release - 22/28 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Jan

Notion Ink Adam Pre-Order Shipments Delayed By FCC Certification

Posted by David Ruddock in Adam, News, Notion Ink

Red tape seems to be getting in the way of Notion Ink's plans to ship initial pre-order customers' Adam tablets today. An email sent to us by one of those pre-order customers this morning indicates that it is the FCC's certification process which has put the brakes on the Adam's release:

Greetings from the Notion Ink Support Team!

This e-mail is to inform you that your shipment is ready, but we are awaiting final FCC and CE numbers which are to be printed on the device before we can ship them to you. The Holiday season in December pushed the administrative work and it will be cleared within this week.

Dec

Tunerfish Releases Android App, Aims To Be FourSquare For TV, Movies, And Videos (Complete With A Back Story - Read It)

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

Tunerfish, which dubs itself "a social discovery engine for TV, movies, and online video," released version 1.0 of its Android app to the Market today.

The idea behind Tunerfish is similar to the one behind 4square, only if you replaced locations with TV shows, movies, and online videos. In order to use Tunerfish, you can create an account or log in using Facebook or Twitter. Once logged in, you can:

see what your friends are watching in real-time
see what they were watching in the past
check out trending shows, movies, and videos, i.e. what's being watched now by everyone
earn badges and awards
participate in discussions, view profiles
check in and share what you are watching on Tunerfish, Facebook, and Twitter

You can read more about Tunerfish here.

Dec

HTC To Start Rolling Out Froyo To European Wildfires This Week, Rest Of The World By February 2011

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Froyo 2.2, HTC, News, Wildfire (Buzz)

While the owners of HTC Wildfires have known for a while now that their devices would be eventually receiving Froyo, and that it probably wouldn't happen until Christmas, they were still secretly hoping HTC wouldn't take over 6 months to accomplish the feat. At least it looks like the company is keeping its word, which is refreshing nowadays, to say the least.

Starting this week, HTC will be rolling out Froyo to European Wildfire variants, with the rest of the world following sometime between now and February 2011. Better late than never, I suppose, although by then, we could be seeing Honeycomb and forgetting all about Froyo, let alone Gingerbread.

Dec

[Updated Again: Rohan Responds] Notion Ink Pre-Order Page & Return Policy Are Arousing Suspicion, Anger

Posted by David Ruddock in Adam, Editorials, News, Notion Ink

Last Updated: December 11th, 2010

Note:

Let me direct you all to our most up-to-date post on this issue:

Our Response To Rohan's Blog Posting

Please leave comments there - this thread is getting a little unwieldy.

Thanks,

David

Update #4: If Notion Ink is planning to unveil Adam at CES, why are they not listed in the CES exhibitors list?

Update #3: Rohan Shravan has posted, in response to many users' concerns, some information on his blog regarding many of Notion Ink's policies, shipping costs, and warranty.

Rohan has also stated that on December 18th, a video demonstration of the Adam will be posted for all to see.

Dec

JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 10 With Full Android Gingerbread Support In The Free Community Edition

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Apps/Games, Development, News

Android developers take note: Eclipse with the Android Development Tools (ADT) is no longer the only player in town when it comes to developing Android applications. JetBrains, the maker of IntelliJ IDEA, which was open sourced about a year ago, today released version 10 of their IDE, which, among other improvements, includes support for Android in the free Community Edition. All versions of the Android SDK are supported, including the recently released Gingerbread.

As an Android developer myself, I am constantly frustrated with Eclipse, constant IDE crashes, and millions of quirks that ADT seems to have. Therefore, I welcome the competition and will definitely be trying it out.

Dec

Froyo Now Rolling Out To All HTC Legend Variants

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Froyo 2.2, HTC, Legend, News

Almost a month ago, lucky HTC Legend owners on Vodaphone UK began receiving their Android 2.2 (Froyo) OTA updates. Surprisingly, carrier independent Legend variants, which would normally get updated first, were instead left behind.

Today, HTC finally let everyone in on the party and announced Froyo availability for all Legends:

To check for updates, turn on your device and go to Settings > About phone > System updates.

Welcome to the club!

Source: @HTC

Dec

Launcher Pro v0.8.2 Brings Virtual Homescreen Looping, Recent Apps Dock Popup

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

Launcher Pro, one of the greatest Android homescreen replacements (Sense who?), received an update today with 2 excellent new features: virtual homescreen looping and a Recent Apps dock popup.

The virtual looping feature enables scrolling past the leftmost or rightmost homescreens with a quick bounce-to-the-opposite-end effect. While Fede implemented it this way instead of an endless scroll for technical reasons, I think it's visually a lot better and clearer, as you will still know when you've reached the end and won't feel lost in your own homescreen forest.

Joining SMS, missed calls, and bookmarks, the 2nd feature is a new swipe gesture dock popup called Recent Apps.

Dec

[Updated] Google Announces 2.3 Gingerbread! Here Is Everything You Need To Know

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Gingerbread 2.3, News

Last Updated: December 10th, 2010

The moment we've been waiting for so many months - it's finally here! I can hardly contain my excitement as I'm writing this, but both Gingerbread and the Samsung Nexus S were officially announced 30 minutes ago. As expected, the new OS bears the version number 2.3 and brings updates to the SDK and the NDK as well SDK tools and the Eclipse ADT plugin.

As expected, a lot of the OS improvements are under-the-hood, which will result in better gaming, responsiveness, and overall Android experience.

New Features/Enhancements

OS/SDK/NDK

The new OS features and enhancements include:

enhancements for game development, including a new concurrent garbage collector, more native APIs, faster event distribution, updated video drivers, and new sensors (gyroscope) - this is amazing for developers; expect gaming to get a lot more responsive and versatile
lots and lots of attention in the above bullet point has been given to the NDK - the Native Development Kit.

Nov

ADT (Android Dev Tools) Source Code Commits Suggesting Imminent Gingerbread SDK Release?

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Gingerbread 2.3, News

Today, I was looking at the Android Development Tools (ADT) commit history, as I normally do on a Tuesday morning at 3am, and I noticed something that made my heart skip a few beats. But let me back up for a second.

Every Android SDK release is normally accompanied by an ADT release that adds support for the new functionality and fixes existing bugs. ADT, in turn, is an Eclipse plugin, which is essentially a set of developer tools for one of the best free open source editors out there (that's Eclipse), which also happens to be the IDE of choice of Android core developers.

Nov

Froyo Flood Begins: UK Vodaphone HTC Legend And Galaxy S Along With Korean Galaxy A And S Now Receiving Froyo Updates

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Froyo 2.2, Galaxy S, HTC, Legend, News, Samsung, Vodafone

What a day for Froyo! First, we had the Dell Streak, which has been long overdue for some frozen yogurt, and now not 1 but 4 more phones are receiving their Froyo updates. They are:

Vodaphone HTC Legend in the UK
Vodaphone Galaxy S in the UK
Galaxy A and Galaxy S in Korea

Interestingly enough, it's the carrier specific version of HTC Legend that is receiving Froyo, even before its carrier agnostic, unlocked brothers. The situation is usually the other way around because releasing through a carrier involves additional testing steps that normally slow things down. We'll take it though!