News - 820/944 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Dec

Sprint Taken To Court Over $10 Monthly "Premium Data" Fee

Posted by Jaroslav Stekl in News, Sprint

Looks like Sprint's $10 per month "premium data" fee (I like to call it the "4G tax") is coming back to bite them - a class action lawsuit was recently filed against the carrier.

Customers of the HTC EVO 4G as well as the Samsung Epic 4G may be "interested to know" that they can call the law offices of Scott A. Bursor at 646-504-7781 to confirm that they have indeed been charged the $10/month fee. His plaintiffs' argument is that Sprint's customers are already promised unlimited data within the $69.99 "Simply Everything" package.

Thing is, while the plaintiffs certainly do have the right to sue, I have my doubts about this here lawsuit making it anywhere.

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

Android Chrome To Phone App Update Brings Link History

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

The Chrome To Phone Android app, exclusive to Android 2.2 and up, was updated today to version 2.2 with 1 new feature: link history. The app, which lets you quickly and easily send data to your phone from your computer's browser (see our tutorials here: ChromeToPhone, FoxToPhone), now has a single useful screen with links broken down to Today, Last 7 days, Last month, and Older. Here it is:

Unfortunately (or luckily), clipboard history does not show up in this list, so all your passwords and grandma's cookie recipes you might send around are safe.

Grab the updated app in the Market by clicking this link from your mobile or scanning it with Barcode Scanner:

Source: Chrome To Phone

Image credit: DownloadAtoZ

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

Notion Ink Adam Pre-Orders Starting At 10:30AM PST Today At Lower Than Expected Prices; Mystery Feature Still Unrevealed

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Adam, News, Notion Ink

The wait for Notion Ink's dual-core Tegra 2 based Adam tablet pre-orders is finally coming to an end - after yesterday's teaser blog post that now generated over 8000 comments, Rohan Shravan, the CEO and the public voice of Notion Ink, put up some details of the pre-order that is indeed coming today.

Timeline

First up, the timeline:

10:30 a.m PST Dec 9th (0:00 a.m. IST Dec 10th): pre-orders start for a pre-selected group of people who have been actively participating in the Notion Ink Blog
4:30 p.m. PST Dec 9th (6:00 a.m. IST Dec 9th): pre-orders open up for everyone (link TBD)

Pricing

The pricing structure of 3 out of 6 models has been updated as well, and to our surprise, the new prices are actually lower, though temporarily:

LCD Wi-Fi version: $375.33 (down from $399.99)
LCD Wi-Fi+3G version: $425.33 (down from $449.99)
Pixel Qi (transflective display) Wi-Fi version: $499.45
Pixel Qi (transflective display) Wi-Fi+3G version: $549.99

Note: For each 3G model, there are 2 variants - 850 and 900 series, which differ in the exact frequency of the 3G chip.

Dec

[Updated Again: New Pictures] Notion Ink Teases Us With The Golden Ratio A Day Before The Big Adam Unveiling

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Adam, News, Notion Ink

December 9th has been circled on my calendar ever since Notion Ink unveiled its new site and we found a hidden hint pointing at tomorrow's date. That's when the big Adam reveal and pre-orders are undoubtedly happening, as today Notion Ink posted this teaser, with a single image inside, titled "1.61803399." 1.61803399 happens to be the Golden Ratio, which played a huge part in Adam's design:

As for the single occupant of today's blog post, here it is:

Can you smell what the ~~Rock~~ Rohan is cooking?

Update: Joe points out in the comments that the image above contains some metadata that reads: "Oh you've reached here!

Dec

Android Passes 300,000 Activations Per Day, According To Android Chief Andy Rubin

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Android OS, News

Andy Rubin is a man of few words, at least on Twitter. Followed by 15,000, he only ever tweeted once before today, defending Android's openness. His second tweet - an update on the daily rate of Android activations, which was 100,000 per day in May during Google I/O, 160,000 in June, 200,000 in August, and now topped 300,000.

300,000 Android phones a day! That's 2.1 million phones per week, about 9 million phones per month, or 108 million phones per year. That's a whole lot of phones.

Shortly after, Dan Morrill, Android's tech lead, echoed Andy with his take:

Just for fun, I entered the data points into a spreadsheet and extrapolated them using a trendline.

Dec

Upset Android Developers Demand Better Service From Google After Recent Android Market Payment Issues

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

On December 4th, Google user judez reported on the Android Market support forum that for six hours straight, all of his Android Market sales were showing up as "payment declined." The issue continued through December 5th and 6th with over one hundred responses from other developers. Other threads were started reporting the same issue as well. Take a look at the problem:

The screenshot, posted by khriskooper on the second page of that thread, shows just how ridiculous the issue became. Developers were reporting anywhere from 50-90% of payments being declined, with the most significantly affected sellers being outside of the United States with the purchasers in the United States.

Dec

OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) Ported To Android, Available In Market

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Games, News

Anyone who grew up in the 90's may remember Transport Tycoon - a game similar to Sim City 2000 and Roller Coaster Tycoon (Chris Sawyer, who created TTC, also created RCT). The objective of the game is fairly simple by today's standards: control a transport company to make more profit than your rivals. Fans of the original should be happy to hear that the OpenTTD project has been ported to Android, and this time around, there's even multiplayer support.

The bad news is that it's still an early release, so it's not without kinks. A fair number of users can't get the app to run at all, and some users have also had trouble getting sound to work.

Dec

[Quick Hands-On] Comcast Xfinity App Now Live In The Android Market

Posted by Stephen Tenerowicz in Applications, News

Just as promised, Comcast has finally brought their Xfinity application to the Android Market (and it's about time). We haven't spent more than a few minutes with it, but that's enough to provide at least preliminary impressions.

At first glance, the app is very attractive and appears to be pretty functional, including its own Comcast mail client, voicemail inbox, TV listings, and a DVR Manager (which takes up to 24 hours to set up). In addition to this, it contains a listing of all On Demand shows, but no On Demand playback is available at the moment. While fully featured, the TV listings portion of the app is very laggy and slow.