Artem Russakovskii
Contributing since March, 2010
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1398articles
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About Artem Russakovskii
Artem is a die-hard Android fan, passionate tech blogger, obsessive-compulsive editor, bug hunting programmer, and the founder of Android Police and APK Mirror. Most of the time, you will find Artem either hacking away at code or thinking of the next 15 blog posts.
Latest Articles
After months of anticipation and weeks of delays, we kind of lost faith and thought this day would never come. However, the HTC Thunderbolt just went live on VZW's own site, including free overnight shipping, which means you can get your hands on the first LTE phone by the 18th (unless you go to a local store, of course).
The Netflix app wasn't the only good thing that came out of the LG Revolution system dump posted earlier today by Android Spin - feast your eyes (and your ears) on 13 beautiful wallpapers ripped right out of the Revolution's entrails, together with 31 ringtones and 20 notification sounds.
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 week or so.
Take a deep breath - it's really starting to look like the Thunderbolt saga is approaching the end. Verizon's first 4G LTE device has been through a rollercoaster of predictions, disappointments, and broken promises (over and over), but the latest confirmed date of March 17th we told you about earlier is indeed proving to be legitimate.
Late last night, the Android team pushed out a set of changes to the Android app publishing interface that developers use to upload and maintain their apps. The new features, while completely invisible to the end-users, are absolutely fascinating to app developers.
The reincarnation of the Sidekick brand didn't quite come as a complete surprise after T-Mobile teased its return back in January, followed by a nice photo leak that showed the latest thumb-killer, this time made by Samsung, in its full glory. However, it's always nice to get official confirmations and specs from the carrier itself, and that's exactly what T-Mobile is gracing us with today.
Remember the first Xperia Play commercial that aired during Super Bowl? The one with Andy getting human thumbs attached to his green hands so he can play games? Yeah, the one that sent creepy chills down so many kids' spines (although, personally, I absolutely loved it).
Yesterday, in the first part of the new Boot Animations series here at AP, we posted 5 boot animations that replace those boring stock snoozers your carrier ships your Android phones with.
For the past few weeks, a very talented Android Police fan Mike Smith has been working on something special for us - our very own video intro that we can use as a pre-roll in the YouTube channel going forward. Today, I'm proud to show all of you the final product.
Dolphin HD, one of the most popular Android browsers, has been pretty unusable on large tablet screens due to choppiness and lag caused by the CPU having to work with a much bigger area. For example, when we got a demo unit of the Galaxy Tab, the problem was quite apparent to the point of Dolphin being downright frustrating on relatively complex sites.
A couple of weeks ago, I ran into a new game by Art in Games called AirAttack HD Lite, which was a free preview version of a top-down plane shooter, but with only 2 levels. The game was polished so well that I finished the 2 levels in a heartbeat and was left longing for more. In fact, if you remember, I called AirAttack HD "not your dream game, but the one after that."
DI.FM fans, in an announcement on Facebook, your favorite radio station just dropped its Android app (previously available as only an off-Market beta) in the Android Market. Being one of such fans - Digitally Imported Premium is one of the few services I pay for monthly - I can tell you that the app is superb - it's clean, well designed, functional, and not over-bloated with features nobody needs.
As you may know, one of Motorola XOOM's current biggest drawbacks is the absence of Adobe Flash, necessary to view Flash-powered websites and play Flash games. While this feature is widely advertised, Motorola warned us that the tablet would actually ship without Flash support bundled in, but will be updated to include it in a few weeks.
Even though SwiftKey has always been my favorite keyboard in theory, I've never been able to truly make the move from the HTC keyboard on my EVO to it for one reason - it didn't have arrow keys exposed on the main screen. Prediction was also about the same - sometimes worse, sometimes better, so I stuck with the HTC stock offering, giving SwiftKey's new versions a try here and there.
One of my greatest annoyances with Android, as a developer and an employee having to connect to my company's VPN, is the complete lack of attention to usability of VPN-related activities. Not only is it impossible to pull out a widget to connect to a VPN server, but Google apparently thought it wasn't useful (and so insecure that it shouldn't even be an option) to add the ability to save the VPN password. Sure, it's more secure to type it up every time, but I give you 3 tries before you want to pull out your hair, especially on a shaky connection.
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 week or so.
Sprint has been mum about its 2011 lineup throughout this whole year until yesterday, when we finally got a break and caught wind of not 1 but 3 upcoming Sprint Android devices - the Nexus S 4G, the EVO 3D, and the EVO View tablet. The rumors were dropped to both Engadget and AndroidAndMe by an anonymous tipster, but both sites seemed confident in their sources, meaning it wasn't the first time the same credible tipster provided reliable information.
Up until some recent events, it was quite hard to get through to Google regarding anything going on in the Android Market, be it stolen apps, copyrighted material, or getting any feedback regarding why your own app was removed. Sure, they still listened to DMCA requests and malware reports, but it seems that complaints by mostly large copyright owners saw any action, while reports by small-time developers getting ignored were getting abundant around the web.
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 week or so.