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Sep

Sprint Launches 4G In Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN And Pittsburgh, PA

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Epic 4G, EVO 4G (Supersonic), News, Sprint

Sprint continued its 4G announcement marathon this morning with the official launch of WiMax service in Minneapolis-St.Paul, MN, also known as Twin Cities, and Pittsburgh, PA. Welcome to the fast lane!

This announcement follows the Nashville 4G launch 2 weeks ago, Orlando launch last week, and the introduction of Epic 4G in the beginning of the month. Sprint’s 4G service now covers 55 markets.

Users of the only 2 aforementioned devices capable of running on Sprint’s 4G network are charged an extra $10 "premium data" fee, no matter whether 4G is available in their area or not.

As Sprint’s 4G network expands, be sure to follow its growth on our up-to-date 4G Coverage Tracker, right here at Android Police.

Sep

Eldar Murtazin Speculates On The Future Of The Samsung Galaxy S: RIP Super-AMOLED Phones?

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Captivate, Devices By Manufacturer, Epic 4G, Fascinate, Galaxy S, News, Samsung, Vibrant

If there's one man with an inside line in the mobile industry, it's mobile-review.com's Editor-in-Chief Eldar Murtazin. This guy has a network of informants rivalling any national security agency you'd care to name.

The latest subject of his (occasionally spurious) tweeting is Samsung's family of Super-AMOLED phones, namely the Wave and Galaxy S. Eldar seems to have some insight into the production and stock of S-AMOLED panels, leading him to think that neither of the two aforementioned phones are in production anymore because of S-AMOLED scarcity.

Murtazin goes on to indicate that the Galaxy S line does not have an immediate replacement in the pipeline (dash our hopes), and that all current stock of Samsung's stunning new screen tech has been sold to Apple for a product release in 2011.

Sep

Google Unveils "Phone Gallery", Aims To Help Us Discover and Compare All Android Devices With Google Services

Posted by Nate Kimmey in Devices By Manufacturer, News

Google promised it a fairly long while ago and today it finally got around to replacing the old Nexus One sale page with a list of all (OK, not all, at least not yet) Android phones with Google services (Market, Gmail, YouTube, et cetera). It may not be the most comprehensive list yet, but it's definitely a start.

Right now, the list only includes phones from manufacturers HTC, LG, Samsung, and Motorola, although it lists phones from several different carriers in multiple countries. If you see some phones (or countries) missing, don't fret: Google has already promised to add new countries to the list as it grows, as well as phones that are currently missing (for example, I didn't find Verizon's Samsung Fascinate present).

Sep

DroidRover: Ubernerds Team Up To Create Android-Controlled Rover

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Applications, News, Nexus One (Passion)

We received a tip in the wee hours of the morning that we managed to miss until now, despite its overwhelming awesomeness. In short, it's a video demonstration of a Senseta rover running with custom hardware and controlled by a Nexus One, although it looks like it will run on any Android device with Bluetooth.

The combination of Android and the simplified hardware allows for a simpler setup that saves weight, and in a little bugger like this, any lost weight counts for a lot.

The DroidRover was built by volunteers working out of a NASA lab. According to the YouTube description:

Work completed by volunteers Andy Boyett, Andy Lee, David Lehrberg, Paul Mans, led by NASA Contractor Geoff Chu, and assisted by the Droidcopter and AndroidSat teams.

Sep

Lucky XDA User Gets His T-Mobile G2 Early, Discovers Trackpad LED And Posts Videos

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Devices By Manufacturer, G2 (Vision), HTC, News

Over at XDA-Developers, Hitorii just got his sweet new T-Mobile G2. Naturally, before even opening the box, he went and told everyone about it. Wouldn't you? I am super jealous, anyway.

He also made a neat new discovery that we had not heard of before: the trackpad has an LED surround, which glows white on new notifications. He wasn't able to get it to glow any other colour, even using apps that do have coloured notifications, so it looks like the LED is not the same as the RGB light of the Nexus One. It's still a nifty looking feature, and must have been a pleasant surprise.

Sep

Orange San Francisco - £99 WVGA AMOLED Phone - Unboxed On Video And Already Rooted

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Devices By Manufacturer, Orange

Here's a device that's been making some waves in the UK Android community. Over at MoDaCo.com, founder Paul O'Brien picked up Orange's rebranded ZTE Blade for £99 ($160) with a pre-paid SIM. Judging from his video, it seems that you get quite a lot of device for your money, including that aforementioned 3.5" AMOLED screen. Despite being burdened with a silly name and an abundance of network shovelware, the Blade/SanFran's 600 MHz CPU appears to run Android 2.1 pretty nicely.

As is his wont, Mr O'Brien has cracked the Blade right open, with root being achieved pretty much immediately, and the tantalizing prospect of an AOSP Froyo ROM hanging in the air.

Sep

Keep Your Clipboard History A Long-Press Away With ClipStore And Button Shortcut

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Applications

Maybe you're like me: you don't find Voice Search all that useful; you have an impenetrably foreign, non-Google-approved accent; you find yourself frustrated by the single-entry nature of Android's traditional clipboard.

If you deem yourself a match with any of those things, I'm willing to bet you find at least one of the two applications on show here of use.

ClipStore

Android's clipboard isn't anything special. You put stuff there and it disappears when you overwrite it with something else. ClipStore is a nice twist on that, offering the ability to save your previous clipboard entries, pin entries, add entries manually, and re-copy old entries.

Sep

Imgur App For Android With Account Support Now Available For Download

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

Imgur.com is one of the best, if not the best, sites to upload that image you're about to share with a gazillion people. The site is very simple and robust, yet incredibly functional, and, most importantly, allows all uploaded images to be embedded on other sites without complaining about hotlinking. It is the service used almost exclusively for sharing pictures on reddit.com (hi all redditors!). Imgur started as an anonymous one-time upload service but later introduced account support, which was probably the most frequently requested feature.

Today marks the arrival of an Imgur Android client with account support baked. I'd like to point out that there are actually 2 other imgur apps on the Market already, but neither of them offers the ability to log in.

Sep

Best Buy Launches Free Phone Fridays To Start Your Weekends Right

Posted by Brad Ganley in News

Yesterday, Best Buy announced a pretty cool new promotion for the moth of October: Free Phone Fridays. It's a pretty straightforward deal that offers buyers four phones (one on each carrier) that will be free every Friday.

They have promised that each week they will feature one high-end smartphone, the first of which will be the Samsung Fascinate. The other phones to be offered for free on October 1st will be the Sprint Blackberry Curve, HTC Aria on AT&T, and the Samsung Gravity 3 on T-Mobile.

Scott Anderson, the head of Best Buy Mobile's merchandising department, had this to say:

We are seeing an amazing amount of curiosity and demand for mobile phones right now, especially smart phones, and we want to give consumers another reason to visit Best Buy Mobile in October.

Sep

2.2.1 Update For Nexus One Breaks Universal Androot, Swype, And Other Aftermarket Keyboards

Posted by Brad Ganley in Android OS, News, Nexus One (Passion)

A few days ago, the code for the Nexus One's 2.2.1 update went AOSP (Android Open Source Project), meaning that the source code became available to developers. It was comprised mostly of bugfixes and other things that weren't major... oh, and it also patched the exploits that allowed Universal Androot to unlock your device. We had a short conversation about it on Twitter with Cyanogen (the conversation starts at the bottom and goes up):

As if breaking Universal Androot wasn't enough, apparently the new update also prevents existing installations of Swype and some other aftermarket keyboards from working. An easy solution exists though - just uninstall your existing keyboard and reinstall it.