Aaron Gingrich
Contributing since June, 2010
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711articles
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About Aaron Gingrich
Aaron is a geek who has always had a passion for technology. When not working or writing, he can be found spending time with his family, playing a game, or watching a movie.
Latest Articles
Google continues to be admirably quick to react to DroidDream, the nasty Android Trojan we helped uncover on Tuesday. After removing the offending apps from the Market in just a few minutes of finding out about them, a new post on the Google Mobile Blog reveals that they're now ready to take further steps.
You'll find no Apple lovers around the Android Police offices, but even we have to admit that there's no excuse for Apple showing up the Android tablet scene's pricing. Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happened. With that in mind, it's perhaps not so surprising to hear that Samsung is re-evaluating their upcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky has run the numbers on tablets and lined them up for comparison against a bevy of other figures. Surprisingly, there are 5.113 billion mobile subscribers in the world (out of 6.898bn global population), but only 394 million smartphone and tablet users.
If you've been dying to imitate the Honeycomb UI on your device, things have certainly been looking up for you lately. First we saw the digital and analog clock widgets hit, and shortly after, Honeybread was released. Then, just a few days ago, the stunning Honeycomb boot animation dropped. Now, XDA members have come through again with a LWP inspired by the stock Honeycomb wallpaper.
Last night, I spotted a tweet from simms22 linking to a video of the Honeycomb boot animation on a CM7ed Nexus S. This morning I awoke to a tweet from him with a link to download it. Update: about an hour ago, simms notified me that the original animation is the work of XDA member zul8er, and tnpapadakos then released an updated (fixed) version.
As I've said before, CyanogenMod (CM) custom theme support is just plain awesome, and today's example is no different. It's called NTSense, and as you can probably guess, it's a Sense-inspired theme created by nhnt11. It's currently in beta and only supports LDPI and HDPI devices at the moment, but things look pretty good so far.
It's amazing how quickly the developer community gets to work after a new flagship device is released, and the XOOM is clearly no exception. First, ClockworkMod developer Koush managed to get CWM up and running on the tablet 2 hours after he picked it up, and shortly after, he released root instructions.
The long planned, much anticipated update to WidgetLocker that adds themes has been released, and it's every bit as awesome as we expected. Perhaps the best part about it is that there's already a broad selection of themes available in the XDA thread, and it's likely that number will increase substantially as time goes on thanks to the groundwork laid by previous WL mods.
Could the ship date for Samsung's Galaxy S II i9100 be moved up to March? So says UK eTailer Clove, who has apparently had pre-orders open for some time now, with prices at £510 and £590 for the 16GB and 32GB versions. Surprisingly, it turns out they're not the only one with open doors - Mobile City Online is taking pre-orders for the i1900 as well, charging $700 with free shipping, with a ship date of Q1 2011 (which would be by the end of March). While Mobile City doesn't say whether that's the 16GB or 32GB version, Clove's prices would suggest that it's likely the 16GB.
Google may have jumped the gun on announcing that the Android 2.3.3 update for the Nexus One was available - although they did say that it could be a few weeks until the update deployed OTA, it wasn't available for download and install, either. Or, rather, it wasn't until now: the update .ZIPs have been posted and can be downloaded directly from Google.
You read that right: the Market now includes a totally awesome Books site. To be honest though, none of us is really sure what all has changed, since none of us really used it before - but it doesn't seem like a lot, other than a flipped switch. Let's start with what it looks like:
It looks like the Captivate is the next domino to fall, much as expected: AT&T just confirmed via twitter that the Froyo update is now available for Captivate owners through Kies Mini. Similarly, that support page we stumbled upon last week before being pulled has gone back up, and it looks just like it did then.
Last night, Cyanogen revealed on Twitter that WiMAX had officially landed in CM7, via the latest nightly. No small feat, given that the team had to write their own code entirely from scratch. And while CM-based builds with WiMAX have been floating around for a few weeks now, this is the first official release - effectively addressing the last major qualm many EVO owners had with CM.
It's launch day for the XOOM, and already the major news outlets have had a chance to spend a few days with the much anticipated device. Not only does the XOOM bring a new standard in high-end to the masses (a la Tegra 2), but it's also the first device to ship with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) on board. It's also really the second major Android tablet to launch (the Galaxy Tab being the first), and the first to match the 10" form factor of the iPad. But how does it fare? Let's take a look at what our reviewers thought.
The Shack has officially announced the Atrix launch details via their Facebook page. The skinny: it lands in the store on February 22 for $150 with a new qualified 2-year plan. If you buy the dock at the same time, you can get it for $330, at a total cost of $480 - or $20 less than you'll pay at AT&T. I'm not looking to beat a dead horse on whether or not that price is too much, so I'm going to skip straight to the deetz: