All Articles Tagged android

Google’s next iteration of their mobile OS, Android 1.6 Donut, is set to give sugar highs again in October, with support for CDMA radios, QVGA and WVGA resolutions, and to quote from sibling site, Android Central:

Android 1.6 ‘Donut’ also brings Quick Search Box for Android which is basically universal search that searches locally on your phone and through the internet at the same time, new text-to-speech APIs, and the beautiful new Android Market we leaked a few weeks ago. There’s also updates to the camera’s interface, improvement to the camera’s loading time (39% faster), and a neat battery usage indicator that details which applications are using the most power.

CDMA support will now doubt make all those longing for an iPhone on Verizon lose their minds just a little bit more. Support for different screen sizes is more of a mixed bag, however. It means device manufacturers will have more form-factor freedom, but it also means developers will have to deal with Windows Mobile- and BlackBerry-style platform fragmentation (either working harder to support all the different screens, or choosing not to support some and increasing confusion for users). iPhone, graphics power aside, hasn’t had to worry about this… yet.

Quick Search, like Palm’s webOS search, going beyond the device to bring back answers from the cloud isn’t something iPhone supports, but is something we hope Apple’s looking into.

Still, it’s great to see Google keeping up with the updates. Anything in there that makes Android more compelling to you?

More big news for Android — and no, not just HTC finally going 3.5mm with the headphone jacks — but Sony Ericsson’s new “Rachel” Android device and it’s UI.

Hot on the heels of the HTC Hero’s Sense UI, it’s again showing the power and flexibility of Google’s other OS.

Is that model, separating hardware and software development, finally going to pay off in the mobile space? And, ironically, will it be Google rather than Microsoft who realizes it first?

[Android Central via BGR]

Our sibling site Android Central is all over the new HTC Hero announcement — the latest Android smartphone and one that looks decidedly different from its G1 predecessor.

We weren’t exactly fond of the G1’s user experience, but did lust after their notification system and push Gmail. Does this latest entry, with its Senses UI, up the ante? And should Apple be worried yet, or is Microsoft and Windows Mobile still the low-hanging fruit in Google’s sights?

Digital Trends was gracious enough to invite CrackBerry Kevin, editor-in-chief Dieter, and yours TiPb-truly to:

Smartphone Wars: iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Palm pre vs. Android – Our panel of smartphone experts from all different corners of the Web duke it out over some of the most contentious issues facing the smartphone industry today.

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Apple decides which apps get approved for the iPhone/iPod touch App Store, provides little to no transparency on the process, prevents certain things like turn-by-turn GPS outright in the SDK agreement, and — though they’ve yet to use them — maintains black lists for GPS and malware that could remove any LocationServices or entire applications from iPhones everywhere. For this, and more, Apple has earned quite a bit of criticism — and rightly so in many cases.

What if Apple went further, however. They sell officially unlocked iPhones in several regions, like Hong Kong. They also have a program that grants developers tethering abilities for testing. What if, one day, people with unlocked or developer iPhones woke up to find the Paid section of the App Store gone. What would the community reaction be? What should it be?

Google, whose “don’t be evil” motto has been downgraded by management in recent years, is lauded for the openness of their Android Market (even though they’re known to have a kill switch of their ownl — to do otherwise would be irresponsible), yet our friends over at Android Central woke to find themselves in just such a situation this week. Paid apps. Gone.

We’re told it’s because of piracy concerns, that Google thinks developer units of the G1 make it easier for people to steal paid apps. Jeffdc5 on Twitter let us know developer G1 handsets could store apps on the SD memory card in addition to the on-device memory of the regular units, which could make them more pirate-able. However, we’ve seen that the iPhone — with no external memory — can have apps pirated as well, so is that readon enough? It smacks of the same “treat your customers as thieves” thinking that created DRM music, Microsoft Genuine Advantage, Sony rootkits, and Adobe invading our boot sectors…

Apple has already removed DRM from iTunes music, and has now removed product keys from boxed versions of iLife 09 and iWork 09 as well. It seems to be working out none too badly for them.

Openness is definitely A Good Thing. Maybe trust in your user base should be as well?

Our sibling site, Android Central, has posted up a story about TeleNav making a turn-by-turn GPS navigation app for Google’s Android G1:

The TeleNav software will include full color 3D graphics, speech recognition, one-click rerouting, traffic alerts, weather updates, gas prices, and restaurant reviews.

