08
Oct
android_vector_thumb1_thumb

Android At War: Google Mounts A Defense Against Oracle, But Can They Win? An Analysis

Posted by in Editorials, News

As we previously reported, Oracle America has filed suit against Google for (primarily) patent infringement. If you're not familiar with the case, I'll quickly summarize.

Oracle claims Google is in violation of seven U.S. patents previously filed by Sun Microsystems as part of the Java platform. Oracle now owns Sun. The alleged infringer, more specifically, is Android. If you want a more detailed explanation, read the next paragraph. If not, look at the pretty picture and continue.

The patents generally relate to the Java virtual machine (JVM). Apps on your Android phone run through the Dalvik VM (DVM), a Google / Open Handset Alliance developed alternative to JVM that utilizes portions of an open source Java implementation known as Apache Harmony.

23
Aug

[EXCLUSIVE] Report: [UPDATED] Google's Android Market License Verification Easily Circumvented, Will Not Stop Pirates

Posted by in Development, Exclusives, Videos
Last Updated: June 5th, 2012

[Update: 8/24/10 @ 7:45 PM EST by Aaron] Tim Bray responded to Justin's article, but seems to have misunderstood the goal. Thus, Justin has written a follow-up article here.

Preface

This article was not written to teach people how to pirate or ridicule Google's Android License Verification Library (LVL) that handles communication with Google's Android Market Licensing Service.

I am very much against piracy, and very much pro-Google. I have spent more time researching copy protection for my applications than development of the applications themselves.

I would like to thank:

  • the author of Star Hunt for allowing me to use his application in my demo video
  • the author of Tasker for allowing me to use his application, which has the best implementation of LVL I found, in this article

Both of these applications are available in the market - I highly suggest you give them a try.

06
May
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New Google Goggles v1.1 Can Translate English, French, Italian, German, And Spanish To Many Languages, We Go Hands-On

Posted by in Applications, News

Goggles Translate (OCR)

Fresh off the press, Google just announced that the latest update to its Google Goggles for Android (1.6+) introduces a Translate feature.

The app currently supports the following input languages:

  • English
  • French
  • Italian
  • German
  • Spanish

and can translate them to a much bigger set of languages which I just jotted down (from the app itself):

  • Afrikaans
  • Albanian
  • Catalan
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Galician
  • German
  • Icelandic
  • Irish
  • Italian
  • Norwegian
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish
  • Swedish

Google promised support for more Latin based languages soon, with non-Latin based languages coming after.

To use the feature, just snap a picture of the text or use the "region of Interest" (pictured below) button and draw the desired shape around the words you want to translate.

26
Mar
Android statistics

Android Usage Skyrockets Across The Board In February 2010 - Apple, RIM, Palm, Nokia Fall

Posted by in CLIQ / DEXT (Morrison), Dream, Droid (Sholes), G1 (Dream), G2 (Vision), Hero, Hero (Sprint, HeroC), HTC, Magic, Motorola, myTouch 3G (Magic), News

AdMob, one of the world's largest mobile advertisement networks, posted a report (PDF) yesterday citing various mobile related statistics for the period of February 2009 to February 2010.

We've looked through all the boring stuff and pulled out the interesting highlights (you all like highlights, don't you?).

The Highlights

Here are the highlights that we've cherry picked out of it for you (the data is year-over-year where applicable):

  • AdMob currently serves over 15,000 mobile websites and applications and has received 14.1 billion (!) requests worldwide in the last year
  • The number of smartphones went up 13% from 35% to 48%
  • Smartphone traffic overall went up 193% (data transferred, number of requests)
  • Non-smartphone phones share went down 23% from 58% to 35% (yup, soon everyone is going to have an PreiDroidberry of sorts)
  • Android was the fastest growing operating system, up 22% from 2% to 24% (!!!)
  • The top 5 Android devices by traffic were:
    • Motorola Droid
    • HTC Dream (G1)
    • HTC Hero
    • HTC Magic (MyTouch 3G)
    • Motorola CLIQ
  • Among the number of requests from smartphones, all non-Android devices posted a decline while all Android ones were up (except for the G1, which was the first generation Android and doesn't really count).

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