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Looks like those of you on the regional carrier Cellular South can finally join the Droid fray... with a phone that’s a year old. On the plus side, it was (is?) an incredibly popular phone, and for good reason. On the downside, the device is now fairly outdated and overpriced. A reminder of the specs:
A picture of a Droid 2’s Quadrant benchmark results has been released, and its score is the best stock store to date at 1,458. This is especially impressive considering the phone is apparently straight from the box.
OKCupid (via Gizmodo) published an extremely interesting (but very in-depth) article detailing all kinds of smartphone and camera data. There were a number of interesting things in the article, perhaps the most relevant of which is that Android users have nearly half the number of sexual partners as iPhone users. Age bias is eliminated because the poll was conducted on 30 year-olds, rather than the mass populace. No real use for that information, but funny and interesting.
CyanogenMod 6 is continuing its rampage: last night the first Nightly build of CM6 was released for the HTC Aria (a.k.a. the Liberty) and CDMA HTC Hero. This should make the users of these phones quite happy - CM is the single most popular Android ROM, and for good reason.
Early last month, Robert Stephens, CTO for Best Buy, revealed via Twitter that the company was working on an Android tablet. The good news: he’s now tweeted a few pictures of a RocketFish branded tablet, and boy does it look good (actually, it looks startlingly similar to the iPhone 4). The bad news: Engadget says it lacks internals (although I couldn’t find that anywhere). Somehow, despite the fact that it evidently has nothing inside, Stephens claims it runs Froyo and has a front-facing camera for video calling over Fring.
[Updated August 6 @ 10:15 AM EST]
Damageless and TrevE have been hard at work for the past few weeks porting Froyo to the EVO. On July 24th, they released the first DC 3.5 (Froyo) beta. Today (in the wee hours of the morning) they released their final build - and users seem to be loving it. The guys have also set up a Google Code page for DC, which provides a wiki and bug database, in addition to the usual news/latest version page.
A few days ago, we reported that the Facebook app had been updated, and now included “less suck”; turns out we may have been wrong (that pun will make sense in a minute). Flipz, the developer behind the awesome Fresh ROM’s, has done his homework and found that the updated Facebook App has a wake lock bug that drains the battery fairly significantly.
On June 23, Eric Schmidt told the world that Google was tracking 160,000 Android devices sold per day – and just a month before that, they were at 100,000/day. Today, he revealed that 200,000 Android devices are sold every day. It’s truly amazing, especially considering the scope of other devices – as much as I hate to do this, I’m going to drag in the iDevices, and quote the figures I stated in June:
The newest Android Platform Version numbers are out, and the news is both good and bad. Android 2.2 (Froyo) now has 4.5% of the market, while Android 2.1 (Eclair) commands 59.7% – meanwhile, Android 1.5 and 1.6 (Cupcake and Donut) still account for a whopping 35.6%.
Facebook released an updated version of their Android app today and finally addressed many reported issues – namely, that it was underpowered in comparison to the Facebook app for the iPhone, or even the mobile site. Tonight’s update brings a slew of improvements, raising the app to a level that puts it on par with its sister app on iOS.
This is exactly why I love Android so much and the awesome developer community around it. Case in point: the official Android 2.2 update for the EVO 4G has already been rooted by netarchy over at XDA-Devs. Yea – the update that was just released yesterday… pretty impressive stuff. Be forewarned, though – the update may not play nice with the previous (non-final) update that was released.
Rumor around the interwebs in the last few days has been that Samsung may be planning on announcing the Samsung Galaxy Tab during the August 11th press conference.
Awesome ROM dev Flipz has sent out a beta of his newest ROM(Fresh Evo 3.0) to testers. Unlike other FroYo ROMs, such as CM6, Fresh Evo 3.0 is based on the official (but not final) Android 2.2 update (accidentally) released by HTC last night, rather than AOSP (Android Open Source Project) code. Hopefully, this provides an experience close to stock, but with minor improvements.
I watch a lot of movies on my TV through my PC (rather than my 360, since Netflix says I have to have a Live Gold membership – stupid). This setup works just fine, since my PC sits right under my TV anyway, so my couch is just a few feet away. However, this means that any time I want to control the movie, I have to get up and go to the computer to do so – a definite pain. I made a few attempts at using VNC apps to do so, but they’re not well suited for such a simple task. Enter Gmote – an app designed to make your phone function as a remote control for watching movies on your PC.
Looks like Verizon isn’t looking to be a distant second in the race to FroYo, as they’ve just dropped word that the original Motorola Droid is scheduled to receive the Android 2.2 (FroYo) update sometime next week. Given that FroYo is a huge step up from Eclair (2.1), and the Droid commands somewhere around 30% of the Android market, this is big news. Take it with a grain of salt, though – Verizon has a history of delaying updates.
Antennagate may be a little played out by this point, but you can’t blame Motorola for trying to capitalize on it for as long as possible.
