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As with some previous Verizon flagship devices, employees are being given a customized version of the new Motorola DROID Ultra. Well, "given" may be too strong a word - they get a reduced $99 price ($100 off) with a two-year contract. Verizon will also throw in some DROID-branded accessories, namely a free case and some SOL Republic JAX earbuds. Droid-Life spotted the Employee Edition, presumably on an internal store, set to ship on August 20th with the other DROIDs.
Most of you are probably familiar with NVIDIA's Tegra line of system-on-a-chip boards - Tegra 2 was behind most of the first wave of Honeycomb tablets, Tegra 3 powered the Transformer Prime and Nexus 7, and there's this little thing called SHIELD with Tegra 4 coming next week. But their latest promotional efforts take the spotlight off of a fully integrated solution to focus on NVIDIA's bread and butter: the GPU.
A lot of little things got the axe in Google's latest redesign of the Play Store website. Most don't seem to be coming back (oh how we miss you, 30-day download chart!) but one of the most useful ones for browsing has been resurrected. You can now narrow search for apps based on their free or paid status: just click the drop-down menu next to "Android Apps," which is set to "All prices" by default.
Just as expected, Verizon revealed its new family of DROIDs today, courtesy of Motorola. The smallest is (naturally) the DROID MINI, entry-level counterpart to the big daddy Ultra and MAXX, and ostensible sequel to the excellent DROID RAZR M. The phone uses the same Kevlar-wrapped style as the larger phones, with the naturally updated hardware that you'd expect. It launches on August 20th for $99 on-contract, and pre-orders will be live today.
So, the folks at Canonical have been talking up their Ubuntu smartphone platform for a little over six months. Today they revealed their ultimate plan to revolutionize the smartphone world, a fantastic Death Star of a concept device: the Ubuntu Edge. It's a beautiful slab of metal that features some of the most outlandish mobile hardware ever seen, it runs Ubuntu for smartphones, doubles as a dockable ARM-powered desktop, and dual-boots Android. And all you'll have to do to get it is fork over thirty-two million dollars.
Bitcasa Android App Updated To Version 2 With New UI, Recent Files, Pull To Refresh, And More
Bitcasa Android App Updated To Version 2 With New UI
Bitcasa has had a hard time of it since launching on Android seven months ago. Thanks to a buggy app for its unlimited storage service, it's currently sitting at a 3.5-star rating in the Google Play Store - not good when you're up against juggernauts like Dropbox and Google Drive. Hopefully the completely revamped 2.0 update will fix that. In addition to the seemingly ubiquitous UI overhaul, stability and performance improvements are mentioned in the changelog.
If you've ever wanted a Parrot AR Drone that feels more at home in the water than in the air, you'll want to check out the Ziphius Kickstarter campaign. This remote-controlled floating drone just passed its $125,000 goal with less than a day and a half remaining, and is scheduled to go into mass production later this year with backer units shipping in March 2014.
A strange new presence has made its way onto the Internet. It's a website, innocuous as it is mysterious, with a stylized version of a binary clock counting down: cyngn.com. Just in case you're a bit rusty on your CompSci, the numbers are counting down to August 19th of this year, as testified by the site's source code.
Gameloft's Official Game For Thor: The Dark World Teased, Looks Like A Marvel Version Of Diablo
Gameloft's Official Game For Thor: The Dark World Teased
Marvel's march towards complete domination of superhero cinema continues: the second Thor movie (and the second Marvel movie this year) is scheduled to hit theaters in November. Gameloft continues its partnership with Marvel, and the publisher has just posted a teaser trailer for the mobile tie-in to Thor: The Dark World. And it actually looks pretty OK - Thor's doing his thing, kicking some Asgard in an isometric top-down dungeon crawler.
Like Google has done with its own first-party apps, Samsung has placed its WatchON app on the Play Store for easy updates. Of course, it's still limited to Samsung hardware - this version has been updated for the Galaxy S4 (and the S4 Active, and likely a few more variants as they become available). Meanwhile the tablet app is being expanded to include support for the Galaxy Note 10.1 and both 7" and 10" versions of the Galaxy Tab 2. More recent hardware like the Note 8.0 and the Tab 3 family already have it installed.
