apple - 18/20 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Sep

Fruit Ninja Now Available For Android

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Games, News

We told you it was coming today, and indeed here it is - Fruit Ninja, one of the most popular iOS games just entered the Android world, powered by OpenFeint.

Download

You can download the game for $0.99 by clicking or scanning the barcode below:

A Few Notes

it is quite big - almost 14MB, but it doesn't yet support apps2sd in Froyo. I'm sure that is coming later
the graphics, physics, UI - everything is very well done. It's a direct port from the iOS version using the NDK (Native Development Kit) - not a Java rewritten version
in my opinion, the copycats, such as Ninja Kaka and Fruit Pirate are nowhere near as good
the new Arcade mode is coming soon - for now it's only available on iOS

Screenshots

Sep

Fruit Ninja Coming To Android Wednesday + New Arcade Mode [AppNation]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Games, News

Last Updated: September 15th, 2010

Update: Fruit Ninja is now available in the Market!

At the AppNation conference today, I got a chance to talk to Shainiel Deo, the CEO of Halfbrick, a company most known for its best selling iOS game Fruit Ninja.

Fruit Ninja is an addicting game in which you try to slash as many pieces of fruit thrown in the air as possible, getting bonus points for combo slices, while avoiding bombs at all costs. The biggest appeal of the game is probably its excellent graphics, fluid movements, and the satisfaction of chopping all that fruit in half.

Shainiel made 2 major announcements:

The New Arcade Mode

The new Arcade mode is coming to the iOS version this week and the Android version in the future.

Aug

Editorial: Convincing Your Non-Techie Friends To Go Android

Posted by Kenny Embry in Editorials

Last Updated: August 2nd, 2012

I have always been a techie. As a child of the 80s I had an IBM PC with a 10 megabyte hard disk that had to remain completely immobile and level or risk scratching, I had a 300/1200 baud internal modem and I stayed up all night downloading a 64 kilobyte game that, at the time, was the coolest thing I had ever seen. My wife, on the other hand, thought anything with a screen needed rabbit ears to get good reception and that PC stood for popcorn.

Convincing her to get an iPhone was almost impossible. She thought $200 for the phone was money headed straight down the toilet.

Jul

Motorola Will Not Be iBashed - Fires Back At Apple's Death Grip Claim With This Gem

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Droid X (Shadow), Motorola, News

When Apple released a widely criticized video of a Droid X death grip last week, Motorola suddenly found itself as a target of what could essentially be interpreted as a smear campaign. Here is the video for those who managed to miss it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJG7pbSRvJ8

Of course, the video followed a similar smear aimed at HTC's Droid Eris during a recent Apple press conference focused on antennas and reception. Clearly, Apple is not singling anyone out while trying to defend itself. The only problem is it's not comparing apples to apples (oh, the puns) - in fact, I'll leave the explanation to this very sane article by PC World.

Jul

Fujitsu Developing Japanese Market Android Smartphone To Challenge iPhone's Domination

Posted by David Ruddock in News

MobileCrunch is reporting via Japanese site Sankei Digital [JP] that Fujitsu is planning on manufacturing an Android handset for the Japanese market. Apple currently dominates the smartphone market in Japan, largely because the Japanese smartphone market was fairly bland before Apple entered the foray.

Japanese phones have tended to focus on high portability, social connectivity, and gadgetry over advanced software or bigger displays. The iPhone changed all that, and created a market for devices with larger displays and modern smartphone operating systems. The iPhone 3G and 3GS last year accounted for over 72% of all smartphones shipped in Japan, and the iPhone 4 will likely be just as big a hit.

Jul

Android On The Move: Google Now Controls 13% Of The Smartphone Operating System Market

Posted by David Ruddock in News

Today, comScore released its mobile phone market share figures today for May 2010 (the figures take a while to compile), and the results bode very well for Google. Among smartphone operating systems, Google’s Android now holds a 13% share. While this may not sound huge, keep in mind that only 3 months prior in February Android controlled only 9% of the market. The figures and changes, below:

Mobile OS	Feb. 2010	May 2010	Change
RIM	42.1%	41.7%	-0.4
Apple	25.4%	24.4%	-1.0
Microsoft	15.1%	13.2%	-1.9
Google	9.0%	13.0%	+4.0
Palm	5.4%	4.8%	-0.6

Meanwhile, every other smart phone operating system has lost ground.

Jul

Google Android 2.2 Froyo Web Browser Versus Apple iOS4 Mobile Safari In JavaScript Benchmarks: No Contest

Posted by David Ruddock in Froyo 2.2, News

It’s rather surprising this comparison took such a long time to take place, but nonetheless, ArsTechnica published the image below comparing the performance of Android 2.2’s web browser against iOS4’s mobile Safari in two respected JavaScript benchmarks.

SunSpider

The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark measures the amount of time a certain number of various JavaScript operations take to complete. A lower score means the operations completed more quickly, and the Nexus One running Froyo beats the iPhone 4 in this regard by a sizeable ~50%.

V8

The V8 benchmark (an open source benchmark maintained by Google) tests the robustness of a phone’s ability to move through rigorous JavaScript actions found on many modern, complex web pages.

Jul

More Developers Have Experience Developing For Android Than Any Other Mobile Platform

Posted by David Ruddock in News

Last Updated: July 15th, 2010

An interesting chart published today by BusinessInsider reveals that mobile developers, or at least the 401 surveyed, more often have experience developing for Android than any other mobile operating system, including iOS. Given Android’s growing market share, it seems only natural that developers are flocking to the increasingly attractive (and large) customer base Android devices provide.

While Android’s lead over iOS in this regard isn’t massive, it certainly isn’t insignificant either. Nearly 60% of developers have experience developing on Android, while the number for iOS hovers around 50%. Meanwhile, Blackberry and Windows Mobile sit even lower at about 40%. While Apple’s App Store certainly offers developers greater upfront financial incentive in selling their applications, apps supported by Google Ads are clearly just as, if not even more, lucrative.

Jul

Latest Breakdowns: Top 10 Android Devices, Operating System Share, Satisfaction Levels, And Other Stats

Posted by Nate Kimmey in News

Today we're having a look at AdMob's latest monthly mobile metrics report which includes some information that may be of interest to the Android community, especially developers.

Top 10 Android Devices

One particularly interesting piece of information is their ranking of the top ten Android smartphones in terms of market share, based on data collected by AdMob in May of this year. You can view the list and each handset maker’s own market share below.

Combined, HTC and Motorola are dominating the Android handset market with an 83% share. It's going to be very interesting to see how the stats change in the coming months with Samsung, currently at 5% (at least in the top 10 list), gunning full speed to regain their own Android market share.

Jun

The Comeback: HTC EVO 4G VS iPhone 4 Parody Video, This Time From Apple's Side (Battery Jokes - Check)

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, Videos

Earlier this morning we posted a hilarious video made by tinywatchproductions depicting an average iPhone ~~user~~ fanboy - the one who mindlessly gobbles up everything Steve and AT&T say and buys every iPhone just because it's an iPhone. Admit it - you know a few people like that.

Now in a comeback video, the same tinywatchproductions came up with a few things an iPhone user could counter with in a conversation with a mindless EVO 4G fan (do those exist?). This video is done in the same machine text-to-speech voiceover format as the first one, which makes it so funny.

Mac VS Windows next please?