected]
Lackluster launch for Android
The HTC G1 launched today for T-Mobile (though the phone itself won’t be available in stores until October 22nd). For anyone who wasn’t paying attention when it wasn’t announced, this is special because the phone uses Google’s mobile operating system, named Android.
And what a botched job it was. Don’t get me wrong; I love Google, and I love HTC. I also have T-Mobile service. So why am I disappointed with this first phone? Well, namely because it seems like too little fanfare for something that could potentially be huge. Or, maybe because too much hype has been generated for what it isn’t doing yet. I’m not entirely sure yet.
The Android Logo
Android has been in the works for a little under a year now. It’s an “open source” SDK with an Java based architecture that is supposed to offload much of the processing requirements from any hardware, thereby allowing it to run much faster than traditional operating systems. This is especially important for mobile devices since they don’t have the same horsepower as your laptop or desktop will have. Conversely, they also don’t need all the features that your PC does, so it can run much leaner than Windows Vista or OS 10.5 and get away with it.
The main downside to it is that it IS open source. While Google itself is a huge company who could throw endless resources at making a mobile phone, they wouldn’t get very far in the commercial market. For this reason they partnered with HTC, T-Mobile, Amazon, and who knows who else to get their system out there. I get the feeling that a lot of concessions were made in the process, since we are NOT looking at the iPhone killer that many people were expecting.
And the really dumb thing is that none of it is Android’s fault! If you look at the G1, it looks like any other HTC phone! It operates like it’s the Touch, and even has a similar menu system as both the Touch and the Shadow. The system menu (the load of icons) looks more like a Blackberry or Windows Mobile 6 than it does anything else, the only apps that even exist for the thing are either Google’s or Amazon’s (in an attempt to sway the iTunes Store users), and the thing is downright clunky.
What we were promised vs what we got
Apple released the iPhone to a stunned crowd, and for good reason; it’s a shiny toy. Apple learned how to sell anything by simplifying it and making it an accessory. Don’t believe me? The iPod is more status symbol than actual device nowadays, the iPhone (as much as it failed in many of its original objectives) is still immensely popular, and the iMac I’m using to write this post is more designed for loft-dwelling hipsters who can’t afford both a TV and a computer (so why not have a computer the size of your TV).
"In my loft, on the interwebs. I'm just like those hackster kids!"
This is not a bad thing though (it’s not a great thing either). However, it’s not really easy for other companies to duplicate, and HTC going on about their new phone and how it’s going to have all the same interface “shinys” of the iPhone was probably the wrong way to go as it gave people unfair expectations. Does Android seem to stand up to Palm OS? Well, hard to say since we haven’t seen any sort of Synch capabilities. Does it stand up to Blackberry OS? Seems to, though 3rd party support isn’t there yet. Does it stand up to Windows Mobile 6? Oh yeah. And then some.
But see, all of these mobile operating systems are actually USEFUL! They aren’t toys and they aren’t accessories. This isn’t a Sidekick we’re talking about here, it’s an actual smart phone. They could have launched it as just another HTC phone, and people would have been happy with it. Instead, they drummed up that it was using Android and therefore was about to rock our world!
Well we’re left rather non-rocked, looking at a phone that can does what every other smart phone already does, wondering where all the apps are for it.
But hey, at least this thing can cut and paste!
