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. |
Google Maps continues the march of progress, officially adding traffic support for 13 European countries today. Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to see traffic in Maps, Navigation will now re-route you based on traffic conditions.
The countries:
The new functionality is live on Android, iOS, and in the mobile browser.
[Source: Google Mobile Blog]
Android has grown at an amazing pace in the past year, and so has our reader base. With that in mind, we have a simple question for our readers: how long have you been an Android owner? Were you one of the 'Droid front-runners, or did you join the game a bit later? Sound off in the poll below, and feel free to share some details in the comments below.
From a manufacturer standpoint, 4G (for the purposes of this post I mean LTE and WiMax, not 3G+) is a bit of a nightmare. The immaturity of the technology means that chips are expensive and bulky, and realistically offer benefit to only a small portion of consumers. (Compounding the issue, "4G" has become yet another buzzword that consumers don't understand but think they need anyway... but I digress.)
Consider a diminutive device such as the Samsung Galaxy S II. It's thin and light, but could a 4G chip be integrated without expanding the dimensions in one or more directions?
It's hard not to love SetCPU developer Michael Huang. He's been on the overclocking frontline for many devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S II and Motorola XOOM, and now he strikes again with an custom tweaked kernel (update: to clarify, the kernel source isn't available, so this isn't a rewritten kernel - he used a hex editor to modify it) for the HTC EVO 3D that allows for a stable 1.8GHz. With a few minor tweaks the kernel should work for the Sensation as well, although he hasn't had time to get it working without a device in hand.
All of Motorola's recent devices (save for the XOOM) have featured bootloaders that are locked down like Fort Knox, and despite publicly stating that they would be reversing that policy, the company has yet to take any action. Although they stated they wouldn't begin making bootloaders unlockable until late 2011, many people held out hope for the newly-released Droid 3. An apparently lost hope, unfortunately, as a Motorola Support forum admin has confirmed that the hot new Droid is as locked as its brethren.
Motorola painted a big bull's eye on itself when it started locking bootloaders, and now the company is certainly taking its time remedying the situation.
A new update for Google Maps was released today and brings some impressive new functionality. Artem put it well (although perhaps not exactly eloquently): "it's #$%^ing amazing... Google keeps blowing minds." In a nutshell, Transit Navigation (as it's officially dubbed) brings exactly what you'd expect - it helps you navigate public transport. In their words:
Transit Navigation (Beta)
Google Maps Navigation (Beta) currently provides over 12 billion miles of GPS-guided driving and walking directions per year. Now, GPS turn-by-turn (or in this case, stop-by-stop) navigation is available for public transit directions in 400+ cities around the globe with Transit Navigation.Transit Navigation uses GPS to determine your current location along your route and alerts you when it’s time to get off or make a transfer.
We know Android continues to grow at an amazing rate, with 500,000 Android devices activated per day and an activation growth rate of 4.4% per week (as an aside - if that growth rate is correct, that means the number of activations would double roughly every 16 weeks, based on the Rule of 72.) But how is that raw growth reflected in market share, given the rapidly expanding smartphone market? Turns out pretty well, according to comScore:
76.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in May 2011, up 11 percent from the preceding three month period.
This week, Google revealed its most serious attempt at social networking yet, Google+. Despite being released just a few days ago, it's easy to see that it's a much more accessible, polished attempt than Google's previous attempts, namely Google Wave and Google Buzz. It brings a familiar interface, but clearly bears the Google mark: clean, minimal, but with some well thought-out improvements. That's to be expected, given that the service is Google's next big push - they closed the beta rather quickly and only a small number of users have been invited thus far, all in the name of using a sort of control group to improve the service before opening the flood gates.
For every Windows Phone 7-inspired app, launcher, or theme we've written about, a half-dozen more, often clones, go unmentioned. But every now and then we find something we haven't seen before, and this is one of those times. It's called WP7Contacts, and as you would surmise, it's a contact manager inspired by Windows Phone 7.
The features:
- Sync contacts from SIM and Gmail
- Add new contact or edit existing one
- Search contacts by clicking search button. If one contact remains swipe up or click for edit contact
- Sort contacts by clicking all under people. You can sort by phone or email
- Chose own picture by clicking on the picture under the All/With Phone/With Email
- Quick search by letter by clicking blue letters.
It seems the explosive growth of smartphone use has had some unintended consequences: U.S. carriers are moving towards tiered data. While some carriers have had "soft" caps for years, we've recently seen a move towards hard caps. "Tiered" plans have long been standard in other parts of the world, but the simple difference is that US carriers charge significantly more across the board - be it basic plans (just minutes), add-on's (such as texting), or data (whether used on a plan or as-you-go).
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