2010 March | Android News, Reviews, Applications, Games, Phones, Devices, Tips, Mods, Videos, Podcasts

Mar

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

Posted by Editorial Staff in EVO 4G, 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…

Mar

Don’t Wait For Verizon To Update Your Droid To 2.1 – Do It Yourself And Do It Now

Posted by Editorial Staff in Droid, Mods, Motorola, News, Tips, Verizon

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

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Mar

RCA AirPower: Recharge Your Android Phone Through WiFi!

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Devices, 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…

Mar

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

Posted by Editorial Staff in Droid, Motorola, News, Verizon

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

…

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, Reviews, Tips

Last Updated: September 6th, 2010

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…

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…

Mar

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

Posted by Editorial Staff 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

…

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…

Mar

Sony Ericsson’s XPERIA X10 Gets Reviewed, Touched, And Compared – Results Mixed

Posted by Editorial Staff in News, Reviews, Sony Ericsson, Xperia X10

Last Updated: March 29th, 2010

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" 480×854 TFT screen is beautiful
1GB internal storage
384MB RAM

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Mar

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

Posted by Editorial Staff in CLIQ, Dream, Droid, HTC, Hero, Hero (Sprint), Magic, Motorola, News, T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile G2 Touch / Vision, T-Mobile myTouch 3G

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

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