Welcome back to another lovely edition of our Boot Animation Roundup! We've been scouring the net for the past couple of weeks looking for the coolest boot animations that we could find, and here's what we came up with: a hungry Android, the guts of a Gingerbread man, a new take on a classic, some TRON-esque lovin', and a little somethin' somethin' for all the gamers out there.
The crew over at Wirefly recently got their hands on the Samsung Exhibit 4G, one of T-Mobile's upcoming budget phones, and, in typical Wirefly fashion, gave it a brief review along with a couple of benchmarks. Bob Kovacs seems to really like the phone, stating that it "has all the power of the Galaxy S line, but in a smaller, more affordable package," which makes this sound like a solid offering, especially when you consider the T-Mo price of $79.99 with a two-year agreement. At this point, Wirefly hasn't announced what its price will be for this device, but we're pretty certain it's going to be more affordable than what Magenta is offering.
If you own a Samsung phone or tablet, there's a good chance that you've heard of Kies, Samsung's proprietary synchronization software. If you're also a Mac user, I'd be willing to bet that you're familiar with the frustration of Kies' Windows exclusivity.
Good news, though - the days of booting into Windows just to sync some data or grab an update are over, as Samsung finally released a version of Kies for Mac. Beware, though - this software is beta, so you'll probably experience some bugs. Also, the initial version only supports two devices: the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Tab - so if you're not holding one or the other, you'll have to wait for Sammy to push an update that supports your device.
Roughly two months ago, Halfbrick - the company behind the infuriatingly addictive Fruit Ninja - released its latest and seemingly greatest Android game: Age of Zombies. The otherwise praiseworthy game had one major flaw, however - it was only available for Sony Ericsson's Xperia PLAY, which at the time wasn't widely available. This resulted in understandable disappointment and displeasure in the Android gaming community - our own Artem Russakovskii used the weekly app roundup to publicly express his desire to play (no pun intended) the game.
Today, however, the wait is over for non-PLAYers, as Halfbrick Studios just pushed an update to the game that makes it available to all multitouch-capable devices running Android 1.6 or above.
On paper, the OnLive game system seems like a revolution in gaming: instead of using your own console or hardware to play games, OnLive's servers sync and render gamplay on their own servers and stream it back to you in 720p. This would theoretically allow you to play any game you wanted at high settings, regardless of your available hardware.
Picture courtesy of Engadget
OnLive's taken the chance to expand from an initial PC experience to include their own microconsole; however, it looks like they're expanding to the Android tablet market, as well. The company is expected to showcase their new universal controller at the upcoming E3 conference, but Engadget has a video demo of it in action with an HTC Flyer tablet.
Sonos is a company well-known in the tech industry for their line of wireless speaker systems, designed to let you sling music around your house without the hassle of complex setup processes or routing wires through ceilings and walls. To mark the launch of their Sonos Controller for Android application, Sonos generously loaned me a full multi-room system consisting of two Sonos S5 speaker units and a wireless ZoneBridge router. Given the buzz surrounding Sonos's products, it seemed best to review the system as a whole, viewing the application and hardware as a complete set. Read on to see how it all stacked up.
Update: Link to the de-odexed version added. Happy flashing!
Looking for a rooted version of this update? Have no fear - head over to our other post.
Update 2: Here's a direct download link from our own (fast) mirror for the EVO 4G Official Gingerbread OTA.
To flash it, follow these instructions:
We don't really know what's going on with the web and possibly on-device Market right now, but we do know that it's fallen a bit sick, throwing Server Error pages left and right. At first, I thought the apps I was looking at were getting deleted, but then I noticed that the familiar-looking screen actually mentions a server error. After trying 10 more random apps, I got a total of 7 consistent errors and 4 successes. According to our quick polls on Twitter and Facebook, you guys are experiencing the same thing, so it's not just tied to my Market account.
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous week or so.
This is part 2 of this week's roundup, featuring applications. For part 1 with games and live wallpapers, see 25 Best New Android Games And Live Wallpapers From The Last 2 Weeks (5/19/11 – 6/1/11)
Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here:
Android Police coverage: [New App] LBE Privacy Guard Is Like Windows’ UAC For Rooted Android Devices
This app looks like a more sophisticated implementation of the fine-rained permission control that was added to CyanogenMod last month and both praised and criticized by many.
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