Sure, it’s not all roses. After a 30-day free trial, you need to fork over $9.99 a month, $99 a year, or $249 for four years to keep the service, but at least they have the option.

So what’s happening with the iPhone app? We asked, and this was what we got in response:

We have to stay mum at this point on an iPhone app other than to say that we’re working on it. Please stay tuned!

If it’s hard to stay mum, imagine how hard it is to “stay tuned” after months and month (and months) of waiting.

Dieter mentions that Apple, flush with success battering around the music industry and Google, may not know how to zip their lip and make nice with the map licensors. Could that be the hold up?

We won’t ask if you want turn-by-turn GPS navigation — we know you do — so we’ll just tell Apple and TeleNav to suck it up and get this done (before more people jailbreak just for xGPS), and we’ll leave the comments open for you to do likewise…

Someone told Daring Fireball that Apple not only asked Google to remove the multi-touch from the Android/HTC T-Mobile G1 smartphone, but also to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack.

The first part was reported earlier and makes the kind of sense that only tricky mega-corp coopetion can make (iPhone eyeballs are more valuable to Google than the G1’s multi-touch at this point). The second part… not so much. Specifically, Daring Fireball’s source mentioned Apple’s use of the remote buttons on the headset to control media playback as the reason for Google avoiding the jack entirely on the G1. (Note: while this sounds familiar, a Google search didn’t turn up any links for Apple patenting anything associated with such processes, so if anyone can point us towards that info, please let us know in the comments).

Other smartphones have long used the 3.5mm headphone jack, and since the G1 is hardly a media powerhouse (it doesn’t even include a built-in video app), there’s little reason to believe HTC couldn’t have included a non-remote, standard 3.5mm jack.

(Aside: Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, has managed to confirm that both the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Pearl both make use of some type of headset based media control, so there we go…)

Chris Ziegler over at Engadget Mobile weighs in, calling the entire Apple/Google story from VentureBeat FUD, and the sourcing on the 3.5mm piece sketchy, and while admittedly an unnamed Android source, absent corroboration, doesn’t pass the traditional media test, here’s the other thing:

HTC seems to love the ExtUSB in lieu of 3.5mm headset jack. It’s not just the G1, but an increasing array of their smartphones that are — and will be according to the 2009 HTC roadmap that was leaked — abandoning 3.5mm for the ExtUSB.

So, we’re not sold on this story yet, how about you? Does it seem likely Apple talked Google out of a 3.5mm jack, or that HTC just plain doesn’t like them and never considered it?

Our sibling-site PreCentral.net points us to an interesting developer commentary up on Ars Technica which provides this little golden spitball of insight:

he had a lot of good things to say about how Palm is handing the extremely nascent developer community and his hopes for the future of the platform. The developer told us that he has explored mobile development on Apple’s iPhone SDK and found much of the company’s position towards their community to be “developer-hostile”—an obvious reference to their insistence on enforcing a pointless NDA well past its expiration date and their strong hand in regulating what can and cannot be developed for its platform.

Apple, of course, is providing Cocoa Touch, an iPhone-optimized version of their Objective C frameworks that, while highly administrated by Apple, provides desktop-class power with a hefty of amount of access to developers. Palm, by contrast, is using Mojo as an open, web-standards based framework for the webOS, which we’re guessing will be something similar to how Widgets work (half way between WebApps and native apps).

Every solution comes with compromises, so in the end it will be up to each developer to choose which platform(s) best suit their needs and the apps they want to build, but is the way in which Apple treats developers — something entirely outside the SDK — going to be a concern as competing alternatives like Android and webOS become increasingly available?

Android Central (via Gizmodo) brings us the latest in a long — long — line of… er… iPhone inspired smartphones. This one, however, will be running the Google mobile OS:

The OPhone is 1mm bigger than the original iPhone, has a dedicated camera button, 5MP camera, flash, microSD slot and 3.5mm headphone jack. Yeah. Sounds pretty flippin’ sweet to us too.

TiPb will reserve judgement until it launches, but it will be interesting to see Android on hardware other than the slider-trackball-touch G1. Won’t it?

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Join us for the second of two special Smartphone Round Robin Roundtables! This week, Casey, Kevin, Rene, and Dieter discuss the final two devices in our Smartphone Round Robin: the T-Mobile G1 and the the HTC Fuze. Plus, they answer your questions live!

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