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Having your phone model supported by CyanogenMod's community is quite an honor nowadays, and for many people it's a deciding factor when picking up a new phone. CM usually stays ahead of the curve and is likely to support your phone well after manufacturers and carriers stop showing any interest.
HTC Nexus One, the predecessor to the Gingerbread-sporting Samsung Nexus S, has been teased with the Android 2.3 over-the-air upgrade ever since Gingerbread was released. At the time, we anxiously waited for the upgrade that seemed to be imminent, but weeks flew by without any news. Then, Google said it was coming "in the next few weeks," but months slowly churned, and thousands of Nexus Ones owners are still GBreadless.
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.
Another game hit that was previously available only as a Flash game on PCs is now on Android, and its premise may surprise you. Mr. Karoshi, who happens to be an "overworked Japanese salaryman" is feeling suicidal. Your job? Finish him off.
One of the few tech blogs who managed to get their hands on Motorola's upcoming AT&T flagship - the Atrix 4G - is, of course, Engadget. The reviewer, unsurprisingly, is the infamous cool geek and editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, who, from my experience reading Engadget's reviews, does a good overall job but fails to go into those details that matter to most Android users. The Atrix 4G review is exactly what I had expected, and I'm going to summarize it and save you 20 minutes reading it.
Earlier today at MWC, LG officially unveiled its most powerful upcoming smartphone: the Optimus 3D. We've already heard of the Optimus 3D before, and even witnessed both decent and disastrously cheesy ads LG put out ahead of the release, but what we didn't know is that the Optimus 3D would end up being the most powerful smartphone currently on the market.
Words With Friends, the wildly popular iOS game by everyone's favorite company Zynga, has come to Android, after weeks of anticipation. WWF is one of the most addicting and well made word games on the planet, and as of a few hours ago, you can download it for free from the Android Market.
Google's newest Android creation is not a 4-dimensional map or a death ray - it's much more light-hearted and is aimed at the versatile and passionate Android community. Absolutely quietly and without any fanfare, Google in collaboration with Larva Labs today launched a new Android application called Androidify.
MWC has officially started, and one of the first press conferences of this massive mobile event is from Samsung, still going on live as I'm writing this. Samsung's first announcement: Galaxy S II, which was fully expected to be revealed based on various leaks and Samsung's own preview ads throughout the past few weeks.
When it comes to haptic feedback, which is a fancy term for the way your smartphone vibrates or physically responds to your actions, smartphone users are not used to much variety. Unlike the complicated haptic motors in console gaming controllers, my EVO has a pretty standard and very basic vibrating motor inside, and the only aspect apps can control is the length of the vibration. Boooring.
If one thing can put an end to rumors, it's the official Best Buy weekly ad - the one you get in print from the store. Unfortunately, this time, all the rumors turned out to be correct. Namely:
You've probably heard of Plixi, a picture-sharing service heavily aimed at social networking users - after all, according to Alexa, it's the 372nd most popular site in the world. Or maybe TweetPhoto, the company's previous name, rings a bell? As you can see below, its popularity is undisputed, but until now, the millions of users sharing their media to Plixi have been doing it mostly through 3rd party apps.
Revision3, a popular Internet-based TV network started in part by Kevin Rose, just quietly released not 1, not 2, but 6 apps for 6 of their popular shows.
The upcoming 3D phone from LG, Optimus 3D, may be cool, with its glasses-free 3D and a dual-core CPU, but it certainly didn't stop the company from producing one of the cheesiest/worst commercials we've ever seen.
After many weeks of speculations, Nokia and Microsoft finally announced minutes ago that the 2 companies are entering a strategic partnership "to build a new global mobile ecosystem."
About 2 weeks ago, BGR broke the rumor of RIM's upcoming tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, possibly being capable of running Android apps sometime after launch, which the latest rumors put at the end of March/beginning of April with a price sticker of $499.99. The company was seriously looking into this possibility and was trying to decide whether using the Dalvik virtual machine (the same one Android uses to run its apps) was a viable way to move forward. BGR is usually very credible, so the rumor definitely had legs.
Do you or your company use WebEx for online meetings? While Cisco, the company behind WebEx, has offered native iOS and Blackberry apps for a while, Android users have been feeling left out. That is, until today, because Cisco just quietly dropped the WebEx Meetings app into the Market.
The Thunderbolt just can't come soon enough, can it? It seems we've been talking about this beast forever, and Best Buy even officially announced pre-orders, but the uncertainty regarding the actual release date has been killing us. Is it the 14th, the 24th, or something else?
Sonos, a company that develops wireless speaker solutions, announced today that the official Android app was almost ready to rock your speaker setup and would be available soon.Fully supporting multi-room configurations, the app will let you control music that is flowing to your Sonos speakers, sync all rooms to play the same song (hey, that's actually pretty cool), search your collection, control individual speaker volume, listen to online radio, and play music from a variety of services, such as Napster, Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody, SiriusXM, and LastFM.
Earlier this week, BBC teased us with some delicious news of the official iPlayer app for Android arriving later in the week. The app lets UK residents watch TV, listen to the radio, manipulate their favorites, and look up schedules of TV programs. Oh yeah, and it just went live in the UK Android Market.