08
Dec
2011-12-08 13h39_19

Android Developers' Blog Gives Us A Closer Look At 10 Billion App Downloads

Posted by in Android OS, Applications, News

As you probably already know, the Android Market hit 10 Billion app downloads this week - a huge landmark, no doubt. Over at the Android Developers' Blog, they put together a nifty infographic showcasing some pretty cool details discovered on the path to the big 10B. Check it out:

10B_2_lg (1)

There's definitely some really cool knowledge dropped here - who would've thought that those little fieldrunners traveled 466,216 miles each month? Or that 1.87 million hours have been spent using the IMDb app in the past four months? Some of these numbers are simply staggering.

I really only have one question - why aren't we downloading more apps at 4:00 AM on Monday mornings?

03
May
blackberry-playbook

RIM Demonstrates Android Apps Running On Blackberry Playbook

Posted by in Applications, News

This morning we told you about RIM's plan to bring Blackberry Enterprise Solution to Android and iOS, with a brief mention of Android apps running on the Playbook. No sooner than we posted the aforementioned article did we find out that RIM had demonstrated just that at Blackberry World Conference. Take a look at the video:

Each Android app will run in its own virtual machine, but will seamlessly integrate into the Blackberry ecosystem. The Playbook doesn't have access to the Android Market, either - all compatible Android Apps will be available through the Blackberry App World. This does mean a bit more headache for developers, though, as they will now have to submit their apps not only to Google for the Android Market, but also to RIM to be accepted into App World.

05
Mar
friday-logo

[Updated] App Preview: Friday Is Your Very Own Personal Assistant

Posted by in Android OS, App Reviews, Applications, News, Reviews
Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

Update: We have been notified by the developers of this app that the app does not upload any information. The information is kept on the phone and organised by the app. In the future there are plans to implement a feature that would allow the information to be uploaded to a backup server. However, at present, information collected by Friday is not shared with anyone including the developer.

Each day a smartphone user receives information from a variety of different sources, including phone calls, text messages and emails. Keeping track of it all can be a major headache and more often than not we misplace crucial pieces of information because we are unable to recall when we had received them and/or what we were doing at the time.

17
Feb
reader

Google Reader App Update Brings Widgets And Other Improvements

Posted by in Android OS, Applications, News

The Google Reader app for Android is streamlined, slick and easy to use. It performs one function and it does it well: reading your RSS feeds.

So, I was pleasantly surprised when the app updated today with some additional useful features.

google-reader-widgets-180x300google-reader-mpar-180x300

Firstly, two new widgets have been added, one to show the unread count and one to display new stories in a news ticker format. The unread count widget can be set to show the number of unread stories in a feed, label, person or on all your items. The news ticker widget scrolls through any of the RSS feeds in Reader.

26
Oct
snap20101026_110657_wm

Google Adds Android App Search To The Google.com Mobile Interface

Posted by in Applications, News

I'm not sure exactly how recently Google has done this (update: apparently, it's been a few months, thanks Brad), but there is a tab in the mobile search interface called "Android Apps." I'll give you 3 tries to guess what it does.

Clicking on each result pops open the Market app and works exactly as you would expect. The interface does show the star rating to help weed out the crapola, the price, the company name, and the number of reviews. In the future, it would be totally sweet to see an Install button integrated as well, to save us that extra click.