David Ruddock
Contributing since June, 2010
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3358articles
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About David Ruddock
David is the former Editor-in-Chief of Android Police and now the EIC of Esper.io. He's been an Android user since the early days - his first smartphone was a Google Nexus One! David graduated from the University of California, Davis where he received his bachelor's degree, and also attended the Pepperdine University School of Law.
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Whenever I hear about the latest and greatest tablet under $100, I get a little bit sad inside. It's sort of like that feeling you get when you see a 3-legged dog - your heart is mildly warmed by its perseverance, but the rest of you would much rather look away and think about something a little less... depressing.
Let's be frank: RIM's BlackBerry products are unilaterally, shall we say, unexciting. And RIM's new theme song should probably be this. And by "unexciting," I mean ugly, hopelessly dated, and so boring that a story about them spontaneously bursting into flames might actually give the company some much-needed edginess in their marketing campaigns. Maybe that's a bridge too far.
Verifying a rumor put out by BGR over a month ago, HTC has announced after a dismal end to 2011 (net profits fell 26% last quarter) that the company will be changing its handset strategy to focus on fewer, "hero" devices in the coming year. The problem of excessive handset iteration is one I've opined on before. It is a problem, and while it's unlikely that HTC's balance sheet woes were even in majority caused by the large number of handsets they released, making fewer models is certainly a way to cut costs and increase the amount of attention that goes into each product.
A recent Newsweek article has been making the rounds claiming, through an unnamed Apple "insider," that Apple has spent north of $100 million litigating its various grievances against HTC since late 2010. Verifying the accuracy of this number is pretty much impossible. But that doesn't really matter. It may just as well be $80 million, $150 million, or $300 million - the conclusion drawn would remain the same: Apple is spending quite a chunk of income on its growing lawsuit habit.
This a cause I think we can all get behind. Back in 2010, the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress issued a rulemaking statement exempting smartphones and DVDs from reverse engineering laws under the DMCA. Previously, companies like Apple had used these provisions to threaten criminal prosecution (as well as civil action) against those who "jailbroke" (rooted) devices such as the iPhone (or iPad). The exemption to these penalties put in place by the Copyright Office extended to the "jailbreaking" (or, as we know it in the Android community, rooting) of all smartphones (it also extends to things like bootloader unlocking). Now, that exemption is about to expire, if the rulemaking committee does not renew it. The EFF wants your help, in the form of submitting writings to the Copyright Office explaining why the exemption should not be allowed to expire.
Now, we're an Android blog and all, but we aren't exactly deaf to the seemingly never-ending corporate death-curdle that is Research in Motion. As we speak, the tech world is watching (halfway out of actual interest, half for sheer entertainment value) as the once seemingly immovable enterprise titan rolls, like a god on high fallen from Olympus, to the bottom of a mountain called Relevancy.
If you were part of the PC gaming scene in the late 1990's and early 2000's, you almost certainly played Counter-Strike at some point. It was the online first-person shooter (of course, Doom III was around as well), and was essentially a modified runtime of Valve's popular sci-fi FPS Half-Life. Later iterations of the game like Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source lacked the magic which made the first game so addictive, and so the series has essentially been undergoing a slow death over the last few years.
When I read the comments of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in an interview with The Daily Beast, my first thought was "this sounds like an eminently reasonable man making some well-reasoned points." Of course, being an Android site, we took interest in Wozniak's comments on Android's superior (in some respects) voice commands, as well as his praise of its workable built-in navigation solution (something iOS currently lacks outright).
Of course, the biggest feature on any DROID is the keyboard, and you can rest assured, the DROID 4's does not disappoint. Key spacing and action were both great, and the praise Motorola has received for its keyboards on previous iterations of the device obviously hasn't made them complacent.
It's finally happening - Intel processors are coming to Android phones, for better or for worse (we tend to think it's going to be the former). The world's first Intel smartphone? The Lenovo K800. But the real question is, is it actually going to be any good? Judging by the short time we spent with the device earlier today, the answer is a pretty emphatic "nope." The device in question has a 1280x720 4.5" display, 1.6GHz Z2460 Atom processor (single core with hyperthreading), and an 8MP camera.
We stopped by the Sony booth earlier this morning at CES, and got some hands-on time with the very first Sony smartphones (Sony-Ericsson is no more, subject to regulatory approval) - the Xperia Ion and the Xperia S. While these devices were designed before the Sony Ericsson breakup, they'll be marketed as Sony devices when they hit retail channels.
Wow - Motorola's Sanjay Jha and Intel just announced that the two companies have entered into a strategic partnership to combine forces to deliver new Medfield-based mobile devices to the US market, with actual devices finalized by this summer, and availability shortly thereafter (subject to carrier approval). This is probably the most exciting thing we've heard all day.
We're live at CES on the show floor this morning, meandering around countless booths to bring you all the Android-related news you can handle. One of our first stops in the Las Vegas Convention Center was the Toshiba booth, where the company demoed three brand-new Android tablets, which they refused to tell us anything about - aside from their display sizes (and the fact that they are coming at some point this year).
Intel and Lenovo just announced the world's first Intel-powered Android smartphone: the K800. It utilizes Intel's Medfield mobile platform, with what we assume is the Atom Z2460 1.6GHz processor. Intel and Lenovo claim that the new Medfield platform is a "no compromise" mobile processor in terms of performance and battery life, though no exact figures were quoted. It actually looks pretty similar to Intel's reference device, and will be available in China (no US availability announced) some time in Q2.
We're onto the second day of official pre-CES activities here in Las Vegas, and this morning we got to spend some time with Huawei's newest smartphone - the Ascend P1 S. While the vast majority of information about the device was leaked sometime last night, we had a chance to take some video of the Ice Cream Sandwich device and share a few insights about it, as well as obtain some relevant info on pricing and availability.
We arrived at CES earlier today, and Acer's pre-CES event was the first item on our agenda (yes, on a Sunday). The company unveiled a number of ultrabooks. a new cloud service, and briefly mentioned that it was bringing a brand-new Android tablet to market later this year - so briefly that we didn't even hear the name of the device mentioned (obviously, we later found out what it was called).
I'll make it known now, I've been itching to try out Logitech's Ultimate Ears TripleFi 10 headphones for some time. Artem, the Android Police Chief, if you will, swears by this pair of headphones. I'm pretty picky about sound, so I wasn't entirely certain if I'd come to love them as much as he does. But after a couple of weeks with these rather pricey earbuds, I have to say, the sound is better than any other earbud I've used (admittedly, I've not tried any other earbuds above the $150 mark for any meaningful amount of time).
Update: Anymode, after what we assume was a good-natured cease and desist letter from AT&T, has denied any of the information in its CES Media Alert (pictured below) is true. If we're being frank, they're 100% completely full of beans. Someone made available information they weren't supposed to, and someone got upset. Too bad official photos of the AT&T Galaxy Note were leaked this morning.
You made your nominations, and you voted. Now we have a winner. The Andy for Best Non-Nexus Android Phone of 2011 goes to...
Update: Dow Jones Newswires apparently left out a key piece of information from Hesse's statement on throttling, in an example of truly stellar journalism and attention to detail (unfortunately, we have no audio or video record to verify Hesse's statements). Hesse was discussing throttling of those who are on networks that Sprint has roaming agreements with (which, admittedly, Sprint has a lot of - including with Verizon). While this still makes Sprint's ads technically misleading, the throttling really only applies to those who live in areas where Sprint's data network relies chiefly on roaming - not to those using primarily Sprint towers.