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PowerAMP for Android appeared seemingly out of nowhere one day as a leaked beta and immediately captured attention of thousands of Android users who were impressed by its initial features, good looks, and overall polish. Fast forward to today - PowerAMP is one of the best selling Android apps in the Market with a 4.6-4.8-star rating, even at ~$4.99, which is considered pretty pricey for an app.
This morning, an HTC Sensation ROM featuring Sense 3.0 got leaked online, and while we're waiting for it to be ported to various devices, I thought it'd be a good idea to download it and see if it has any new wallpapers, ringtones, or notification sounds. While I was a bit disappointed on the audio front (both notifications and ringtones don't contain anything new), most of the wallpapers were indeed brand new, except maybe bokeh (I ran them through TinEye's reverse image search).
There has been a lot of confusion regarding this post on NVIDIA's Tegra developer forum that was misconstrued as vaguely implying NVIDIA would stop supporting the "Harmony" generation of Tegra devices going forward (ViewSonic gTablet, Notion Ink Adam, ViewSonic ViewPad 7, Advent Vega, and others) and would instead only stick to the "Ventana" generation. Rather than panicking and freaking out, we pinged our contact at NVIDIA to get a straight answer and held off until we heard the official response.
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.
2 of T-Mobile's most exciting devices that are arriving this month, the dual-core LG G2x and the Samsung Sidekick 4G, have just gone live on Wirefly's pre-order site. Wirefly, one of the largest online mobile retailers, is sweetening the deal on the G2x by $50 compared to MSRP and on the Sidekick 4G (pick black or pink) by $20.
While Google Maps already made headlines today for omitting the changelog in the latest update, causing hundreds of 1-star comments, it does have a reason to celebrate, which overshadows this snafu by a long shot. The 50,000,000 installation mark, never before achieved by any app in the Market, has been reached, and by none other than Google Maps, making it the most downloaded Android application ever.
Paid app models have always been fascinating to me - I've even had a TODO sitting around in my post ideas list to explore various methods of distributing software without inundating users too much. Pro features, time trials, disabling ads for money, in-app key unlocks, lite versions, paid-only ones without trials - these are all on the list and all have their pluses and minuses.
Mozy, one of the most popular cloud backup solutions (I prefer and use CrashPlan myself), can now add the Android app to the list of features its users. Decho Corp, the company behind Mozy, announced Mozy for Android 2 weeks ago but only dropped the app into the Android Market about 2 hours ago.
When developers release updates to their apps without listing the changes, normally about half of the Market comments turn sour, especially considering Google added the changelog feature into the core of the Market a few months ago. When Google itself does it to one of the flagship products... let's just say things are not pretty.
Adobe, the maker of the Creative Suite of applications, such as Photoshop, Acrobat, and Flash, is starting out the week with a whole array of new CS 5.5 announcements, with many new or updated features that deal directly with Android.
CyanogenMod, or simply CM, is hands down the largest and the most widely used Android custom ROM family on the planet, with support for 30 devices, both tablets and phones, from hundreds of developers all over the world. Over the past 4 months, these developers have been sweating day and night upgrading CM6's Froyo codebase to Gingerbread, and today CM7 is finally fully baked.
If you've been watching the Eee Pad Transformer promo video and salivating over that awesome keyboard dock with 2 USB 2.0 ports, an SD card reader, and a secondary battery that doubles the tablet's battery life, what you're about to read may serve as a splash of cold water in your face.
The dreaded day of April 18th, this year's tax filing deadline, is almost here, and for our weekly poll, we wanted to see how many of you ended up filing your taxes using your Android phone. 2010 was the first year you could actually estimate, file, track, and even snap pictures of your tax forms entirely on your Android device, without touching a computer or paying a tax professional.
Notion Ink is one of the most controversial companies in recent Android history - it's gone through product delays, building up one of the most passionate communities around, followed by communication issues that you could write a suspenseful thriller about (I am fairly sure there is enough for a trilogy with twists at the end of every chapter), and some of the weirdest reasons for shipments delays we've ever seen.
Most users will probably look at this unusual boot animation tweak and wonder why in the world anyone would do this, but developers and Linux lovers will nostalgically giggle and cheer. Rather than having boring pre-recorded boot animations, why not see the actual boot messages fly by, akin to booting a Linux machine?
Could it be? Is Amazon offering another useful app that I actually want to own for the 2nd day in a row? That's pretty much a first so far, with the Shazam Encore/SwiftKey tag team being a close second. What makes today's deal especially valuable is that there is no free version of Wolfram Alpha at all, so combined with 4.7 stars and over 1,800 reviews in the official Market, getting today's free app right away is pretty much a no-brainer.
April Fools' passed a long time ago but users are discovering a few jokes that decided to stick around, such as what happens when you search Google on your phone for any of these words:
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.
After a few days of relatively disappointing free premium apps of the day in the Amazon Appstore, today we have a real treat - the Pro version of a photo editing app PicSay. Before I go on, I must note that this is the only photo editing app I actually bought quite a while ago, after playing around with the free version. It's no wonder - the app has 4.8 stars and over 11,000 ratings in the Market.
If this is going to become a regular weekly event, then sign me up. Amazon's 1-premium-app-per-day deal got a bit of a split personality today, just like a week ago, and instead of one, two apps turned free until the clock strikes midnight. The apps, which are actually both games, are: