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.

01
Jun
new_android_apps_thumb1_thumb_thumb3

Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android games and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Please wait for this page to load in full in order to see the AppBrain widgets, which include ratings and pricing info.

Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here:

Games

Plants vs Zombies

Android Police coverage: PopCap’s Plants Vs Zombies Finally Reaches Android – Free Download Today On The Amazon Appstore

Plants vs Zombies needs no introduction - PopCap's infamous (from the PC world) and highly anticipated game is now on Android.

31
May
wm_IMG_9155
Last Updated: February 8th, 2012

Intro

For the past 3 weeks, I've been rigorously testing Samsung's latest Android tablet - the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and I am happy to report that my verdict is now out. I hope you will forgive such a long review timeline, but I wanted to really dig in deep and get the full experience, all while comparing it to that of the Motorola XOOM.

I know a lot of you will jump to the Conclusion right away, but I urge you to read all the interesting sections as well - In A Nutshell, The Good, and The Not So Good at a minimum.

31
May
image

The wait is over, guys - PopCap's hands down best game, Plants Vs Zombies, finally reached Android minutes ago after many months of anticipation. Normally $2.99, PvZ is available for free exclusively on the Amazon Android Appstore.

The game is a little on the heavy side - be prepared to dedicate 75MB of free space to it (though at least in CyanogenMod, all but 232KB can be moved to SD without any problems).

After a period of exclusivity, PopCap will upload it to the Android Market for everyone to use - until then, it's just us, U.S. folks. Sorry, rest of the world :( (unless you use the tricks posted in the comments that is ;)).

30
May
image
Last Updated: February 8th, 2012

Photo syncing is not a novel idea at all - there are countless solutions that do it on a regular basis, but instant photo uploading the moment it is taken is something I've been looking forward to for a long time. And now it's here, thanks to Chris Soyars, aka ctso - one of the senior CyanogenMod developers.

Chris's new app, DropSnap, has a very simple purpose - get your photos synced up to the cloud the moment you take them. I'm not exaggerating - it really is that fast (of course, depending on your data connection). For example, on Wi-Fi, freshly snapped pictures were synced to Dropbox and back to my computer before I could open my mouth and say "Android rocks".

30
May
image
Last Updated: September 16th, 2012

Looks like Verizon Wireless has taken a page out of AT&T's playbook, as the latest Gingerbread update for the Droid X now seems to detect tethering apps not approved by the carrier and cut off users' data, replacing all requests with an upsale page for the official hotspot add-on. This is now the 2nd wave of attacks against free tethering, following a global carrier block (with the exception of good old Sprint) of the most popular tethering apps on the Android Market.

According to a Reddit community member with a melodic name Poop_Cooper, all data on his Droid X was suddenly cut off after he updated his Droid X to the latest Androd release and started using the popular Wireless Tether application to share his mobile connection with devices around him.

30
May
image

We already kind of knew a tablet/phone tag team would be coming out of ASUS at Computex this week, so today's leaked press photos of the symbiotic duo, simply called Padfone, neither shock nor disappoint.

What ASUS will undoubtedly officially announce tomorrow is a brainless tablet shell combined with a phone that fits snugly right in the back, held by this ridiculous-looking mechanism that teases my imagination with a world full of Russian Matryoshka-like devices that all fit inside each other.

Update 5/30/11: It's official! See the press release towards the bottom. Just like with the Atrix, the phone will charge from the tablet's battery, and judging by Engadget's announcement photos, it looks like the phone will be running Gingerbread, while the tablet will be rocking Honeycomb.

29
May
image

Remember Project Kal-El, NVIDIA's first mobile quad-core CPU with 12 GPU cores that was announced back in February of this year? The one that was supposed to be 5 times faster than the current generation Tegra 2, which you can find in such devices as the Motorola Atrix 4G, the LG G2x/2X, the XOOM, the ASUS Transformer, the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and pretty much all other modern tablets.

As the Kal-El chip progresses towards completion in the 2nd half of 2011, NVIDIA put together a 4-minute video demo featuring a Kal-El powered tablet running Honeycomb and a little game optimized to use 4 cores, called Glowball.

29
May
image

Well, well, well, what do we have here? Why, it's the Android 3.1 update for the ASUS Transformer that we were all expecting early next week. The 220MB package conveniently showed up on the web earlier this morning, bringing joy to Transformer owners who are reporting successful updates without any issues.

The Android 3.1 update to Honeycomb brings performance fixes, an enhanced app switcher, resizable widgets, and alleged improvements to the keyboard dock.

Grab the download file from our mirror here (I've already untarred the original .tar file so you don't have to) and then proceed to the slightly tweaked instructions below:

Note: You will likely lose root if you're already rooted, as this is a stock update.

28
May
image

Remember the stunning MyWater live wallpaper that was ripped out of the Transformer a month ago, complete with ice cubes floating in water that shifts around when you tilt your tablet? Here it is:

image

I actually had no idea but apparently the water level changes depending on the battery charge level. Very cool!

This was the only live wallpaper I've ever considered running on my XOOM - it's original, well done, and constantly draws intrigued stares from the people around. It was the only one until today that is, when I saw Ruvort's custom mods to it over at XOOMForums.com.