Articles about Android

Remember RealPlayer? The media player that was once, quite some time ago, one of the go-to media players for online media disappeared into relative obscurity, shouldered out of the limelight by the likes of Silverlight and HTML5 video. For desktop platforms, RealPlayer has all but vanished, but it is trying to make headway into the mobile market. RealPlayer for Android is out of beta and officially released.

Rather than just audio and video, RealPlayer for Android can also be used to play slideshows of photos, but movies and music are really where it’s all at. There is support for playlists so you can create mood music for every occasion and access it with ease. Aside from RealVideo and RealAudio, support for which can be added through and in-app purchase, the app can playback any file that is supported by your phone or tablet.

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Well, hell's bells. Apple sold about as many iPhones as Wall Street expected during second quarter after all. That's the big, glaring takeaway I see from phone sales data Gartner released today. The numbers also show something else: The analyst firm either has really lousy methodology (which I doubt), or Apple apologists have been wrong all along (as I've asserted for years). Gartner reports 28.94 million iPhones sold, to Apple's 26.03 million.

Gartner is the only major analyst firm tracking actual handset sales to end users, while others record shipments into the channel. Apple does the same, although every time Samsung reports smartphone numbers, Apple apologists rush to claim the figures are shipped while calling iPhone's numbers sales. Not so. Apple reports shipments, too, and corresponding revenue, which comes from sales to cellular carriers, other third parties and direct sales. As such, Gartner's numbers rarely reconcile with Apple's, but they're usually lower. For second quarter, they're considerably higher. The difference is significant, and in Apple's favor.

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BetaNews certainly loves the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Joe Wilcox uses one, Tim Conneally uses one, now I use one. I wanted a smartphone that could easily deal with day-to-day tasks, had decent enough battery life that could get me through the day, had good build quality, and most importantly, received timely software updates.

As some of you may have already read, my Galaxy Nexus came with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but I managed to update it to Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean. I wanted to experience it without the placebo effect induced by claims of a faster interface. So how does it stand up to my four criteria?

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Modders everywhere rejoice: CyanogenMod 9 (CM9) is now a “stable” release for popular Android smartphones, according to a blog post by CyanogenMod team. CyanogenMod 9 is developed from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), having Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as its starting point.

The guys behind the project announced that the stable release “will be the end of the line for the ICS branch” and that they will only fix critical bugs from now on. As well, the team will focus only on CyanogenMod 10 and maintaining the CyanogenMod 7 (based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread) codebase. The other great piece of news comes from the development on CyanogenMod 10, which is based on Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean.

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Google Translate for Android, today available as v2.5, packs some smoking new features: voice-to-text and text-to-voice translation in more than 64 languages and -- get this -- photos.

New features to this version include live/instant language translation results as you type. Allowing you to get the translated text sooner. For people who use the speech-to-translation option, you can now choose your dialect preference for your speech/voice input. For Japanese language users there is now support for handwriting multiple characters at once, allowing for words to quickly be written in for both travelers and native Japanese people.

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Android smartphones aren’t known for timely updates, even if they bear the Nexus name, but when the very first Android smartphone gets Jelly Bean, you know something interesting is happening.

Thanks to Android modder jcarrz1 from XDA forums, even the 3 year old HTC Dream (or T-Mobile G1 as it’s known in the United States) can now get Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The modding community is bringing Jelly Bean to older devices faster than HTC can offer it on their own flagship smartphones available now. But it’s not just the three-year old devices, as the Samsung Galaxy S III and HTC One X also receive a dose of Jelly Bean, before manufacturers release the updates.

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The Galaxy S III is currently Samsung’s flagship smartphone and one of the best Android devices on the market today. To top it off, the Korean manufacturer has announced that the Galaxy S III will get VoLTE (Voice over LTE) starting August 2012 in Korea, which will be followed by "availability in global LTE markets" according to an announcement from the company on Thursday.

If the buyers of the Samsung Galaxy S III LTE model haven’t got the same quad-core processor or video card to play with (unless they’re in Korea), they now have VoLTE to play with which is exclusive to the LTE model.

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Acer CEO JT Wang has been quoted as saying Microsoft's Surface could have a negative impact on the Windows ecosystem, frustrate OEMs, and potentially have far-flung negative consequences. Why is there a problem when Microsoft wants to set a standard in both hardware and software? Windows Phone, Surface, and Signature represent a generational shift in Microsoft’s thinking related to operating systems, hardware, and the intended software experience. This is the Microsoft that should surface (no pun intended) from every interaction with one of their products, and who’s to say that’s not a good thing?

