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Pantech is looking to pull itself out of the low-end budget phone ditch by bringing some pretty awesome non-touch gesture recognition to Android. Imagine this: you're working on a car, cleaning the kitchen, painting... anything that where you're hands are going to dirty or wet and you don't want to touch your phone. You receive an incoming call -- what do you do? How cool would it be to simply wave your hand over the device to answer? No touching. No getting it wet or dirty.
Oh snap, here comes another entry into the mobile OS game. Instead of some no-name third-party, though, Canonical has plans to step up to the plate with Ubuntu and see how it fares at on-the-go computing. Once the finishing touches have been put on the the upcoming LTS (long term service) release -- version 12.04 -- Canonical plans to start porting Ubuntu to mobile handsets, tablets, and even smart TVs.
One of the biggest problems that developers face with Android is the wide range of devices that run the OS. Different hardware, screen resolutions, Android versions, etc. make it extremely difficult for devs to ensure that their apps will run correctly on every single device. Apkudo is a service looking to change that by helping developers test their app on nearly 300 real-world devices.
If you've been waiting for AT&T to start announcing some smartphones for its LTE network, that time is over. Ma Bell just took the wraps off of its first two LTE-powered smartphones, and they're nothing short of impressive.
A few months ago AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon all started blocking wireless tethering apps in the Android Market, making them unavailable for download on their respective devices. At that time, Sprint was the only carrier still allowing tethering apps to be installed without limitation -- but that time has come to an end. That's right, the Now Network has begun blocking the installation of wireless tethering apps from the Market on any device attached to its network.
It seems like it was just yesterday when I mentioned that LG should tend to the Revolution's lack of Gingerbread, and here it is. Verizon just updated the Revolution's support documentation with all the details of the upcoming update, which includes Android 2.3.x.
While most of you have heard of Open Source software at this point (I hope you have, anyway), you probably aren't aware that each year Packt Publishing puts on a contest to highlight the best and brightest Open Source projects across all platforms. The contest is currently in its voting stage, ends on October 31, 2011.
Google just announced the newest version of GoogleTV, which will bring four major areas of change to GTV sets:
While we're patiently waiting for the American release date of the Galaxy Nexus, Samsung confirmed earlier today that our brothers across the pond will be able to snag the device beginning on November 17th. As for us here in the States, we'll just have to hang out for a while longer and wait for Sammy, Big Red, and whoever else may be involved to send some release date love our way.
Remember that weird little Vizio tablet that was released back in July? Yeah, the one that works as a remote control for your Vizio Google TV. I feel like I'm not alone in thinking that it was slightly under-spec'd and drastically overpriced at launch, even if you can justify its use with your TV. Fortunately, Amazon has taken care of the latter issue by dropping the price down to a much more reasonable $199 with free shipping.
How long have we been hearing that the Galaxy Nexus would be exclusive to Verizon? Quite a while -- probably since rumors of the "Nexus Prime" first started surfacing. It looks like those rumors have been around so long that Verizon itself started to believe it, too... until they were told it wasn't true.
Apparently there are a whole slew of pissed off users because Google decided that the Nexus One will not be getting updated to Ice Cream Sandwich. As a result, an infographic was made to represent the fact that Apple can support its four devices better than manufacturers support their ump-teen Android devices. The infographic compares the all the iPhones of the past three years (so it excludes the 4S) to most Android devices of the same timeframe.
While the bulk of us have been enjoying Google+ from our personal accounts for a few months now, those who exclusively use Google Apps (GApps) have been left in the dark... until today. Google+ is now open to all GApps users, and it even brings some new features for some users.
On Android, there are plenty of ways to monitor your processor, battery, RAM usage, etc. However, there is really no way to monitor said information while continuing to do other tasks, since Android only allows one window in the foreground at a time. That's where Cool Tool, a simple resource monitoring app, comes into play.
When Motorola announced the Droid 3, there was a lot of negative energy directed at the device for its lack of an LTE radio. Of course, it was still better than its predecessors in every way -- larger, more vibrant screen, better keyboard, less intrusive Blur -- it was an all around nice piece of kit. Moving forward, Moto knew that it had to one-up the D3 with the newest iteration of the iconic Droid series, and, according to these leaked images, it looks to have hit that nail on the head with the Droid 4.
It's a pretty well known fact that, when trying to lose weight, you have to create a caloric deficit -- for every 3500 calories burned, that's one pound of weight lost. Thus, it takes a combination of diet and exercise to create said deficit. However, it is exceedingly difficult to keep track of your caloric intake, as well as calculate the calories burned for various activities. If you're serious about getting in shape, though, there is a solution: using an automatic body monitoring system like BodyMedia's FIT Armband.
We heard that Sony was looking to buy Ericsson's half of Sony Ericsson earlier this month, and now that deal has come to fruition. Sony will purchase Ericsson's part of the joint effort that has been over a decade in the making for €1.05 billion cash. Aside from the obvious, the deal will also land Sony a cross-licensing agreement that includes access to a few "essential patent families relating to wireless handset technology."
In what seems to be its biggest update since the initial release, the Winamp team just pushed some pretty major changes to Winamp for Android. For starters, this update now allows Mac users to sync with Winamp -- something that has previously been missing. Aside from that, there is now a pro version available, offering enough new features to easily justify the $5 pricetag:
In an effort to help advance computer vision on mobile devices, Qualcomm has released the first mobile-optimized CV library, aptly named FastCV. While this news may not be groundbreaking for end-users, it's a pretty big deal for developers, as this library can be used in mobile development to help improve things like face detection and recognition, text tracking and recognition, gesture recognition, as well as open a whole new world for augmented reality applications.