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It's April 28th, the official release date for the 2nd generation Droid Incredible from HTC, and if you haven't studied this phone in detail yet, you're probably wondering just what exactly has changed since the original "Dinc" entered the market last April. Let's have a look, shall we?
While browsing the XOOM xda forum today, I saw this announcement of HoneyReader, a new application built specifically with Honeycomb tablets in mind. Because it doesn't have to support pre-Honeycomb versions of the OS or small-sized phone screens altogether, the authors concentrated on making it a great tablet experience, and I must say, their first take is pretty good.
Earlier this week, I dropped a hint on Twitter that we have a few awesome giveaways lined up here at Android Police, and I really wasn't kidding.
Rogers, one of the top Canadian ISPs and carriers, wants you to know that it has some Android phones you can buy. It really-really wants you to know, in the most awesome way I've seen in a while (possibly ever). Have a look at the Android takeover of Rogers.com, which includes a brilliant intro and a landing page packed with Android news, videos, device info, and even a contest.
What an incredible day for Samsung Fascinate users on Verizon Wireless - earlier this morning, we reported that the coveted Froyo update was finally set to arrive tomorrow, April 21st. Looks like someone at Verizon pulled the trigger a little earlier, as we are seeing multiple reports of the update rolling out as we speak write.
Welcome to the weekly roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Market or were spotted by us in the previous week or so.
Sticking to last week's announcement, Autodesk, the maker of the popular modeling/designing/drafting AutoCAD software, released AutoCAD WS to the Android Market this morning for a low price of absolutely free.
The LG G2x, the first dual-core Android phone on T-Mobile, is officially available at all retail channels starting today, April 20th. While you can go pick it up at T-Mobile for 9.99 after an instant discount and a mail-in rebate (plus a nice kickback to Uncle Sam), you could instead head over to Amazon, where the G2x page just went live, ready to be delivered to your abode via free 2-day shipping.
HowStuffWorks.com, together with its numerous video and podcast series, like the hilarious Stuff You Should Know, is arguably one of the most interesting websites on the Internet. It's no wonder - HSW is owned by Discovery Communications, which you may recognize from, oh, I don't know, the Discovery channel. Sometime ago, Discovery finally decided that Android users are not discovering enough and not figuring out exactly how all of this stuff works, and got to work on a dedicated HowStuffWorks app.
Last week, LauncherPro's Federico Carnales launched a beta version of the new LP Plus with skinnable widget support, and this update, tagged 0.8.5, made its way into the Market as of this morning. Skins can be downloaded and installed as regular Android apps from the Market or from 3rd party websites (sorry, AT&T users) and then applied to LauncherPro Plus (you need the Plus edition to have widgets).
If there's one thing we still don't know for sure about the Toshiba Android tablet, it's its name. At this year's CES, when the product was first announced and demoed, Toshiba refused to give up the name, simply referring to it as "the unnamed Toshiba tablet." The company then followed up with the site named just TheToshibaTablet.com, leaving us guessing and puzzled as to why it takes months to give a gadget a name. Then came guesses - Antares and ANT were both considerations, but it now seems like both were actually wrong (or rather, could be internal names) and the real name of the tablet will be...
Almost 2 months ago, CNN pushed out its first news app to the Android Market, though with one quite annoying caveat - it was created specifically for Honeycomb devices, which were quite scarce to say the least (i.e. the XOOM).
I know the subject of Twitter buying another company is not directly related to Android, but considering the importance of the social service in our day-to-day operations and the target of the rumor being TweetDeck, a crowd favorite when it comes to Twitter clients, I thought I'd give this one a mention.
Today, for the first time ever, my EVO 4G had an unexpected failure installing updates for some of my Android apps. All update attempts would inevitably end in an almost instant failure with the message that read:
To shopaholics' delight, Internet superstore Buy.com quietly graced us with its official Android app this evening. After playing with it for a few minutes, I found it to be quite similar to Amazon's shopping app, including a prominent search box, product listings, Buy buttons, account management, barcode scanning, and voice searching.
When it comes to testing bandwidth throughput of your Android device, the Speedtest.net app is considered a de facto standard - it's functional, the UI is gorgeous, and there is a good chance they have a server pretty close to your location. I've tried all the speed testing programs in the Market, and always kept coming back to this one. For a long time the app has remained unchanged on the Market, lagging behind its iOS counterpart and its shiny new user interface. Well, no more.
After a bunch of relatively uninteresting premium apps given out for free in Amazon's Android Appstore, today's offering is really quite refreshing. Users of the desktop version of Trillian will instantly recognize their beloved multi-network IM client's logo, and those new to it will find its features quite impressive:
For all 5 people who are actually using the gTablet's stock UI instead of a custom ROM that is miles ahead of it in features, ViewSonic released a new over-the-air (OTA) update that finally adds Adobe Flash, along with external docking station and USB keyboard/mouse support and a few other things. The full list, found on ViewSonic's news page, is reproduced below:
The unnamed dual-core 10.1-inch Toshiba Android tablet that we got to play with at CES this year has oddly remained anonymous for an extraordinary amount of time - in fact, we still don't really know what its final name will be. An earlier rumor suggested it could be called "Antares," and today's freshly discovered Newegg pages curiously neither confirm nor deny that name, simply listing its 3 variants as ANT-100, ANT-102, and ANT-104. Could ANT be short for Antares? Sure. Could they both be just internal codenames? Just as well.
Flipz, the developer of Fresh ROM for the EVO 4G and the HTC Hero, has been quiet since the release of Fresh 3.5, and it's no surprise - Sprint hasn't pushed out anything to our beloved EVOs in months. Since Fresh is a Sense ROM that follows official releases, as opposed to being built from AOSP like CyanogenMod, I didn't really expect to see another Fresh release until either the next leak or an official Sprint release.