When Microsoft announced Surface, I immediately saw great potential for people like me who need advanced software to perform real tasks that require an intensive use of resources. But at the same time, Microsoft Surface gave a glimpse of what’s to come: Microsoft can actually make hardware to its own specifications and design. It is an approach that has been slowly coming to the front with Microsoft which began three years ago, before the debut of the first Windows Phone. Working closely with HTC, Microsoft could make sure the hardware performed in such a way that its software looked better.

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We've heard a handful of complaints about Google's Nexus 7 screen dimming and flickering, but they pale in comparison to this story from New York tech industry professional Ed Zitron, who is currently dwelling in Nexus 7 support hell.

I was really excited about the Nexus 7, for just two hundred dollars I could get a device that I could sling in my bag, play with, enjoy mindlessly and then put away --a nicety, a frivolity, something enjoyable and cheap that I wouldn’t worry about.

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If there is one thing that’s typical of Twitter, it's the long, long, long list of tweets that shows each of your Twitter friends' er…tweets. Slices for Twitter by OneLouder Apps is designed to make your Twitter experience better by adding "Twitter Content Discovery." Simply put, it provides improved functionality over the official Twitter app.

Slices for Twitter comes with five major features: Twitter Directory, Live Events, Timeline Slicer, Bookmarks and Mobile-to-Web.

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Thursday it was announced that an unofficial port of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean CyanogenMod 10 custom ROM was available for the discontinued webOS powered HP TouchPad, with a big early thanks to XDA-Developers forum member and Android developer James Sullins, aka jcsullins.

Though it's discontinued, and mostly a niche device, the HP TouchPad is no slouch in the hardware world. It sports a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core processor, has 1GB of RAM, and 16GB to 32GB of storage. It is still a very solid tablet.

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At the moment, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the only Android smartphone that can be experienced the way Google wants. Of course, there were previous Nexus iterations like the Nexus S and Nexus One, but with the Galaxy Nexus, Google got it right. Well, right enough that I recently bought one.

Your first days with any new device are the honeymoon. There’s the initial joy of opening the package and peeling off the plastic sheets on both sides and looking inside the box for accessories. Then, the battery is in its rightful place, the back cover is on, and at a touch of the power button the SAMOLED displays "Google." Things get interesting, the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich animation pops up, I run through the initial set up and bang, I am now using my new shiny Galaxy Nexus.

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Canalys released its latest report on the state of the smartphone market based on shipments in Q2 2012, and the results provided by the estimates are going to stir some emotions among Android and iOS fans. Android dominates the market with iOS following its lead, but not from up close.

Android, Google’s smartphone operating system, shipped in 107.8 million devices in Q2 2012, a 100.10 percent increase over Q2 2011 when Android smartphone shipments reached 51.2 million units. Shipments have more than doubled year over year, and at the same time the share in shipments increased as well. In Q2 2011, Android shipments accounted for 47.6 percent of the smartphone market, and in Q2 2012 they have grown to 68.1 percent which is a 43.06 percent increase over the same period last year.

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A week after Madfinger Games made much to-do about piracy driving its decision to make first-person zombie shooting game Dead Trigger free on the Android platform, the game developer has now done the same for the iOS version.

Those who purchased the game while it was 99 cents will be given in-game currency 25 gold and ten casino chips in the 1.1.2 update. Unlike last time however, there is no grandstanding from CEO Marek Rabas on a privacy problem on Apple's mobile platform. All we know is that Madfinger is moving to a "freemium" model with Dead Trigger, and in one case, blamed it on piracy.

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To understand why Google subsidized the Nexus 7, you have to first understand what makes the tablet market unique from all other forms of personal computing. All personal computing devices fall into three major categories: PC, cellphone, and tablet (with possibilities for more in the future such as “smartglasses”, which Google and others are developing).

The PC market is mature, there have been very few changes since the nineties; functionality has steadily improved and the only big change was the advent of the laptop, which changed the form, although, it didn’t change the two main players: Apple and Microsoft, with Microsoft’s hardware manufacturers also playing an important role. The players in the PC market have changed little (sure HP bought Compaq and IBM sold out to Lenovo). It would take a truly revolutionary product to change anything even though there have been attempts -- the constant presence of Linux, and the recent (relatively) introduction of Chromebooks for example -- none have have managed to have any impact.

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