October 2010 Archives

Oct

Rovio Launches Pre-orders For An Angry Birds Plush Toy Collection [Bonus: Angry Birds Halloween Pics]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in News, Off-Topic

Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, one of the most successful franchises to hit mobile gaming, is slowly starting to spread into our daily lives outside of our mobile devices. No, I'm not talking about all the Halloween awesomeness that we've been seeing today:

I am talking about the official Angry Birds plush toys that just dropped for pre-order. These furry little things are produced by Commonwealth Toys and come in 5 different versions. They cost $14.99 a pop, measure 8" in size, and will be ready to ship by December, just in time ...

Oct

id Software's Rage Mobile To Receive An Android Port: Droids VS Zombies At 60 FPS?

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Games, News

If there's one thing about Android that's really been coming along lately, it's gaming. We've already seen great games like MiniSquadron!, Angry Birds, and Reckless Racing make good impressions, and now we have another cause to celebrate. Following on from the news of an imminent Cut The Rope release for Android, we have this illuminating tweet from id Software co-founder John Carmack, confirming what has been the wish of many since way back in August:

Just in case you don't know who this John Carmack fella is, his Wikipedia entry states:

Carmack was the lead programmer of

...

Oct

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, X10 Mini, And X10 Mini Pro To Start Receiving Update To Android 2.1 In November

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Android OS, Eclair 2.1, News, Xperia X10 (es209ra), Xperia X10 Mini / Mini Pro (Robyn / Mimmi)

Try to contain your excitement, here: Sony-Ericsson will begin rolling out an the update to Android 2.1 (Éclair) for the Xperia X10, X10 Mini, and X10 Mini Pro devices starting November 1. As sarcastic as we are about being updated to an already out-of-date version, it's still a huge step up from the current Android 1.6. Major features of the updates:

Xperia X10:
• HD video recording with continuous auto-focus for high quality videos
• Upgrade of the Android platform to Android 2.1
• New back up and restore application, with extended content back up
• 5 homescreens for

...

Oct

NPD: 28% Of Smartphones Sold In Q1 2010 Were Android

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Android OS, News

Finally, some empirical evidence that illustrates what we've known for some time now: Android is growing like gangbusters. In fact, 28% of smartphones sold in Q1 2010 were Android, compared to 21% for iOS. RIM still holds the top spot with 36%, but that's a drop of roughly 12% in the past year - while iOS has fallen approximately 10% itself. In the same period, Android increased over 20%.

In fact, it seems like Android grew at the expense of just about everyone else - excluding a minor 1-2% increase in "other". And as Android continues to expand across ...

Oct

Acer Liquid Metal Announced For The UK, Seems Rather Solid

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Acer, Devices By Manufacturer, Liquid Metal, News

Last Updated: November 15th, 2010

While all you Americans slept, Acer took the wraps off its latest Android handset, the Liquid Metal, over here in Europe. Sporting Acer's custom Breeze UI, the Liquid Metal runs Android 2.2 atop an 800 MHz processor. The MSM7230 CPU is a whopping 32 MHz higher than the 768 MHz of the original Liquid's QSD8250 Snapdragon, but this 800 MHz core is the same Scorpion processor that powers the rather lovely T-Mobile G2. If the G2's performance is any indication, this processor is no slouch (particularly when overclocked), so things are looking quite nice indeed for the Liquid ...

Oct

HTC Desire HD Review Roundup: HTC Does It Again

Posted by Jaroslav Stekl in Desire HD (Ace), HTC, Phone Reviews, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

It's not HTC's first 4.3-inch monster of a phone, but according to these early reviews, the Desire HD might just be the best. It would be really hard to say no to its sexy aluminum casing, stunning 8MP camera, and next-generation Snapdragon processor, not to mention all the advantages not immediately visible from its spec sheet. Let's take a look at what reviewers have had to say so far:

TechRadar

TechRadar's Gareth Beavis wrote up an exhaustive review of the HTC Desire HD that covered just about everything about the device, from its game-playing capabilities to its four capacitive ...

Oct

Google Maps 4.6 Goes Up, Android Market Goes Down...

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Applications, News

As you may have noticed over the last couple of days, the Android Market hasn't been doing too well. Downloads have started, and then failed, failed to start, started to fail, and just generally failed in every imaginable way. There once was a time when clearing such-and-such cache would fix this sporadic issue, but it seems that even this black magic no longer suffices. Threads have been popping up all over the Android-tinted corners of the 'net with people unable to download anything from the Market.

This happens to coincide nicely with a Google Maps 4.6 update, which is said ...

Oct

ZTE Blade / Orange San Francisco Review: Two-Thirds Of A Nexus One For One-Third The Price

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Blade, Devices By Manufacturer, Orange, Phone Reviews, Reviews, ZTE

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

Introduction

Since the advent of Android in 2009, the family of devices running Google's mobile OS has grown from one handset to now hundreds and possibly thousands of unique models. In recent months, Android has seen an explosion of devices coming from lesser-known Asian manufacturers, with one of the main selling points being price. The manufacturers realized that with Android they had a readily and freely accessible operating system, a large market of potential customers, and all they had to do was put together a cheap device to capitalize on Android's continued growth. Unfortunately, these devices often cut corners where ...

Oct

Motorola Droid 2 Update Rolling Out Now, Bringing A Handful Of Minor Improvements

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Droid 2, News, Verizon Wireless

Word on the street is that Droid 2 users are now receiving/pulling a minor update. The official Verizon document on the update reveals a number of improvements:

Improved battery life
Heightened proximity sensor accuracy to enable faster screen response
View the Weather widget in both landscape and portrait orientation.
Simpler setup, improved user interactions, and better notifications for Visual Voice Mail.
Background Email Sync during display inactivity for better user experience
Support for email domain suffixes containing more than three characters.
Keep text messages organized with chronological in-box screen.
Edit text messages after you've inserted a video file.
Improved audio

...

Oct

Android Gingerbread, Next Nexus, Information And Speculation Round-Up

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Android OS, Devices By Manufacturer, Gingerbread 2.3, Samsung

These last few days the Android blogosphere has been awash with excited spluttering, dubious rumours and hopeful conflation. Kicking things off was City A.M., a "London-based free daily newspaper that specialises in financial news". According to an article on their website, Google had struck a deal with the popular phone retailer Carphone Warehouse. CPW were to sell Google's next phone, the Nexus Two by any other name. Their position as a reseller of phones and contracts on most if not all networks in the UK and wider Europe makes them a logical choice, right? Nexus One sales online ...