Eric Ravenscraft
Contributing since January, 2012
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1039articles
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About Eric Ravenscraft
Eric is a freelance writer and an OG 'round these parts. Since leaving Android Police, his work has been in Lifehacker, The New York Times, OneZero, PCMag, and a bunch of other places. Catch him on Twitter and YouTube as LordRavenscraft.
Latest Articles
We'll do our best to stay away from spoilers for the newly-released Die Hard movie (Happy Valentine's Day!), but the companion endless-runner game Fox just released to the Play Store isn't doing us any favors on that front. The app—which is somewhat shadily referred to as simply "Die Hard", trading on the name of greater movies—takes inspiration from titles like Temple Run. Just, not enough inspiration. (Note: some screenshots are very slightly spoiler-y, so if you're still planning on seeing the movie and you're a purist, you might want to wait to hit up the source link.)
Back in December, Media Monkey released a beta of the Android version of the media player app that received a level of success on the desktop. It still packs the same ability to tag and run scripts that the original possessed. Now it's arrived on the Play Store, which should make rolling out bug fixes much easier.
Google just pushed an update to its Search app (which, as you know, includes Google Now). Among the new additions are the Google Now widget that we've all been hearing so much about, movie ratings, the ability to pull up movie passes purchased from Fandango, and real estate listings from Zillow when Google thinks you're in the market for a home. Now that's fancy.
Slacker Radio Updates Paid Model, Adds $10/Month All-You-Can-Eat Option To Its Radio Service
As if there weren't enough contenders out there for music subscription service, Slacker Radio has updated its business model.
As if there weren't enough contenders out there for music subscription service, Slacker Radio has updated its business model. You can still get the standard ad-supported radio station features that were always available. However the company has added a Spotify-like buffet option for $10/month. Pony up the dough and you can remove all ads and listen to as many tracks as you want.
There's little doubt that Pokémon is the very best at separating parents from money. Like no franchise ever was. Getting Nintendo to relinquish control of content, though, is a real test. It doesn't generally stream its show for free without good cause. Today, however, it's available across the land. The animated series can now be streamed to Android handsets far and wide.
SwiftKey Flow Beta Updated To 4.0.0.99, Brings A Plethora Of Bug Fixes And Improvements
SwiftKey Flow Beta Updated To 4.0.0.99
Swiftkey's new Flow beta has been a crowd-favorite since its release. The company behind one of the best Android keyboard replacement apps has pushed a new update that brings a variety of bugfixes—including a bunch of crashes—and improvements such as a nicer-looking installer, a new Turkish layout, and better punctuation prediction for non-English languages.
Can we be honest with ourselves? Plex kinda sucks. Hard to blame it, most third-party media centers on Android do at the moment. As a lengthy blog post by the developer points out, part of that has been due to Android's inflexibility and lack of a coherent UI in its history. That's changed over the last couple years and now Plex has been rebuilt from the ground up to be a lot more beautiful and a lot more functional.
While the Nexus 4 may be the LG handset getting everyone's attention, the company does have other market segments to think about. The L SeriesII (so that's what happened to the other letter from the Optimus G) fills that need with a trio of handsets that will debut with the Optimus L7II in Russia next week. The phone comes with a 4.3" 800x480 IPS display, dual-core Qualcomm processor and Jelly Bean 4.1.
We're all eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Ouya and the one question we need to have answered is whether or not the platform will be able to acquire enough interesting games to be worthwhile. One of the ways the company is generating interest and content is with a 10-day developer competition. Keeping in mind that the entire programming process occurred in a little more than a week (and in some cases, less than that) and all the titles are unfinished, here's a look at some of the games that may end up on the console.
Google Voice is a great service burdened by a lack of support, integration, and easy way to sign up (unless you're on Sprint, of course). Those who do decide to jump the hurdles and either get a brand new number—or port their existing one to Google—will find themselves in an uncomfortable paradise. On the one hand, you can text from your desktop, tablet, or phone completely for free which is awesome. On the other hand, you have to use the Google Voice app, which is not that great. 'Messaging + Google Voice', however aims to alleviate that problem a bit.
Welcome to the Android Police Podcast, Episode 48.
Tower defense games are great. Tired and done to death, sure, but the good ones are really fantastic. Anomaly Warzone Earth and the sequel Anomaly Korea are two of the better entries in the genre, having the distinguishing factor of playing role reversal. In these, you're not building towers, you're trying to slip past them. Now, both titles are half off on the Play Store, each costing a mere $2.
The rumors continue to fly about the HTC M7, which we expect will be announced before too long. The latest tidbit comes from the usually-reliable @evleaks. According to the ever-mysterious entity, the company's newest flagship will simply be called 'HTC One.' Nice and clean, just the way we like it.
I'd by lying if I said I missed the days when blasting invading space craft with 8-bit energy beams cost a pocket full of quarters. The gameplay itself, however, remains a treasure of nostalgia. One that Syder Arcade HD is blatantly exploiting to get $1 from me and I will happily pay it. Why? Because blowing crap up is awesome.
The Pebble sure wasn't the first smart watch, but it's been getting a lot of attention lately. In fact, wearable computing as an industry is seeing a bit of a resurgence in general. The trouble, at least as one company sees it, is that smart watches require you to already have an expensive phone. That's two batteries you have to keep charged! Craziness! That's where the Neptune Pine comes in.
One of the biggest problems Google faces with Android is avoiding a situation where one manufacturer controls so much of the market that everything else falls by the wayside. As study after study shows, though, this is becoming an increasing risk as Samsung gobbles up more customers. To wit, this survey from Localytics—a company that provides analytics for mobile apps— showed that of the top ten Android devices its customers used, eight were made by Samsung, and seven had the Galaxy brand attached.
One of these days, we're finally going to figure this whole buttons problem for Android devices. While touchscreens are great, the tactile feeling of physical controls will always have its appeal. Some solutions are better than others, but maybe the Wikipad can find the sweet spot. The tablet comes with an attached set of game controls that can be removed, leaving the player with a regular 7" Tegra 3 tablet. The entire unit costs $250.
Update: As we suspected, this really isn't official. In fact, it's a fan render that was published on The Verge's forums two and a half months ago. Mystery solved! (Thanks, c3vzn!)
The long-awaited Carbon for Twitter app landed on the Play Store a few days ago, but some were of the opinion that it wasn't quite finished yet. This happens in software development. Nothing to be worried about. What should cause worry is if problems persist for months or years at a time (*coughGoogleVoicecough*). On that note, it should be very encouraging that the developers have already rolled out an update that includes a variety of bug fixes.
A doctor did this. Before I get any deeper into this story, I want to point out that a person with the prefix "Dr." in front of his name—Dr. Christopher Culligan, a Canadian ER physician and instructor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, to be precise—is responsible for this mobile app that promises to infer a man's size based on a variety of factors. This criteria includes but is not limited to height, shoe size, butt size and whether the man is gay or straight. Seriously.