Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Apr

PowerAMP Updated With App To SD, Dolby/SRS Support, Open API For Developers

Posted by David Ruddock in Applications, Apps/Games, Development, News

The popular Android music player PowerAMP received an update this morning with new features and numerous bug fixes. Take a look at the change log below:

New:
- PowerAMP now has open API for 3rd party developers. Please check PowerAMP site for reference, samples, and complete Widget Pack sources
- PowerAMP now can be moved to SD card. You can still use PowerAMP widgets if you install PowerAMP Standard Widget Pack
- added Dolby/SRS support for HTC Desire HD (and few other HTC phones with Dolby/SRS) (Equalizer => DHD button)
- added song number/total counter (Settings => Look And Feel Tweaks => Show Track Counter)
- auto-advance option for queue (Settings => Auto-Advance Settings)
- PowerAMP now re-shuffles lists on repeat
- playlist/queue reordering can be now toggled on/off via special icon in list headers
- PowerAMP now shows embed lyrics from tags in its Album Art area.

Apr

Honeycomb On A Budget: 7 and 10" Acer Aspire ICONIA TAB A100/A500 Pre-Order On Amazon UK

Posted by David Ruddock in Acer, Deals, Honeycomb 3.0/3.1/3.2, Iconia Tab A500, News

Last Updated: April 29th, 2011

Update: The 10.1-inch big brother of the A100, the A500, is also available for pre-order and ships on April 20, though it will cost you the substantially larger sum of £449. Why? It's packing an LED-backlit display (as opposed to LCD), 32GB of HDD space, and 1GB of RAM.

This one only applies to our friends across the pond for the moment, but Acer's first attempt at an Android 3.0 tablet has just gone up for pre-order on Amazon UK. It will ship on April 20, and it'll set you back a paltry £299.

With 512KB of RAM, my printer is giving the A100 a run for its money (Amazon typo much?)

This is without a doubt the most competitively priced piece of Honeycomb hardware we've seen to date, but its specs appear markedly different from the 7" prototype Android tablet we saw at one of Acer's press conferences last year.

Apr

Android Developers Helplessly Fuming Over App Publishing Console Downtime - 4 Days And Counting

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Apps/Games, Development, News

On March 31st, the Android Developer Console, which developers use to publish their apps to the Market, started experiencing issues that ranged from 404s and disappearing applications to missing statistics and apps that no longer obeyed.

As more and more panicking developers chimed in with similar experiences to multiple support threads, the only response from Google so far came from an employee named Ash back on the very first day, apologizing for the inconvenience and then shortly after announcing that all issues had been fixed.

Except they weren't.

The next day was April Fools' - nice prank, Google. Reports from devs all over the world kept flooding support forums, but Google was not responding anymore, even though April 1st was Friday - a workday, and this was no laughing matter (although they did fix something obviously more important).

Apr

AT&T Samsung Nexus S Shows Up On Samsung.com, Now All But Officially Confirmed

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in AT&T, News, Nexus S (Crespo/Soju), Samsung

Samsung's Nexus S, the first Gingerbread device, was a T-Mobile exclusive in the U.S. until last month, when Sprint announced the Nexus S 4G - a CDMA (and WiMAX) counterpart of this sleek stock Android device. Can Samsung pull the same trick it did with the Galaxy S phones that came to all U.S. carriers? It sure looks like it.

We've already seen a Nexus S with model GT-I9020A (as opposed to T-Mobile GT-I9020T) hit the FCC with AT&T bands, and now the same exact model has shown up on Samsung's own site, citing AT&T as the carrier. Whether Ma Bell will subsidize it or not (they didn't offer subsidies for the Nexus One) remains to be seen, but now the AT&T Nexus S is all but officially confirmed.

Apr

[Bootscreen Animation Roundup, Part 2] 5 Excuses To Reboot More Often

Posted by Cameron Summerson in Android OS, Bootscreen Animation Series, Development, Other Reviews, Reviews

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

It has been almost a month since our last bootscreen roundup, so we decided it was time to give you another opportunity to pimp your power up process (I don't normally use the word "pimp", but I just couldn't resist the alliteration). After spending a few hours and literally digging through hundreds of pages, here are five more most kickass boots animations that I could find.

