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Open Garden 2.0 Comes With Channel Bonding, Enhanced Reliability, Same User-Friendly Mesh Networking
Everyone's favorite mesh networking startup Open Garden today announced its 2.0 refresh at LAUNCH festival, having allegedly already served 2.1 million installs since version 1.
In what seems to be a fairly arbitrary move, Google has trimmed the fat from the Play Store's Nexus 7 cover selection. The lineup, which formerly included pink, light blue, and gray, has been cut down to just the light blue color in the US, with the pink cover variant appearing outside the US. The gray cover has been axed completely.
Since the Nexus 10 was released last October, I've been hunting for great accessories to go with it. There's no word on the official-looking dock we saw in Google's "Happy Holidays" video, nor has there been even a mumble about the flip cover we spotted when the Verge got an exclusive hands-on.
A mere seven months ago, we saw the launch of Google's Play Store gift cards, a much wished-for addition to the store front that made gifting the store's digital content almost as easy as it should be. Unfortunately for international users, though, the cards were only destined for the US at launch. When "redeem pages" popped up in the UK's online and device-based stores in mid-December, many thought the cards would hit retail stores in time for the holidays. Alas, the holidays came and went with nary a peep from Goog on the subject.
The Xperia E, Sony's low-end Jelly Bean-powered smartphone which was announced back in December may have another trick up its sleeve yet. The manufacturer is offering owners of the device the chance to test out Mozilla's fledgling Firefox OS on the device via a downloadable ROM. Meant for "advanced developers," the ROM comes with a few warnings from Sony, chiefly that you should know what you're doing before you get started.
Pushover, a "simple push notification service" that essentially allows web services, scripts, and a lot more to send notifications to your mobile device, got an update recently to version 1.6 (and soon after, 1.6.1), which brought on a couple more nifty features.
Yesterday, we attended a press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where we were treated not only to the unveiling of ASUS' new Padfone Infinity and aptly-named Fonepad 7" tablet phone (with which we later got some hands-on time), but also to the dazzling (ly awkward and hilarious) antics of a "tech illusionist," and plenty of other awkward moments.
Google, in a bid toward continued competition with the other social networks, today announced Google+ Sign-In, a unified login that can be utilized across the web, as well as Android and iOS apps to make sign-in and sharing much simpler. Think Facebook connect but, in Google's words, "minus the social spam."
There are a few surefire ways to get straight to a consumer's heart, and one of them is nostalgia. People love to be reminded of the good old days, and Sony has done just that, uploading a new Xperia Z spot that will take viewers back to the moon mission, the Berlin wall, roller skating on the beach, and playing video games, all with Sony products.
At an afternoon press conference across the street from MWC 2013's enormous venue, ASUS has just wrapped a (hilarious) press conference that saw the introduction of two new devices (or three?) – the Padfone Infinity and the Fonepad. Before we dive in for hands-on, let's take a quick look at the specs and pricing for the devices.
Yesterday, we got an eyeful of NVIDIA's new Tegra 4 and Tegra 4i, along with the Phoenix, NVIDIA's nifty reference device. The benchmarks were quite impressive compared to current-generation processors, but all we got to see in terms of gaming performance was a brief demo of Real Boxing.
Motorola, through its Feedback Network, has indicated that it is readying a "new Jelly Bean software release" for the Droid RAZR and RAZR MAXX on Verizon, asking participants – as usual – to test the waters before the release is made final. We know that the RAZR/MAXX duo are set to get a 4.1 update in "Q1 2013" from Motorola's own update schedule, so the following email (sent to members of Moto's feedback network) is a good sign that things are on track.
Bringing to market a simplistic, clean take on the puzzler genre, Appxplore released Sporos today. The concept behind Sporos is simple: place sporos (which, by the way, is some sort of "special seed") on the board, watch the adjacent rows or columns light up, and repeat until every cell on the board is illuminated.
We don't often cover Kickstarter campaigns – after all, the platform is flooded with entries that may not be worth mentioning, or are dead on arrival. Sometimes, though, a gadget comes through that exceeds expectations, and the myIDkey is one of those.
Popular beta testing platform TestFlight has officially announced its arrival to Android in private beta form, in a post to the TestFlight blog. If you're wondering how popular TestFlight really is, the same post should provide some reference: the service has been trusted with smoothing the process of beta app deployment for over 300,000 iOS apps. Needless to say, its expansion to Android is big news.
Roman Nurik's DashClock Widget has seen remarkable adoption since its release earlier this month, with a handful of apps quickly adding their own DashClock extensions in a bid to populate your lock screen with useful information. Joining the list today is PushBullet which, in an update to version 9, added a DashClock extension that will let you know how many pushes await you before you unlock your device.
Did you know that, since the last update to Google Search, developers have been able to utilize offline voice recognition? Previously, any non-system app that wasn't an IME (Input Method Editor) that hoped to recognize your voice without a web connection needed a rather kludgy typing overlay. Since the update though, apps can hear and interpret not just your words, but essentially any command that doesn't explicitly require web access.
Last summer, we saw the launch of Tweet Lanes – a beautiful, functional Twitter app that – due to Twitter's reformed API – ceased active development just a few months ago. Today, Chris Lacy has issued a "further update" on the status of development, writing in a post to Google+ "just because I am no longer actively developing Tweet Lanes doesn't mean that development of the app has to stop."
Remember that little diagonal arrow that used to appear next to suggestions in the Google Search box as you typed? The arrows could be used to insert suggestions into the search bar, while you kept typing away. For a while now, though, the arrows have been missing from Google Search. Those that want that feature back are in luck, however – astute Redditor Foxsbiscuits notes that a simple long-press will fling search suggestions into the search bar, providing essentially the same functionality with a slightly more discreet UI.
Update: Over the course of the evening, ROM Manager was updated yet again, to version 5.5.2.0 - this time adding support for the TWRP recovery, which is undoubtedly a feature many users have been wanting for some time. Just update ROM Manager in the Play Store and you'll have it.