Aaron Gingrich  
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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. |
A fairly simple question this week: what is your primary portable music player? Do you still have a personal media player (PMP), or do you rely on your phone? Or perhaps another device - or none at all? Sound off in the poll below, then head down to the comments to discuss.
The next Nexus device, at least unofficially dubbed the Prime, has been very highly anticipated, especially as the scheduled reveal (originally October 11th) neared. Unfortunately, the announcement has been postponed due to the passing of Steve Jobs, and is now reportedly scheduled for October 27.
The Prime is rumored to pack some serious power, packing anything from a 1.2 - 1.5 GHz dual-core CPU, a high-end 5MP-8MP camera, 1GB of RAM, a fairly large (4.3" - 4.65") screen packing a 1280x720 resolution, and perhaps most notably, will usher in the next iteration of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).
We've been hearing about the Nexus Prime for months now, but things have really been heating up in the past week or so: first, Samsung released an official teaser trailer about the event and gave us a glimpse of the device's side profile. And yesterday, we had two conflicting sets of specs "leak out" (though obviously neither was confirmed). Finally, the official AndroidDevelopers YouTube account put up a video called "Android ICS Launch," set to stream during the Samsung Unpacked event in which the Prime and ICS were set to be revealed.
Update: Samsung's own blog confirms the delay.
Just a few days ago, Best Buy dropped the price of the HTC Flyer to just $300, and today they've dropped it further to $100. At that price, it certainly seems like a fire sale (similar to the HP TouchPad), but at this point it's unclear what's prompting the uber-low price.
As a quick reminder, the Flyer has a 7" screen, single-core 1.5GHz CPU, front and rear cameras, an SD card slot, and 16GB of on-board storage. At the moment it merely runs Gingerbread, but HTC has long promised an update to Honeycomb (and/or hopefully Ice Cream Sandwich) sometime soon.
The first of Amazon's two new Android tablets has officially been revealed (the second one is rumored to be coming out towards the end of the year), and features a 7" 1024x600 display, 1GHz dual-core CPU, 8GB of storage, and a heavily modified Android experience with an emphasis on Amazon's cloud services - all for just $200.
Given that the price of similar (but larger) tablets is still in the $400+ neighborhood (unless you want to compare it to the Nook Color or original Galaxy Tab, though both are substantially less powerful), will the lower cost yet powerful specs be enough to make the Fire the de facto standard in the tablet world?
The Android Police giveaway fever continues, but this time we've stepped things up with a triple header. Once again, we've teamed up with NVIDIA to give away three Motorola Photon 4Gs. Why? Because NVIDIA and Tegra Zone are awesome.
As I myself have discovered in the past few weeks, the Photon is a great phone that packs some serious power under the hood:
Before we move on to the giveaway, I wanted to mention our awesome sponsor, NVIDIA, once again.
On September 14, Sprint revealed that an update to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) was rolling out for the LG Optimus S. Seems like a good thing, right? Not so fast, actually - it turns out there are some fairly substantial bugs that weren't worked out before rolling out the update. Sprint is aware of the keyboard issue but has yet to acknowledge the other problems users seem to be experiencing, such as issues charging and using USB storage.
Update: Sprint pulled the Gingerbread update for the time being.
We've already had over 150 comments relating to the update, issues, and potential fixes, so I thought it would be a good idea to compile some of the suggestions into a post.
We already know the Samsung Galaxy S II (SGSII) is a huge success (even compared to the original SGS), but now sales of the uberphone have been kicked up even higher. In the last 8 weeks, sales have gone from 5 million to 10 million - or 625,000 units sold per week. And here's the real kicker: the press release expressly states "Model: GT-I9100," meaning these sales figures don't even include the United States.
Between the Sprint SGSII (the Epic 4G Touch), which just hit shelves, and the U.S. T-Mobile and AT&T variants going on sale soon, that number should ratchet up even further.
Possibly the simplest (and undoubtedly the shortest!) question we've ever asked in a Weekend Poll... how many apps have you purchased in the last month? Sound off in the poll, then head on down to the comments to discuss!
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A new version of SwiftKey X has been released to private beta testers, and it brings quite a few improvements. Chief among them: the ability to learn from your blog via RSS - certainly a nifty feature. Other highlights include better error reporting, general performance improvements, and a number of bug fixes. The update also brings a new novelty feature in the form of the "My typing heatmap," which keeps track of keystrokes and displays a "heatmap" of the keyboard.
What's new in this version?
New features:
- Autocaps toggle - now choose whether your sentences begin with a capital letter or not
- Better personalization - SwiftKey can now learn your typing style from your blog
- Language switching - easy transitions between (e.g.) English and Russian keyboards, just slide the spacebar
- More stats about how you type with SwiftKey - and more links to share them
- My typing heatmap - cool visualization shows how you use your keyboard
Improvements:
- Alternative character selection - now select with a slide rather than a new tap (this works for smileys too)
- Instant language updates - refresh your language list to see new languages and new updates as soon as they are ready
- Various layout and user interface usability improvements.
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