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.
Latest Articles
Samsung's finally giving up on its flub of a chat platform, ChatON, early next year. Speaking to Engadget, Samsung confirmed that the app which no one asked be installed on their phone would be going offline on February 1st in all markets except the US, where it will shortly convalesce until some point before the end of Q1 2015. At which time, ChatON will die, and let's be real, probably go on to be reborn as some other not-very-good Samsung software product in a year or two, like a sort of crappy phoenix.
Picture yourself on a couch. Now, across the room is a television. It's just a 48" 720p flatscreen, hooked up to a digital cable box Time Warner sent you like 8 years ago that is slow as molasses and has no remaining DVR space, and beside that is the old Xbox 360 you haven't touched in many a fortnight and is presumably home to a small but happy civilization of dust-eating molds and fungi who are probably as old as the component video cable you have attached to it. Oh, and there's a DVD player.Your cousin/nephew/niece/sibling/whatever got you one of those Chromecast things, but honestly, you don't even want to try how to learn to use it, so it's still in the box. You read eBooks on your old Kindle DX, and you use your laptop as your TV a lot these days because it has Netflix and Hulu and stuff, but that laptop is definitely getting to be a bit of a laggard. You also order a lot of things on Amazon, because it's a name you trust and you like product reviews and good prices.You want a tablet. Which one do you get? It's probably a Kindle Fire, be it the 6, 7, HDX 7, or HDX 8.9. They're all basically the same in your mind - it's just a difference of screen size, storage, performance, and price. It's not that you don't care about technology, it's more that you're kind of set in a way of doing things and the prospect of an Android tablet makes you a little apprehensive because there are just so damn many of the things.Then you see that big, happy banner advertising the Kindle Fires. They all get at least 4 stars - that's encouraging, and there are thousands of reviews. The 7" HDX starts at $179, but you know what, you want something fully-featured. This will be your only tablet, and your laptop is on its last legs. You want a piece of hardware that's going to take over at least some of that workload, even if that just means browsing Buzzfeed and YouTube. So, the 8.9 makes sense - it's powerful, newly-released, gets the best battery life, has two cameras (front and rear!), and it reviews perfectly decently.
This weekend's poll is another throwback, but this one's just a couple months out of its one-year anniversary, having been asked back in October of 2013. This year's poll options will be a little different, as the number of new crowdfunded smartwatches seems to be slowing a bit (especially in terms of media coverage), and smartwatches themselves are much more widely available than they were a year ago.
When a new version of Android lands, there's often a sizeable lag period before it's running on a significant number of devices out in the wild. We generally know why that is, too: manufacturers take varying lengths to update their products, and while they do receive early access to new versions of Android, nothing can be fully completed until Google releases the relevant source code for the platform. Add in things like carrier certification for phones, OEM software modifications, chipset-level support, and other factors, and you have a big stew of contingencies that can add months to the wait for the newest version of Android.
The RHA T10i are the latest headphone from the Scottish firm, and their most ambitious (and expensive) yet. The T10i (and controller-less T10) are seeking to win over customers on a value basis, even though they cost what some might call a rather staggering $200. The reality, though, is that the market for in-ear headphones in the $200-500+ range is actually a very large one, and that's not even counting wireless systems.
Google has just updated the language of the support page where software update policies for Nexus and GPE devices are summarized, and the new text is not exactly encouraging on first read. The following clause, regarding carriers, was added:
AT&T Note 4 Getting 233.7MB OTA Update To Build AUCU1BNK3 [Update: Changelog]
AT&T Note 4 sees an update.
Update: Here's Samsung's changelog.
Gift cards for digital storefronts have been around some time, but Google first unveiled them for the Play Store back in 2012, just a little over two years ago. Since then, they've been rolled out to a fair number of countries across the world, and we're curious: have you ever actually bought one?
As had been previously reported, the European Parliament has now taken a vote on and passed a non-binding resolution that, if it should become a regulatory act of the European Commission, would seek to have Google's Search product broken up into a separate company. The motivation behind the resolution, according to the European Parliament's statement, is in "ensuring competitive conditions within the digital single market."
Update 3: Google claims the issue with Gmail is resolved.
[Faulex] As Smartwatches Grow, So Too Does A Market For IP-Infringing Watch Faces - And Legal Action
IP infringement and the internet have a long and storied history. Never has it been so easy to share so much so quickly so anonymously - something any college student with a campus broadband connection generally discovered as an almost dorm room rite of passage from the late 90s onward. Music, films, television, games, and other software have long been the most-pirated content categories, in turn provoking varying degrees of legal response from the industries who own and distribute such content.
We asked this question over two years ago in a weekend poll, and now we're asking again: is your primary Android device rooted? We all probably have a vague idea what rooting is even if we don't root our phones or tablets, but those of you more familiar with customization probably have pretty specific reasons for doing it, and experience with the rooting process over the years.
Update: Motorola has responded, claiming the blame lies with them for the situation - they mailed a number of Nexus 6s with incorrect firmware that would cause the phone to fail to start up properly. Pre-order customers are those most likely to be affected, and those persons will have an opportunity to replace their devices. Here's the full statement:
Roughly one year ago, the Rockstar Consortium filed a lawsuit against Google and a number of Android handset companies in the Eastern District of Texas for patent infringement. That consortium consisted of Apple, Ericsson, Microsoft, Sony, and Blackberry, companies that bought up a heap of Nortel patents related to telephony and internet technology.
While we weren't able to find anything else particularly interesting (note: Music Key is not linked to this update, previous versions had it, too), YouTube 5.18 does include some interesting strings referring to upload trimming. Specifically, these strings:
As many of you doubtless know by now, Google's first Android 5.0 devices ship with full-disk encryption enabled out of the box - encryption that can't be disabled without flashing a new ROM to the device. We've heard from at least one source that this encryption shouldn't really affect on-device performance noticeably, but new benchmarks from Anandtech seem to suggest otherwise.