Brad Ganley - 6/11 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Brad Ganley

An Android power user, Brad consumes most of his free time with unhealthy amounts of cell phones and cell phone related things when he isn't playing with his son. Brad is also an avid movie-watcher and tea-drinker.

Oct

Broadcast Networks Block Google TV, Stay Stuck In The '90s

Posted by Brad Ganley in Google TV, Internet TV, Logitech, News, Sony

Google TV hasn't been in the wild for long, but major content providers like ABC, CBS, and NBC are already blocking their content from Google's awesome little TV companion. This, as you might have guessed, sucks.

With the advent of TV on the Internet, broadcasters have shown us time and time again that they just aren't ready to embrace the fact that we can get their content from sources other than our TVs. Luckily, says Reuters, Google is reported to be in active negotiations with the networks to get this content back on. As I'm sure you've guessed already, that essentially means that Google is figuring out how much money the networks are going to demand.

Oct

T-Mobile's HSPA+ "Not Ready In All Areas"

Posted by Brad Ganley in G2 (Vision), T-Mobile

Allen Kiehl over at AndroidSpin has recently posted a pretty unbelievable tale about his experience with network issues on his G2 and what T-Mobile recommends he do about them. The story starts out pretty commonplace: he was experience network issues such as dropped calls, not receiving calls or text messages at all, and a finicky data connection. All of these are symptoms of a bad device, right? Wrong.

What happened next blew both Allen and myself away. T-Mobile recommended he swap it out for an entirely different device or leave their network. Here is what they told him exactly:

I would recommend that you take advantage of the buyer's remorse program as we do not have an ETA when the issue will be resolved.

Oct

[Review] Trident Cyclops Case For The HTC EVO 4G

Posted by Brad Ganley in Other Reviews, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

The folks from Trident Cases were nice enough to send me a review unit of their brand new Trident Cyclops for the HTC EVO 4G. I must say, after putting this case on and using for a few hours, there are several reasons that this is my new favorite case, and I'd like to do some show and tell.

My first impression of the Cyclops was actually a direct result of its packaging.

There's a lot that can be said for good, clean packaging, and this box delivers with some cool tech info and a QR code that takes you to a video of a Trident employee smacking around an iPad in one of their cases.

Oct

Evernote 2.0 Beta Changes Everything For The Better With A Complete Rewrite, Finally Gets Offline Storage

Posted by Brad Ganley in App Reviews, Applications, News, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

Evernote is one of those services that does one thing and does it extremely well: it takes your notes, organizes them, and helps keep your life together. The beauty of Evernote is that it works everywhere (desktop, web, mobile) but, until recently, the Android app has been a bit... lackluster. It was not just a bit clunky and bland - that we could live with. The biggest downside of the Android client, as noted by countless 1-star reviews, was the need to maintain an Internet connection to read and write notes, meaning the app didn't support offline storage of any kind.

Oct

Sanyo Zio And Samsung Transform Now Hitting Sprint Shelves

Posted by Brad Ganley in News, Samsung, Sanyo, Sprint, Transform, Zio

The first two of Sprint's latest three-phone, mid-range lineup are now arriving to various Sprint retailers, such as Best Buy, sprint.com, Wirefly.com, and others. While they aren't the powerhouses that we've gotten used to, the Sanyo Zio and the Samsung Transform are good introductory-level Android devices for people who want to dump their feature phones for smartphones without having to shell out the big bucks. They are joining the ranks of Sprint's other low-to-mid-range phones, such as the Samsung Intercept and the HTC Hero.

Sanyo Zio

The Sanyo Zio offers a 3.2-inch touchscreen, mobile hotspot, and a 3.2MP camera with autofocus.

Oct

Adobe AIR Lands In Android Market, Doesn't Do Much Of Anything Yet

Posted by Brad Ganley in Applications, News

A while back we were shown a leaked release of Adobe AIR for Android and told stories of its incredible capabilities. Well, the time has come. Twitter is now lighting up with reports about it and it is now available in the Android Market.

Here is Adobe's explanation of AIR for Android:

Adobe® AIR® will let you publish ActionScript 3 projects to run as native applications (.apk) for the Android OS. These AIR applications can be delivered to Android devices through Android application stores such as the Android Market.

Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build AIR applications for the Android OS.

Oct

[App Review] WolframAlpha Makes Your Phone A Supercomputer

Posted by Brad Ganley in App Reviews, Applications, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

Recently, Wolfram Alpha LLC dropped the official WolframAlpha app into the market. It is one of my favorite services and I purchased it ($1.99) as soon as it came out. For those not familiar, this is a clip from the "about" page of WolframAlpha to give you some idea of what this is all about:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Oct

Skype For Android Can Now Make Calls Over 3G In The US, No Thanks To Skype

Posted by Brad Ganley in Applications, Development, News

This is really no big deal for Verizon users who have been able to do that since March but, thanks to some creative tweaking, the all-carrier version of Skype for Android can now make calls over 3G in the US. If you remember, the version distributed in the Market prompts you to enable WiFi in order to make calls to both Skype and regular phone numbers.

Xeudoxus (known for his work on Dark Edge) got a bit creative with the Skype apk and has released it to the on-the-go Skyping masses. If you're a Skype user who frequently makes phone calls via the service, this could potentially be a godsend.

Oct

HTCSense.com Goes Live

Posted by Brad Ganley in Applications, Desire HD (Ace), Desire Z (Vision), News

Last night, @IncredibleDoes threw a shout out on Twitter to let the world know that HTCSense.com was now live.

While the selection of users and phones that can utilize the service right now is very (more like extremely) limited, it is still exciting to see this coming to fruition. There are devices both upcoming and already out that are slated to receive the new Sense, and it is nothing short of mind-blowing how much functionality they've added.

If you want to go and check it out, go for it. If you don't have a Desire Z or Desire HD, you won't get very far because even after you register, the site prompts you to sign in from your phone.

Oct

Source Code Released For Desire MR-2.6.32 Kernel

Posted by Brad Ganley in Desire (Bravo/BravoC), News

Last Updated: August 1st, 2012

If you are unfamiliar with rooting or ROMs, you can check out our primers here, because we're going to talk about it:

User lalexi over at xda-developers just posted a link to HTC's official release of the Desire's kernel source code. This is very good news for the development community because, as it stands, developers have to simply patch bugs that occur when trying to overclock the processor and getting things to work, sometimes incompletely, trial-and-error style. They are all fixed in this source code and now all that's left is for the developers to focus on adding functionality rather than fixing broken functionality.