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NEC, Casio, And Hitachi, known as NEC Casio Mobile Communications since their merger in 2009, have been pretty quiet about their Android plans so far. However, after seeing Panasonic take the plunge yesterday and announce its plans to enter the Android market in 2011, NEC Casio couldn't hold it anymore and spilled the beans today.
Remember The Milk is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful task management solutions on the market, and its Android app is pure awesomeness. It is extremely polished, and I rely on it reminding me about my tasks, including various Android Police business, every day.
Here I was, innocently browsing the Yahoo homepage today (I use it as a random site to test my tethered connection), minding my own business. Imagine my surprise when the main navigation column suddenly started peeling off to reveal a so-dear-to-my-heart EVO 4G. Continuing to watch this technique, I observed a flat screen TV and a Blu-ray player before finally seeing the perpetrator on the right - Best Buy. While I'm not usually a fan of Flash ads, this one amused me and reminded me of the upcoming holidays with all the presents that still needed to be bought. Have you gotten your holiday presents ready yet, like that EVO 4G? Time is ticking!
The Motorola Droid Pro, Android's first real answer to Blackberry candybar style phones with a full QWERTY keyboard, is now available across the web and in VZW's retail stores.
Samsung, which has been under fire from consumers for repeatedly delaying Android 2.2. updates on their Galaxy S line of phones, recently posted an announcement for its Canadian customers on Bell, TELUS, and Rogers. In the announcement, Samsung apologized for delaying the long-awaited update and cited rigorous testing as the current stage of the rollout process.
Whoa! Only a few hours after sending out a notification about a big Market maintenance, Google sneakily updated the Market publishing interface with a variety of new options, pointing to nothing less than an updated Market likely to launch very soon, probably together with Gingerbread. The presence of higher resolution graphics underscores Google's newly embraced support for tablets and TVs, and possibly suggests that Market web interface we've been waiting for since Google I/O is finally around the corner.
Winamp, one of my favorite desktop music players, recently landed in the Android Market, and has since become one of my favorite mobile players as well, at least until PowerAMP came along. One glaring omission, however, has been the absence of Shoutcast streaming, meaning thousands of online radio stations (such as DI.fm) that are easily accessible via the desktop version, weren't available on mobile. I don't like having to use a whole different app just for radio, but, alas, I had to resort to using TuneWiki or XiiaLive, neither of which I was a fan of.
One of the most sought for features of the Google Docs mobile interface has always been support for editing documents. As its stands now, you get read-only access, and any editing functionality can be achieved by using external apps, which is far from ideal, especially for quick edits. Note that I'm talking about documents and not spreadsheets here - those have been editable for quite a while now.
As a registered Android developer, today I, along with thousands of other devs, got the following email from the Android Market Support team. The email informed me that the developer console, which is the interface used for publishing new apps, will be unavailable this Thursday, November 18th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. PST. The customer-facing Market itself will continue working just fine (or so I hope at least), but no new applications or app updates will be allowed.
Papaya Mobile, the maker of the popular Papaya game and the social SDK behind it, today announced the upcoming release of the Papaya Game Engine for Android. The new engine is completely free to use and offers a number of benefits to developers looking to write Android games. It isn't available for download just yet, but it should be available shortly.
Today, I was looking at the Android Development Tools (ADT) commit history, as I normally do on a Tuesday morning at 3am, and I noticed something that made my heart skip a few beats. But let me back up for a second.
What a day for Froyo! First, we had the Dell Streak, which has been long overdue for some frozen yogurt, and now not 1 but 4 more phones are receiving their Froyo updates. They are:
Exactly a week after getting rooted and only a few days after getting its very first CyanogenMod nightly release, HTC Desire Z and T-Mobile G2 owners can now upgrade to RC1 (release candidate 1), bringing it up to speed with the rest of the devices supported by the CM team. Apparently, these guys move at light speed.
As we mentioned over the weekend, the UK Dell Streaks were on the verge of finally getting that sweet, delicious Froyo upgrade, and now we are able to provide the rollout schedule in more detail.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, was scheduled to appear at the Web 2.0 Summit today, and while some speculated that he might finally announce Gingerbread to the world, I had my doubts about whether he would actually announce the update rather than talking about it on some tangent. Unfortunately, the truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, with Eric only brushing up on a few things and then going off about the general strategy.
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications and games that went live in the Market in the previous week or so.
Smack down in between the New York Sprint 4G launch on November 1st and the upcoming Los Angeles launch on December 1st, Sprint announced today that the California state capital is also joining the WiMax party, effective immediately. Sacramento residents will now be able to enjoy average download speeds of 3-6 Mbps and upload speeds of around 500 Kbps-1.5 Mbps.
After getting rooted four days ago, the T-Mobile G2 and its European counterpart, the Desire Z, finally joined the ranks of fully unlocked Android phones, which give us the freedom to replace the ROMs on these devices with something better and more custom.
About a month and a half ago, we announced our biggest contest yet - your creativity expressed as an official Android Police t-shirt design in exchange for an Android phone, courtesy of Samsung.
In our last week's poll, we asked you your thoughts on the best overall Android music player, and over 1500 of you responded, clearly putting PowerAMP ahead of the competition, followed by Winamp. PowerAMP released the full version shortly after and still occupies the #1 spot for playing local music in my book.