Artem Russakovskii   | Artem is a die-hard Android fan, passionate tech blogger, obsessive-compulsive editor, bug hunting programmer, and the founder of Android Police. Most of the time, you will find Artem either hacking away at code or thinking of the next 15 blog posts. |
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
This edition focuses only on new games. The app roundup is coming up soon, and you can find the tablet app roundup here.
Today's roundup is sponsored by HeroCraft's latest game - Musaic Box.
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous 3 weeks or so.
This edition focuses only on new tablet apps or ones that added Honeycomb support. Regular apps and games are coming soon.
Android Police coverage: Age Of Defenders Hits The Android Market At Last, Successfully Marrying Tower Defense And Strategy Genres
Android Police review: [New Game Review] Age Of Defenders Easily Overshadows Existing Tower Defense Games With A Polished, Thoughtful, Unique Approach
New trend in the Tower Defense genre is here.
In my continuous hunt for new apps, I sometimes run into such obvious malware/crapware that it causes an immediate virtual gag reflex. Sometimes, however, this malware is cleverly disguised and to an unsuspecting user it may seem legitimate.
Here, have a look at what I found today:
If you briefly scanned this page, you may have missed the fact that the publisher's name is MicrosDft Corporation (in all caps), or that it's requesting a permission to directly dial phone numbers without your intervention, or that the website in the listing is msM.com.
Thankfully, the amount of 1-star user reviews is now starting to look alarming, but that wouldn't have been the case if you saw it right as it came out.
I'm surprised this didn't come sooner, but better late than never, right? The full Galaxy Nexus (presumably GSM) system dump, together with boot and recovery images were leaked earlier today by none other than Paul O'Brien, the founder of MoDaCo, a talented developer, and creator of many custom ROMs. If you remember, previously only the apps as well as certain bits and pieces of Ice Cream Sandwich were made available for download.
The files were extracted by Paul from a test device running build ICL23D and are about 170MB in size combined. You can download all 3 of them over at MoDaCo.
Over the past week, I've been in contact with Sprint about the demise of their network's data speeds, especially in the 3G department. As many of you were also in the same boat, we saw quite a bit of interest and started collecting information on the situation, which resulted in this knowledge dump on Sunday - read it if you haven't yet done so.
Among the tidbits of info Sprint techs let out, one was especially interesting - a round of tower upgrades that were supposed to be completed on October 31st. We were skeptical. Many of you were as well.
Well, this didn't take long. A little while ago, a new app called AppExtractor that can restore individual apps from ClockworkMod backups appeared in the Market seemingly out of nowhere. The app was welcomed by many of us who do custom ROM flashing here and there, sometimes wishing we could only restore a few little things from our Nandroid backups rather than having to restore whole ROMs.
As of today, Titanium Backup, sort of a de facto app in the app backup/restore business on Android, can now do the same thing. Well, kind of - it can do a little subset of what AppExtractor can do at this point, but it's a great start.
Sprint has network problems. Major problems. And they've gotten a lot worse lately. Really, really bad. Not all areas are affected - and in fact some have improved already, but more and more areas are getting so bad that Sprint's 3G data is completely unusable there, especially since the introduction of the iPhone. Troubleshooting and update my phone's "profile" and PRL didn't help, as evident from the screenshot #2 you see below.
Earlier this week I contacted Sprint's customer service, followed by an email to an executive and CEO Dan Hesse himself (or whoever fields his emails). The former told me there was a tower outage in my area, and a fix was incoming the next day (as you've guessed nothing is fixed as of today, 5 days later).
Hot on the heels of the previous privacy/security advisory about A.I.type Keyboard sending your keystrokes to the cloud in plain-text, some of our commenters pointed out another, much more popular app that does something similarly privacy-invading.
As it turns out, Dolphin HD, one of the top browsers the Android platform has to offer, sends pretty much every web page url you visit, including those that start with https, to a remote server en.mywebzines.com, which belongs to the company. In fact, the WebZines feature was introduced only recently back in June with version 6.0, so it's safe to say this tracking started around the same time.
The Android 4.0 API that was released together with the unveiling of the Galaxy Nexus also brought us, developers, ADT 14 and SDK Tools r14, which quite a few people started having problems with almost immediately. The tools were released in an incomplete state based on my experience with ADT 14-preview, as some serious and known bugs weren't fixed when 14-final came out. I have a feeling the ICS event kind forced the corresponding ADT/tools 14 release and prompted Google to roll it out in what I consider a broken state (many reported crashes, broken Logcat, etc).
Thankfully, the tools team (hi, Tor and Xav!) persistently worked on the issues and just released ADT 15 and SDK Tools 15, brining much relief to those of us experiencing said problems (the un-pausable scrolling Logcat was killing me in the last few weeks).
One of the features that really differentiates Android from other mobile operating systems is the ability to install a custom keyboard that works for you. I constantly keep jumping between a variety of keyboards as new updates come out (right now I've settled on SwiftKey due to its unparalleled prediction technology), but when some of our readers pointed out A.I.type Keyboard's "psychic" word completion, I had to check it out.
However, what I found in A.I. Keyboard's Market description prevented me from even installing it - all smart predictions happen in the cloud, which means everything you type (or almost everything) gets sent over the data connection to their servers.
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