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Sure, Hulu may still be struggling with supporting even a majority of Android devices, but who needs that mess when the CW has an app? Well, yes, people who want to watch shows by any of the other networks, but now all of the CW's top shows are available on (some of) your phones and tablets in their full-episode glory.
Widgets are one of Android's best advantages over other mobile platforms. Unfortunately, not as many app developers give attention to widgets as we'd like, which only makes us appreciate Beautiful Widgets even more. The famous clock/weather/battery widget developer, LevelUp Studio, is updating its suite of widgets with support for multiple weather forecasts and, more awesome than that, a web store for discovering/installing widget skins.
Straight from the horse's mouth and not yanked within minutes this time, Samsung has announced that an ICS update for the Galaxy S II (international variant) will be rolling out today throughout European markets including Poland, Hungary, and Sweden, and also in Korea. The update will "gradually roll out to other markets."
In the world of the future, where music is as easily accessible as air, the new bread and butter of the music industry is discovery. While services like Turntable.fm center around small social gatherings, and Pandora uses fancy algorithms to predict your tastes, 8tracks asks "Um, hey, what was wrong with how radio worked? Also, do you guys like tablets?" The answers, of course, are "You know, that's a good point," and "Um, YEAH."
[New App] Chainfire Brings Us SuperSU, A Souped-Up Version Of Superuser With Some Super New Features
"If it's not broken, don't fix it" is a wise and popular mantra among anyone who fixes anything. Developers, on the other hand, couldn't care less. Enter SuperSu. While Superuser has been a staple of root usage for a long time now, XDA developer Chainfire (who has also brought us many other fantastic apps), has taken what already works and made it even better.
We'd heard whispers that the Galaxy S II might be getting an update to Android 4.0 on March 10th. After the announcement was immediately yanked from Samsung's site, we were skeptical. It turns out those suspicions were confirmed tonight via Samsung's official Twitter account. The date was errantly posted by Samsung's Filipino arm.
April 15th is right around the corner. If you're not one of the early birds that files your before Spring, your procrastination is about to pay off. H&R block has introduced a new app for Android phones that allows you to enter W2 information into your tax return by taking a photo of the document. Taxes just got fun! Or, at least, a little less tedious.
Developers, have I got a treat for you today: AIDE - Android Java IDE. AIDE is a self-contained integrated development environment that allows devs to write, compile, and run Android apps on their Android devices. Normally, if you want to write Android apps, you do it on a separate machine running Eclipse (or an alternative IDE). Now... well, you probably still do for major projects (especially ones involving complex library dependencies), but you can edit or create smaller ones without ever leaving the Android ecosystem.
The Amazon Appstore is a great alternative to the Android Market. It's not perfect, however, and today the Appstore fixes a few of the most nagging problems. Not the least of which is those blasted app installation notifications. For those unaware, if you install an app on one device with the Amazon Appstore installed, you'll get a notification that you have a new app waiting on any others with the Appstore installed on. Annoying.
In the past, Android apps have been limited to a 50MB file size. App developers who needed to add extra data, as is the case with most big games, would have to have a secondary, self-hosted download after the user first launched the game. Today, that changes with Google introducing support for up to 4GB of "expansion files". While APKs must still be under 50MB, Google will host two 2GB files that include extra data for developers' apps. Nice!
From climate change to mobile security, psychology to astronomy, TED talks cover some of the most important, interesting, and amazing topics from leaders of science and technology. TED is, in short, a collection of discussions from the height of human intelligence and thought. Now, more than 1200 TED talks are available on your phone or tablet. This is amazing.
Before you ask, yes, this is another tower defense game, but this one is actually unique enough to merit a mention. Where most tower defense games opt for a linear upgrade path for a set of towers, all purchased from money accumulated by killing enemies, Epic Defense uses a less linear and more experimental approach.
With spring rapidly approaching, there's one very big question on everyone's mind: How much longer until The Avengers comes out?! Since that's a question that's easily answered by Google, though, we'll answer another burning question instead: How can I manage my Fantasy Baseball team and ignore my family at the dinner table at the same time? Easy! ESPN's new Fantasy Baseball 2012 app!
The HTC Vivid, one of AT&T's mid-range (if you can call it that) phones is getting an unofficial bump to ICS courtesy of, who else? XDA. User Pirateghost has offered up a flashable Android 4.0.3 ROM. Stock, rooted and ready to go. It even comes with all that AT&T carrier bloat intact. You're getting the 100% pure, unadulterated stock experience with this one, just rooted.
Mobile World Congress means different things to different people. To marketers, it means reaching new audiences, to company execs, its their chance to make us of those public speaking lessons. For us gadget nerds, it means one thing: shiny new toys! What are you most looking forward to adding to your personal arsenal of gadgets? A shiny new HTC One device? Do you have a need for a projector phone that's gone unfulfilled until now? Or are you eager to get your hands on a phone/tablet/netbook with 14,000 mAh worth of battery?
Things are winding to a close in Barcelona, but the effects of what happens at this event will ripple out through the tech industry for the rest of the year. We gadget nerds do enjoy our idle speculation. Who do think made the biggest impact this year? Is it Samsung with its Galaxy Note 10.1 that's nipping at Wacom's heels? Or is HTC poised to take back the high-end smartphone market with its HTC One series? What about ASUS? With four different lines of tablets for every price point, not to mention the Padfone, ASUS seems to be leading the way in Android tablet design and experimentation. Or maybe you're convinced that LG is going to bring 4:3 back.
You're busy. We get it. You don't necessarily have time to keep up with the flood of stories coming out of MWC this year. You've got things to do. Well, this is all we do. So allow us to make things easy for you. Here's a roundup of all the best, most interesting things that happened at MWC this year.
We got a look at the Excite 10 LE's at CES when it was called the Excite X10. Now, Toshiba is bringing the thinnest and lightest tablet* to the US market. The Excite 10 LE is identical to the Excite X10 aside from a couple of letters being rearranged. The slate still packs a "multicore" OMAP processor under a 10.1" LED screen. Unfortunately, the device will be launching with Honeycomb (3.2), but is "upgradeable to Android 4.0."
What good is four-to-five cores if you're not going to crank out some high-quality games to go along with it? That's the question NVIDIA had to ask itself. Thankfully, we're getting the answer in the form of some brand new quad-core-optimized games coming to the Tegra Zone. Perhaps the most recognizable name on the list is Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II.