networking - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Apr

[For Developers] Samsung Releases Chord SDK For Easier Peer-To-Peer Connections

Posted by Cody Toombs in Development, News

Few things attract new users to an app more than the ability to interact with other people; gamers demand multi-player and socialites want instant photo sharing. To ease the burden of exchanging data fluidly, Samsung has released its new Chord SDK to make local peer-to-peer and group communication much easier for developers with little or no networking knowledge. It exposes features similar to Samsung's AllShare SDK, but makes it possible to broadcast data and share files with several devices at once.

Chord automates the discovery of nearby devices and handles most of the tedious aspects of file transfer and messaging, which are built on top of the open source ZeroMQ library for high efficiency.

Mar

Open Garden 2.0 Comes With Channel Bonding, Enhanced Reliability, Same User-Friendly Mesh Networking

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Applications, News

Everyone's favorite mesh networking startup Open Garden today announced its 2.0 refresh at LAUNCH festival, having allegedly already served 2.1 million installs since version 1.

Readers would be forgiven for not remembering exactly what Open Garden is, or why it's interesting – we last covered the app in its beta stage.

Basically, the idea behind Open Garden is to create ubiquitous internet access by linking various smart devices together and sharing a common internet connection in a mesh network. For example, if your smartphone is connected to the internet, Open Garden would allow you to create a mesh network to which your tablet, another phone, a PC, or all of the above could connect.

Nov

Google Acknowledges 2.5-Year-Old Networking Bug, Promises Fix In Next Android Version

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Android OS, News

This likely won't affect too many average users, but if you happen to work in a business or university with an open wireless network that relies on an internal hostname within a domain for any redirection, you're in a bit of luck. Up until this point, there's been a bug in Android that makes it impossible for the system to resolve a hostname on a local domain to its proper IP address.

Here's the bug report filed by a user back in April 2010:

Shortly: When connected on WiFi to a network which specifies a domain name, hostnames in that domain do not resolve without appending the domain to the hostname.

Oct

Astro Updated With Honeycomb Hotness

Posted by Ron Amadeo in Applications, Honeycomb 3.0/3.1/3.2, News

Nothing excites me more than a new app for my poor, neglected tablet. Today, Astro is joining the party with version 3.0 of their venerable file manager. The new Astro sports a completely redesigned UI and icons, and drag and drop support. Look how pretty:

And it still works with all the cool Astro plug-ins, like Bluetooth and SMB networking. You know the drill, Astro is available in the Android Market. Go. Download.

ASTRO File Manager

QR code for https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.metago.astro

Jul

Qualcomm Releases Vellamo: A New Web Benchmarking App

Posted by Cameron Summerson in Applications, News

It's a well-known fact that Android enthusiasts love benchmarks. When new devices hit our hands, what is one of the first things we do? Run benchmarks. It's how we compare devices to one another, and what we use to develop the standards on which future devices will be set. At this point, we use a set of benchmarking tools that have become clutch throughout the community: Quadrant, Linpack, SmartBench, etc.

Now, Qualcomm is getting into the benchmarking game with a new web benchmark called Vellamo that aims to judge device performance in areas that really matter: rendering, javascript, networking, and user experience.