Reddit Now Updated To Version 2.0, Adds Card UI, Pull-Down Subreddit Menu, And More
Reddit Now Been Updated To Version 2.0 Adding New Features
Here at Android Police, we love us some Reddit apps, almost as much as we love the gaming cat meme cakes our Libertarian Atheist girlfriends make us from locally-farmed flour. We featured Reddit Now way back in January, and since then the developer has made some noteworthy changes as the app has updated to version 2.0. The app has been slavishly dedicated to Holo standards since its launch, but the new version includes a Google Now-style card interface, not to mention a reworked look on tablets.
These days, everyone want a platform and the developers that come with it. In the case of the consumer electronics giant that Samsung has become over the last few years, they've got several platforms, even if their most important one is standing on the shoulders of some giants in Mountain View. To expand the presence of Samsung in the developer community, the company has announced its very first developer conference, currently scheduled for October 27th, 28th, and 29th.
[Wall Of Shame] ZTE's Indian Homepage Gets Its Press Shots From Evleaks, Just Like Everyone Else
ZTE's Indian Homepage Gets Its Press Shots From Evleaks, Just Like Everyone Else
ZTE is an up-and-comer in the smartphone world, one of about a half-dozen Chinese manufacturers that's slowly increasing its presence on the world stage. The company has released some impressive hardware, even if it never seems to get out of Asia. The ZTE Grand X Quad Lite was just announced for the Indian market. But apparently the sub-continental arm of ZTE lost their password to the company FTP.
Remember that one Star Trek space battle scene? You know, the one where the captain is wiggling around in his chair while the camera shakes, and all the bridge officers are shouting things at him? "Hull breaches on decks five through eight!" "Reversing the shield polarity, sir!" "We're running low on self-sealing stem bolts!" You know.... every Star Trek space battle scene? Now there's an Android game that captures the feel of a space battle from the perspective of the shouting bridge crew. It's multiplayer. There are switches. And lots of shouting.
It's been quite some time since we heard major release information from the ROM developers at the Android Open Kang Project, or as the cool kids call them, AOKP. After three months of relative quiet (though plenty of development and testing has been going on behind the scenes) The team just announced AOKP Jelly Bean Milestone 2, a complete and hopefully bug-free build that brings a ton of new features.
After a last-minute delay for NVIDIA's risky SHIELD gaming device, the company has just sent out an email to those who pre-ordered it. The delayed launch date is next Wednesday, July 31st, just barely making the company's revised commitment to a July launch. Pre-order hardware will be shipped out to customers on Wednesday, and NVIDIA's retail partners will have at least some units that day as well, at the new $299 price tag.
If you want a "ruggedized" phone on Verizon, you can have any model you want, so long as you want the Casio G'zOne Commando 4G LTE. It doesn't have a lot to recommend it aside from its tough-as-nails construction, but if Verizon's your only choice, it's better than nothing. And on that note, a $50 on-contract price tag is better than twice that at retail. Wirefly has the G'zOne Commando for $49.99, fifty bucks off the standard price.
Love 'em or hate 'em, you've got to admit that Samsung has made a habit out of offering its flagship devices in as many hues as they possibly can. Leakster extraordinaire EVleaks posted a press shot of a new Galaxy S4 last night, sporting an Autumn Brown color and Verizon branding. There's no indication of when it will show up on store shelves.
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got a startlingly realistic skateboard game, a proud dungeon crawler, and a super-sized take on Rock, Paper, Scissors. Without further ado:
Some devices get all the ROMs. Of course, for the Google Play Edition of the Galaxy S4, that's kind of the point. Late last month an early version of Android 4.3 was leaked for the phone right around the time of its Play Store debut, and now an even newer build labeled "JWR66V" has popped up. According to XDA Developers forum poster Jahon, it was build on July the 11th, and now it's been re-packaged into a ROM file flashable in the custom recovery of your choice.