10
May
Image credit: http://wholinkstome.com

Android Finally Overtakes iPhone In Sales For The First Time

Posted by in News

Since the launch of the Motorola Droid in the fall of 2009, the market share of the Android OS has been steadily on the rise, and it has only been a question of when, not if it would actually overtake the iPhone in sales.

After all, with dozens of Android handsets now flooding the market, how long can the iPhone possibly stay on top?

The answer to when came today, when NPD, a consumer market research group, reported smartphone sales results for Q1 of 2010.

In Q1, Android OS, which rose to a 28% share, finally caught up, spanked, and beat the iPhone (21% share) in phone sales, putting it firmly in the number two slot behind Research In Motion's Blackberry phones, which maintained a pretty strong lead at 36%.

27
Apr
cyanogen-iphone-3gs

Updated: It Was A Prank - First Android on iPhone 2G, Now CyanogenMod On iPhone 3GS?!

Posted by in Development, News
Last Updated: April 2nd, 2011

Details are being kept internally between team members right now but what we do know is that the CyanogenMod has been ported onto an iPhone 3GS.

Everyone is pretty tight lipped for now but this seems so far to be legitimate, as one of the team members has confirmed the port is working via twitter.

It was only a few days ago when reports surfaced of the Android OS having been ported onto the iPhone 2G which was crazy enough to hear but now the advent of CyanogenMod on the 3GS is almost downright insane.

Progress

So far there isn’t any word on how far things have progressed when talking about the functionality of the ROM on the iPhone 3GS, however Nate Tellari (aka @rikupw) has stated that they have the camera and radio working:

People, I cannot disclose any more information outside of the #team !

22
Apr
android flash

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

Posted by 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.

21
Apr
image

iPhone Now Runs Android Too. Wait. WHAT? Is "Flash Coming To iPhone" Going To Be Our Next Headline?

Posted by in News, Videos

Today has been absolutely nuts - first 3 new Android phones leaked from Dell. Then, another tablet, also from Dell.

And now we have this: a Canadian Linux hacker by the name of Planetbeing posted a 9 minute video of an iPhone 2G running Android. Yes, that is an Android 1.5 or 1.6 dual booted on an iPhone running the iPhone OS.

Planetbeing, being a smart cookie that he is, has ported Linux to run on iPhone hardware over a year ago. Since Android is a custom Linux distribution on its own, it was only a matter of time before Planetbeing figured out how to make this magic happen.

20
Apr
iNexus Hybrid

Google's New Ploy To Recruit iPhone App Developers For Android

Posted by in Apps/Games, News
Last Updated: April 2nd, 2011

With the number of applications in the Android Market continuing to rise, Google is apparently adopting new tactics in their bid to outnumber applications in the iPhone’s App Store. David Pogue, a New York Times blogger, reported yesterday that he was contacted by an iPhone app developer who made him aware of Google’s latest attempt to get developers writing their apps for Android.

The developer, who is behind the Texts From Last Night app for the iPhone, told David Pogue how he received an email from a developer advocate at Google. He was asked if he wanted to port the TFLN application over to Android, and was offered a free Nexus One in the process.

08
Apr
Apple iPhone 4.0 multitouch

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

Posted by 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.

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).

25
Mar
Motorola robot screen test

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

Posted by 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.

25
Mar
Android chart, 100k applications

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

Posted by 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.

Apple

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.

23
Mar
image

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

Posted by 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.

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