March 2010 Archives

Mar

Confirmed: HTC EVO 4G Will Run Froyo - The Next Version Of Android

Posted by Android Police Team in EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, News, Sprint

Last week, after the announcement of HTC EVO 4G at the CTIA conference, Sprint quickly dropped a bunch of developer documentation onto their Android dev site. Having dugg in a little deeper, we saw confirmation from the horse's mouth itself (Sprint) that the EVO 4G will be running on Froyo - the version of Android following Eclair (2.1).

Here is the relevant part of the developer document v0.10 (also unchanged in v0.11):

According to the above, TYPE_WIMAX - a constant used for dealing with WiMax connectivity features - should be added in the Froyo SDK. While developers can use ...

Mar

Don't Wait For Verizon To Update Your Droid To 2.1 - Do It Yourself And Do It Now

Posted by Android Police Team in Droid (Sholes), Mods, Motorola, News, Tips, Verizon Wireless

Yesterday, Verizon released the Motorola Droid 2.1 update schedule which turned out to be so drawn out that by the end of it, we would have seen Android 5.0 (OK, not really but it could take 2-3 weeks).

Who wants to wait this long? It didn't take long for some smart folks over at AndroidForums to figure out where the update was located on Google's servers and provide instructions on how to accomplish it in a few easy steps. Here they are:

If you have rooted your phone, the 2.1 update will unroot you back.

Download https://android.clients.google.com/updates/voles/signed-voles-ESE81-from-ESD56.fa406da6.zip onto your

...

Mar

RCA AirPower: Recharge Your Android Phone Through WiFi!

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Devices By Manufacturer, News

Perpetual charging on the go for your Android phone might no longer be a distant dream, courtesy the new AirPower technology developed by RCA which sucks power from WiFi signals and constantly charges your phone's battery.

The RCA AirPower charger is expected to be available during this holiday season and would be a technological landmark for charging of portable devices such as cellphones (including your favorite Android phone), digital cameras, camcorders, music players, and other low power portable devices.

No More Dead Batteries

The RCA AirPower charger will aim to permanently free you from the hassles of plugging your phone ...

Mar

Updated: Verizon Finally Starts Upgrading All Motorola Droid Users to Android 2.1 Today, Pinky Swears This Time

Posted by Android Police Team in Droid (Sholes), Motorola, News, Verizon Wireless

Earlier today Verizon started rolling out the long awaited and repeatedly delayed Android 2.1 upgrade to the selected few Motorola Droid customers - 1,000 to be exact.

The Rollout

According to the internal document obtained by Android Central, the rollout schedule is the following:

the first 1,000 very lucky Droid owners should have already gotten their OTA (over the air) updates today, March 30th, at 9AM PST/noon EST.
If you are one of the lucky few, please share your experience with us, as soon as you stop calling all your friends to share the joy but right before you

...

Mar

Upgrade Your Android Phone's External Storage With A-Data Turbo 16GB Class 6 MicroSD Card - Review And Benchmarks

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Devices By Manufacturer, Other Reviews, Reviews, Tips

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

As I recently started downloading and listening to lots of podcasts, I found that my Hero's 2GB MicroSD card filled up literally overnight.

2GB is such a measly number that disgracing the Hero with it any longer was a blow to both mine and its pride, so I headed over to Amazon to find a new faster, higher capacity storage card.

After careful deliberation and weighing all pros and cons, I ended up picking the A-Data Turbo 16GB Class 6 MicroSD card.

Considerations

Here are the factors I had considered before I picked the A-Data card:

Size...

Mar

Editorial: Why Google Could Not Avoid Android Fragmentation And What It Plans To Do About It

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in News

Android Fragmentation

If you currently own an Android phone, chances are you are running one of the four major release versions: 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, or 2.1.

Each version has its own set of supported features and a separate SDK (software development kit) which makes developers' lives a living hell - they have to develop and test on 4 different major operating systems or face users' wrath in the cruel world of application reviews.

Furthermore, there is a very high chance your phone manufacturer spent months customizing the OS with its own applications and UI: for example, HTC has Sense and ...

Mar

Texas Wakes Up With Sprint WiMax/4G In Houston Today

Posted by Android Police Team in News, Sprint

If you're one of over 4 million people living in Houston, TX, your mobile connection options just got a lot better. Clearwire, the company providing WiMax/4G service for Sprint, announced today the launch of its 28th US metropolitan market in the Houston metro area.

According to the press release,

… coverage extends as far north as Conroe and northeast as Kingwood; as far west as Katy and southwest as Richmond/Rosenburg; as far south as Alvin and southeast as Clear Lake; as far east as Baytown.
CLEAR service will also be available in the city of Lake Jackson to the south

...

Mar

Top 10 Best Android Related Podcasts To Keep That Podcast App Of Yours Satisfied

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Dev, News, Tips

If you are as interested in Android as I am, you might just be looking for a more unobtrusive and interesting way of absorbing the news.

As this highly scientific chart unequivocally shows, the amount of new Android related information has skyrocketed in 2009:

So rather than spend hours trying to weed out the interesting bits in your browser (unless, of course, you're reading Android Police which is a delight - RSS/Twitter), you can instead fire up your favorite podcast app (BeyondPod on Android is mine) and subscribe to some Android podcasts. And now instead ...