If you have never changed your boot image before, check out our tutorial on the matter.

Android Particles

From the same creator who brought us Smooth Ring the first time around, this is a super-elegant image of Andy appearing from what can only be described as fairy dust.

Apr

T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide Finally Sees The Froyo (Android 2.2.1) Update, Sets HTC's Servers On Fire

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Froyo 2.2, HTC, myTouch Slide (Espresso), News, T-Mobile

MT3G Slide owners, you won't believe your eyes today. April Fool's has passed, and T-Mobile is not trolling you - the Froyo update is indeed available for the poor younger brother of the original myTouch 3G which already received Froyo almost 6 months ago. Don't let the name fool you, as there are, apparently, quite a few differences between the 2 devices - enough to tie up the release for such a long time.

The update is not over-the-air (OTA) - you will have to download it from HTC's servers, which are coincidentally on fire right now, barely pushing out the file at 6-7 KB/s.

Apr

Exclusive: Amazon To Introduce 4.3-Inch Dual-Core "Blaze" Smartphone This Summer [Leak, Pictures]

Posted by Jaroslav Stekl in AT&T, News, Verizon Wireless

Last Updated: August 1st, 2012

Update: If you haven't caught on yet, you should probably check out the date on which this post was published.

This special Android Police project was brought to you by:

The amazing Grant Garrison, who tackled the design side
Jaroslav Stekl, who came up with most of the rest
Artem Russakovskii, who made sure everything went and looked perfect

Amazon's been making waves in the Android blogosphere recently with such new products as the Appstore and the Cloud Player, but it looks like they're not done yet; in fact, they're only just starting. According to the same source who tipped us about the Appstore a few months back, the company will be launching the Blaze, which looks to be a smartphone of pretty high caliber, come August - and in a sentence, there's a lot to look forward to.

Apr

Updated: AT&T Raising Smartphone Prices For 1-Year Contracts, Full Retail, And Early Upgrades

Posted by David Ruddock in AT&T, Carriers, News, Tips & Tutorials

Last Updated: April 4th, 2011

Update: BGR just confirmed with AT&T that the early upgrade price bump listed for iPhones applies to all smartphones - that means early upgrade pricing for 2-year agreement customers will go up by 50 bucks on all Android phones.

Well, there's not a lot of ways to spin this positively, and it's pretty clear what's going on - AT&T is disincentivizing its 1-year and no contract plans in order to goad customers into making more economical 2-year agreements. Customer retention method much?

If you want to go month to month (no contract) on AT&T, the full retail price of your smartphone of choice will shoot up by $50, for no apparent reason other than to discourage you from making that decision.

Apr

Verizon's 4G LTE Up To 10 Times Faster Than Sprint's WiMAX 4G, Says Independent Testing

Posted by David Ruddock in Carriers, Editorials, News, Sprint, Tips & Tutorials, Verizon Wireless

An independent test conducted by a research firm in New York City comparing the speeds of Verizon's and Sprint's respective 4G networks has made at least one thing clear: Big Red owns the Big Apple. After conducting over 1000 individual network speed tests in various locations throughout the city, BTIG Research tallied up the averages, and it's not a pretty picture for Sprint:

The connections were tethered through an HTC Thunderbolt and an HTC EVO 4G, respectively

You're seeing that right - Verizon's 4G LTE is averaging a whopping 10.3Mbps (down) when on a laptop tethered to an HTC Thunderbolt, while the EVO 4G barely eeks out 1.6.

Apr

Android/Mobile April Fool's 2011 Roundup From Across The Web

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Android OS, Off-Topic

Last Updated: April 1st, 2012

Personally, I both love and despise April Fool's day. On one hand, it is a lot of fun, but on the other, it makes me waste entirely too much time trying to see as many jokes as I can and then figure out which stories are real and which ones are not. Alas, such is life, and April 1st will keep coming every year (at least until 2012 :-S), so we'll just roll with it and link the best Android-related trolls of the day.

*** This page will be continuously updated ***

If you want to contribute something Mobile-themed (let's not get off-topic here) not already in the list, feel free to post worthy trolls (including source urls) in the comments, and we'll put the best ones up.