report - 2/2 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Sep

Report: Android Police Visits Aurora Feint To Learn About OpenFeint And Its Vision About The Future Of Android Gaming

Posted by Ian G. Clifton in Apps/Games, News

OpenFeint

About a week ago, Aurora Feint, the team behind OpenFeint, publicly unveiled their Android SDK, allowing Android developers to easily incorporate things like leaderboards and achievements into their games. With that announcement came the promise of twenty new games, and we have already seen significant successes like MiniSquadron and Fruit Ninja jumping to the top of the Android charts. But now what? I flew down to the OpenFeint offices in San Francisco to find out first-hand.

Jet Car Stunts

Jason Citron, CEO and founder of Aurora Feint, showed off Jet Car Stunts (see video below) on iPhone to explain what OpenFeint could currently do and open the conversation about its future.

Sep

Android Police Samsung Galaxy Tab Press Event Report - Galaxy Tab, Media Hub, Details, Hands-On

Posted by Brett Gmoser in AT&T, Devices By Manufacturer, Galaxy Tab, News, Samsung, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless

Rain, shine, or literally freakin' tornado in the part of the country which isn’t supposed to have such weather, Android Police is there. As promised, I attended the press event thrown by Samsung on Thursday, during which they were to announce their "latest Android-powered device" as well as their new Media Hub service.

While the fact that Samsung was to announce a tablet device was officially a secret, we all pretty much knew the mystery device was going to be the Galaxy Tab.

Samsung also took the occasion to announce the launch of their new website, which went live the day of the event.

Sep

Nielsen Mobile App Report: Android Users Respond To Advertisement The Most + More [AppNation]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Apps/Games, News

I am live here at the AppNation conference in San Francisco, and after San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's welcome speech, in which he tried to get a bunch of developers to make apps for the government for free (yeah, riiight), we are looking at a mobile report from Nielsen, called The State Of Mobile Apps.

Nielsen, one of the largest media research companies in the world, compiled a report containing a few interesting metrics, such as:

Most Popular Apps
Application Discovery Methods
Free VS Paid Apps
App Billing Preference
a few Advertising related stats

You can download and read the full report below, but before you do that, I wanted to highlight one metric that I found the most interesting.

Aug

[EXCLUSIVE] Report: [UPDATED] Google's Android Market License Verification Easily Circumvented, Will Not Stop Pirates

Posted by Justin Case in Development, Exclusives, Videos

Last Updated: June 5th, 2012

[Update: 8/24/10 @ 7:45 PM EST by Aaron] Tim Bray responded to Justin's article, but seems to have misunderstood the goal. Thus, Justin has written a follow-up article here.

Preface

This article was not written to teach people how to pirate or ridicule Google's Android License Verification Library (LVL) that handles communication with Google's Android Market Licensing Service.

I am very much against piracy, and very much pro-Google. I have spent more time researching copy protection for my applications than development of the applications themselves.

I would like to thank:

the author of Star Hunt for allowing me to use his application in my demo video
the author of Tasker for allowing me to use his application, which has the best implementation of LVL I found, in this article

Both of these applications are available in the market - I highly suggest you give them a try.

Aug

[Adobe Android Summit] Full Video Of The Google TV Talk

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Google, Google TV, News, Videos

Yesterday, Aaron and I attended the Adobe Android Summit, where Adobe, among other things, did a demo of the upcoming Google TV box. Below, you will find Aditya Bansod's whole talk recorded by me in 1080P HD using Canon T2i (love this beast).

For more info on this and other talks, read Aaron's summary report: Adobe Android Summit 2010: "One Web. Any Device."

Unfortunately, the card was formatted as FAT32, so as soon as the videos reached 4GB, T2i shut off recording, resulting in small gaps between all the parts.

In my defense, it doesn't look like Canon included support for NTFS, so I don't see a way around the problem yet.

Jun

Samsung Galaxy S Launch Event Recap, Photos, And Q&A

Our Samsung Galaxy S Launch Event Report, Photos, And Q&A

Posted by Andrew Gould in AT&T, Captivate, Epic 4G, Fascinate, News, Samsung, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vibrant

Last Updated: July 23rd, 2010

Last night, Samsung officially announced their Galaxy S smartphone family at a swank New York City party after several weeks of blurrycam shots, spec sheets and rumors. Spanning all four major US carriers - Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile - the Galaxy S flavors stand to be a surging juggernaut in the HTC dominated Android world.

Incidentally, I was at the event and had the pleasure of doing a live blogging session, followed by some hands-on time with all the phones.

Galaxy S Line

The Galaxy S line in the US consists of the following devices:

Verizon Fascinate
T-Mobile Vibrant
AT&T Captivate
Sprint Epic 4G

All four phones run Samsung’s skinned Android 2.1 OS variant (TouchWiz) and feature Samsung’s new Super AMOLED multi-touch screens.

Apr

HTC Announces Q1 Financial Results, Blows Past Everyone's Expectations

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in HTC, News

HTC, an increasingly popular smartphone maker and the single biggest player in the Android business, just announced its financial results for the first quarter of this year, and they simply couldn't be any better.

Q1 2010 Financial Results

Revenues rose 19.3% year-over-year to NT$37.7 billion (US$1.2 billion) from NT$31.59, blowing way past the analysts' forecasts of NT$32-34 billion and even HTC's own expectations.

Net profits rose 3% year-over-year to NT$5.03 billion (US$158 million) from NT$4.88 billion.

Sales rose 33% compared to the same quarter a year ago.

HTC's shares are trading at NT$401.50 this morning, +5.38% from last night's close of NT$381 (morning Taiwanese time that is, it's 8PM Pacific here).

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).