apple

Apr

Adobe Ceases Its Efforts To Bring Flash To The iPhone, Concentrates On Android Instead

Posted by John Thompson in News

You can’t say you didn’t see it coming! Adobe have officially given up on any kind of development efforts for Flash and Flash tools for the iPhone, just days after announcing that a public beta of Flash is planned for Android.

After months of trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone OS, Adobe banked big on its ‘Packager for iPhone’ application which was supposed to ship with the CS5 suite released a few days ago. This program converted Flash applications into iPhone ones allowing developers to easily submit their apps to the App Store.

Neither Flash nor the announcement of the Flash to iPhone converter made Apple too happy, who changed their developer rules in their iPhone OS 4.0 to lock down developers to “Objective-C, C++ or JavaScript” only.

Apr

Apple Announces Multitasking For iPhone OS 4, Stabs Android Directly In The Heart

Posted by John Thompson in News

Apple has just announced that iPhone OS 4 will support multitasking, allowing users to dive in and out of apps and keep some parts of an app running in the background while doing other things.

This is all done through a pop-up dock like interface that can be accessed by double pressing the home button. This will bring up all the apps that are currently running in the background.

Steve Jobs said they’ve figured out how to implement multitasking without it being detrimental to battery life or the performance of the phone. The latest SDK allows developers to access a number of services supporting features such as background audio and social networking integration.

Apr

ICD (Innovative Converged Devices) Gemini tablet

Android Powered ICD Gemini Tablet Trumps Apple's iPad Specs On All Fronts, Bound To Put Up A Good Fight

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Gemini, ICD, News

Last Updated: April 8th, 2010

Engadget's Vlad Savov just announced a new Android tablet called Gemini by ICD (Innovative Converged Devices), seemingly out of nowhere - Google searches do not bring up anything but Engadget's own post - it looks like they have an exclusive here. I hate using the term "###### killer", so I will not be calling it an iPad killer. However, it is going to give Apple a run for its money.

ICD Gemini Tablet

Gemini has beautiful 11.2" screen, compared to iPad's 9.7" - a whole 1.5" larger diagonally. This gives us 8.38 square inches of extra viewing space to ogle at.

Apr

Tablet Sales In 2010 - And The Winner Is… (Here Is A Hint: iPad VS Android)

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in 5, 7, 8, Adam, ARCHOS, Enso, News, Notion Ink, Streak, zenPad

We have some interesting numbers today regarding tablet sales in 2010, courtesy of IMS Research - a research company specializing in a variety of topics, such as wireless communications, automotive, consumer, power, and security.

The report suggests that 24% of all tablets sold in 2010 will be running the Android OS. Microsoft will be following way behind at only 10% of the market.

The first place will be undoubtedly occupied by Apple's iPad, which was released 2 days ago and sold an estimated 700,000 units just on day one. We don't have the exact number from the report but Apple's share trumps all competition.

Mar

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

Posted by Android Police Team 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).

Mar

MOTO Labs Team Hires C-3PO To Perform Screen Accuracy Tests. iPhone, N1, Eris Best; Droid, Pre, Storm 2 Worst

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Droid (Sholes), Eris, HTC, Motorola, News, Nexus One (Passion), Videos

~~Did you know Motorola has a Labs team that does cool things and then blogs about them? They're pretty cool like that.~~ Correction: interesting piece of trivia - did you know MOTO Labs actually has nothing to do with Motorola? With a name like MOTO, one could think… well never mind, I apologize for the mistake.

The Finger Test

For example, in January they tested the screens on 4 flagship mobile phones by swiping a finger across the screen in a drawing app and recording the resulting patterns, complete with photos and a video.

The phones in the first test were:

Apple iPhone
HTC Droid Eris
Motorola Droid
Google Nexus One

The iPhone won with the straightest lines (no surprise here - the iPhone screen feels like butter), Eris and N1 were *kind of* accurate and the Motorola Droid was the most inaccurate.

Mar

Projection: Android Marketplace To Hit 100,000 Applications Sometime In September 2010

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Apps/Games, News

Last Updated: March 9th, 2011

Today I put on my wizard Darth Vader math hat and decided to figure out when the Android market is going to finally reach the 100,000 mark.

"Why 100,000?" you may ask.

Well, it seemed like a nice round number, and it also happens to be the same number a small company called Apple was obsessing over in November 2009:

CUPERTINO, California—November 4, 2009—Apple® today announced that developers have created over 100,000 apps for the revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world.

The iPhone App Store launched on July 11th, 2008, so putting it all together, it took Apple 481 days or about 16 months to conquer 100k.

Mar

HTC EVO 4G/Supersonic Playing 720P HD Video Through HDMI, Without A Single Stutter. This Changes Everything

Posted by Android Police Team in EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, Videos

It's amazing how far mobile CPUs have gone in just 6 months. Here we have a video, courtesy of IntoMobile, of the newly announced HTC EVO 4G, formerly Supersonic, absolutely effortlessly playing a 720P HD video of Prince of Persia: The Sand Of Time.

HD video is more CPU intensive than plain standard definition, but the 1GHz Snapdragon processor is barely breaking a sweat. For comparison, the HTC Hero with its 528MHz processor can barely play average quality videos, even ones it itself recorded, and stumbles every few seconds.

This Changes Everything

You are now (OK, fine, a few months from now) holding a device in the palm of your hand that replaces your DVD player, your Bluray player (95% of the people won't notice the difference between 720P and 1080P), and your media PC.

Mar

Sprint Goes After AT&T And Apple In A Snarky 4G Sprint Overdrive Mobile Hotspot Vs iPhone Commercial

Posted by Android Police Team in AT&T, News, Sprint, Videos

Sprint has fired a shot at both AT&T and Apple in this recently released Sprint Overdrive 4G vs iPhone commercial, suggesting that an iPhone's bandwidth can be vastly improved by using a Sprint 4G WiMax router called Sprint Overdrive instead of the AT&T 3G network.

The ad is a bit cheesy but hey, it delivers the message. A carefree Matt actually goes on to eat an Apple (the ultimate pun) while showing off his 4G mobile hotspot that allows up to 5 people around him to connect to a 4G network using WiFi. Oh yeah, and his friend's name? You guessed it - Steve.