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I have a confession to make. I don't care for Evernote. 'Hang him from a gibbet!' I know, but I just prefer Springpad. Which is why I was excited today to see that the newest update brings tablet support for one of the coolest features: Springpad Board. This view allows users to look at all the elements of their notebook—be they text, photos, maps, to-do lists or whatever—as though they are sitting on a table. You can slide and move them around as you will. It's a lovely interface.
One of the bigger mobile games that still somehow manages to disappear under the marketing behemoth of Angry Birds is Cut the Rope. Now, the company behind that title has released a new adventure: Pudding Monsters. The basic gist is, there is red, gelatinous pudding in the fridge, and man is the guy who owns that fridge a jerk. He keeps eating all of these clearly-sentient and terrified desert creatures. Help them!
You know, if I'm honest, I feel a little sympathy for Archos. While they don't usually stand out as a manufacturer of the best tablets, they've gotten a decent reputation as being good for the low-end. Then the Nexus 7 came out and redefined what "budget tablet" means. Still, the company has to make money somehow, and putting its custom video player on the Play Store is as good a way as any, right?
Hide your wallets, folks. Every dang game on the Play Store, it seems, is on sale today. Whether you're looking for a FPS, racing games, or something with the word Zombie in the title, there are plenty of options for you. For example, Call of Duty Black Ops Zombies which manages two out of three of those qualifies at once! Normally, $6.99, this one's been dropped to $2.99. This sale will be going on through January 3rd.
We've talked about AIDE, the mobile developer toolkit that allows you to write Android apps (almost) entirely on your phone or tablet. In those past discussions, we've mentioned that you can probably get by with just the free version. The premium key offers a few nice extra features, though, like APK publishing, Git push/commit, and saving large project files.
Chances are, even if you haven't heard of Vudu (though that's a little hard at this point), you might just own some piece of content that can be used with the service. Vudu is a digital movie locker that allows users to rent or buy movies online and have them streamed to their computers, or a number of set top boxes and Blu-Ray players with internet connectivity. This is all pretty standard fare. The standout feature, though, is Ultraviolet support, which happens to be one of the preferred methods of offering 'digital copies' for Blu-Ray multipacks.
If you needed any clearer indication that Samsung basically owns the Android world while HTC and Motorola are in trouble, maybe this will help. According to Millenial Media, a mobile advertising firm, ad impressions on its platform from Samsung handsets shot up from 23% to 46% in the last year. Meanwhile, HTC plummeted from 32% to 16%, while Moto dropped from 22% to 11%. This is a massive change.
One of the biggest frustrations of dealing with Verizon, if you're someone who likes to tweak their phone, is that the carrier insists on locking the bootloaders on its phones that otherwise would not be locked. Samsung has offered Developer Editions of its phones in the past, including the Galaxy S III, largely to avoid that problem and appease the dev crowd. Today, that tradition continues with the Galaxy Note II which has now appeared on the company's site in a similar hacker-friendly model.
You've gotta hand it to the folks in Mountain View. When NORAD decides to pass Google over for Santa tracking data, the company isn't one to sit on its hands and let someone else handle Christmas. This isn't the first year that the data giant has kept you up to date on the comings and goings of everyone's favorite fat bearded man in a red suit, but this Santa tracker may just be the best yet.
My Fingers Are Threatening Legal Action Against Me After Trying Snapkeys Si, Another Failed 'Invisible' Keyboard
Developers, repeat after me: invisible keyboards never work. Do you understand? Good.
Developers, repeat after me: invisible keyboards never work. Do you understand? Good. I hope we're clear on this. Because after trying to use the ridiculous "invisible" SnapKeys Si, which blocks more on-screen crap than any other input software I've ever seen, I'm ready to throw my beloved Nexus 7 through the next wall to look at me funny.
While Astrid may be one of the leading to-do lists on Android, there is a considerable amount of innovation to be done in the world of keeping track of things that need doing. Apparently! Enter Wunderlist, an app that Matt liked well enough, but couldn't quite manage to make him keep coming back. Perhaps today's update will change his mind, though, as it brings a host of new features such as improvements to the UI, push notifications, Smart lists, and a better widget.
You know the drill by now. It's time for some new LTE market announcements! Woo! Party hard. The network rollouts today are coming to Pennsylvania, California, Indiana, Virginia and Puerto Rico. This comes on the heels of Sprint announcing its intention to purchase the remaining shares of Clearwire that it didn't already own.
While Google's been working feverishly to build out its Play Store, bringing it to other countries and expanding its offerings, the company's music store has been lacking one crucial feature that its competitors have: library matching. Where Amazon and iTunes can scan your current collection and add the songs to your online storage, Google has, until recently, required users to upload every individual track manually. A long and tedious process. In mid-November, the scan and match feature came out for Europe, and today it arrives for US residents.
Sure, Samsung is stealing the spotlight recently with its Galaxy Camera, but did you know that other companies are working on Android cameras? Companies that have been making picture-taking devices for longer than most of us have been alive, even! Take Polaroid's IM1836, for example. This thing has leaked before in a couple different variations, and today were getting a glimpse at a unit that might be a little closer to final production.
Did you think that just because it was winter and all the major phone announcements had died down that Samsung was done releasing things? NOPE. Today, the Korean manufacturer released info on the brand new Galaxy Grand. Where "brand new" means "looks so much like the Note II that Samsung is probably suing itself for trade dress infringement." The phone will carry a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a 5" 800x480 display, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of on board storage (expandable with a microSD card slot), a 2,100 mAh battery, and it ships with Jelly Bean (4.1.2)
I'd like to start this piece Peter Jackson style: with a longer-than-necessary flashback to provide background on this story. Back in the 90s, kids were all about two things: basketball and fighting games. We loved Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Space Jam and Shaquille O'Neal. Or so the legends go. As a result, in 1994, some genius marketer aimed to put the two together to create Shaq Fu. It did not fare well. In fact, it was so bad that there is an organization devoted to "liberating it from existence."
And the nightlies come in the niiiight! Or, in this case, in the middle of the afternoon. Today, the fine folks over on the CyanogenMod team have seen fit to release CM10.1 nightlies for several Nexus devices including both CDMA variants—the Verizon version named 'toro' and Sprint's 'toroplus'—as well as the brand new 3G Nexus 7 hardware. ROMs for all three of the variants are available for download on get.cm.
I suppose you have to give Sony credit for at least keeping its customers informed. Today, the manufacturer announced an update to its plans for bringing its phones up to Jelly Bean. If you're rocking the Xperia T, Xperia TX, or Xperia V, you should see Android 4.1 "during February and March." Of course, this will depend on what market you're in or which variant you own.
Today, Sprint announced that it would be spending $2.2bn to acquire the remaining (roughly) half of Clearwire that it doesn't already own. The transaction, which is naturally subject to regulatory approval, will give the carrier ownership of all of Clearwire's significant share of spectrum, which will be a huge boost to Sprint as it attempts to build out an LTE network to compete with Verizon and AT&T.
Forget all those people streaming their movies from the likes of Netflix and Hulu. You like to have a proper collection of video files. You want to own them and watch them wherever you want. RockPlayer, the all-purpose media player app for Android, has been a crowd favorite for just this purpose for a while, even if it's been lacking a bit of luster. Well, today that changes with a huge update to the interface that makes it both prettier and far more functional.