Mar

Sony Ericsson's XPERIA X10 Gets Reviewed, Touched, And Compared - Results Mixed

Posted by Android Police Team in News, Phone Reviews, Reviews, Sony Ericsson, Xperia X10 (es209ra)

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

Today the Slashgear team got their grabby (and lucky) hands on Sony's first crack at an Android phone implementation - XPERIA X10 which was announced a whopping 5 months ago on November 3rd, 2009.

They go into a relatively in-depth discussion of the pluses and minuses of Sony's new child which I will summarize in a few bullet points for the busy crowd.

The Awesome Bullet Points

1Ghz Snapdragon CPU (same as Nexus One and HTC desire)
the 4" 480x854 TFT screen is beautiful
1GB internal storage
384MB RAM
8GB MicroSD card but only upgradeable to 16GB
Support for AT&T

...

Mar

Android Usage Skyrockets Across The Board In February 2010 - Apple, RIM, Palm, Nokia Fall

Posted by Android Police Team in CLIQ / DEXT (Morrison), Dream, Droid (Sholes), G1 (Dream), G2 (Vision), Hero, Hero (Sprint, HeroC), HTC, Magic, Motorola, myTouch 3G (Magic), News

AdMob, one of the world's largest mobile advertisement networks, posted a report (PDF) yesterday citing various mobile related statistics for the period of February 2009 to February 2010.

We've looked through all the boring stuff and pulled out the interesting highlights (you all like highlights, don't you?).

The Highlights

Here are the highlights that we've cherry picked out of it for you (the data is year-over-year where applicable):

AdMob currently serves over 15,000 mobile websites and applications and has received 14.1 billion (!) requests worldwide in the last year
The number of smartphones went up 13% from 35% to 48%

...

Mar

Sprint HTC Hero Android 2.1 Update Delayed Again, New Tentative Release Date Is Now April 9th

Posted by Android Police Team in Hero, Hero (Sprint, HeroC), HTC, News, Sprint

Rumors have been flying for the past few months that Sprint and HTC would update the Hero to the long awaited Android 2.1 Eclair today - March 26th, 2010.

These rumors have been shattered today by conversations with multiple Sprint customer service reps and a posting of an internal memo by Phandroid announcing the new update date - April 9th, 2010.

While the memo lists the 4/9/10 update as "maintenance", according to an alleged Sprint employee rkendle53 from the xda forums Sprint calls all updates "maintenance", even major ones. We are skeptical but hopeful at the same ...

Mar

Android Market Hits Another Milestone - Now Serving 40,000 Applications

Posted by Android Police Team in Apps/Games, News

The Android Marketplace counts over 40,000 applications and games as of today, at least according to the online Android Market tracker AndroLib.

This number is not inflated in any way by counting application updates - AndroLib includes only separate programs in the total.

A useful statistics page provides some insight into the daily growth for the curious.

At the pace the Marketplace is growing at the moment, it will reach 100,000 applications by sometime in September, as our math geek Artem reported yesterday.

Congratulations to Android on this important milestone.

...

Mar

MOTO Labs Team Hires C-3PO To Perform Screen Accuracy Tests. iPhone, N1, Eris Best; Droid, Pre, Storm 2 Worst

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Droid (Sholes), Droid Eris, HTC, Motorola, News, Nexus One (Passion), Videos

~~Did you know Motorola has a Labs team that does cool things and then blogs about them? They're pretty cool like that.~~ Correction: interesting piece of trivia - did you know MOTO Labs actually has nothing to do with Motorola? With a name like MOTO, one could think… well never mind, I apologize for the mistake.

The Finger Test

For example, in January they tested the screens on 4 flagship mobile phones by swiping a finger across the screen in a drawing app and recording the resulting patterns, complete with photos and a video.

The phones in the first test ...

Mar

Skype Mobile Launches Exclusively On Verizon, Does Not Work On WiFi, Makes Non-Verizon Users Irked

Posted by Android Police Team in Applications, News, Verizon Wireless

As promised, today at CTIA Wireless 2010 Skype launched its Skype Mobile application, available on select Verizon phones (Blackberry and all of Verizon's Android lineup - Droid, Droid Eris, Devour) because of an exclusive deal between the two companies.

Features

Here are the features of the new application:

make and receive unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls to any Skype contact around the globe
send and receive unlimited instant messages with other Skype users
manage the Skype contact list directly from the mobile application
call international phone numbers at competitive Skype calling rates

Skype Mobile promises to have an Always-On capability...

Mar

Projection: Android Marketplace To Hit 100,000 Applications Sometime In September 2010

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Apps/Games, News

Last Updated: March 9th, 2011

Today I put on my wizard Darth Vader math hat and decided to figure out when the Android market is going to finally reach the 100,000 mark.

"Why 100,000?" you may ask.

Apple

Well, it seemed like a nice round number, and it also happens to be the same number a small company called Apple was obsessing over in November 2009:

CUPERTINO, California—November 4, 2009—Apple® today announced that developers have created over 100,000 apps for the revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world.

The iPhone App Store launched on July 11th, 2008, so ...