Articles about Android

At the the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012 Sony Press Conference, Sony announced a big push for their mobile phone gaming platform for Android powered mobile devices. Once called Sony Playstation Suite, Sony is first changing the name to Playstation Mobile. The whole idea is about making it possible to allow access to PlayStation Classic games and other PlayStation titles on "PlayStation Certified" devices. This move expands the selection of access to Playstation games for mobile beyond the current Sony made Xperia phone and tablet line of Android devices.

Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe (SCEE) president, Andrew House, announced this on stage during the briefing as a big move, "That is promoting PlayStation Mobile for third-party Android Cellphone makers". House also unveiled the initiative's first third-party hardware partner is HTC. Not much more in the way of details besides this has been released. It's interesting that Sony would jump into this kind of bed.

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Asymco's Horace Dediu asks an interesting question today: "Trouble with the Robot?" -- referring to Android. He hones in on two seemingly convergent trends: a slight sequential dip in US Android share and sharp decline in US subscribers switching from feature phones to smartphones.

Based on his analysis of April data, iPhone sales remain fairly constant, while Android disproportionally declines. "Broken out by platforms, we see signs that the slowing in smartphone growth seems to be attributable to a slowing in Android adoption", Dediu explains. Stated differently, referring to comScore data he adds: "We see the lowest user growth for Android since 2009". The easy interpretation -- Android is now declining before iPhone -- would be wrong.

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Instapaper, the popular iOS application that lets users save web pages for offline reading, was released for Android on Monday, and can now be downloaded in Google Play.

Instapaper's creator Marco Arment released the app exclusively for iOS, and showed a public preference for the platform, hence earning him the label of "Apple Fanboy" from much of the platform-partisan Web. But due to the undeniable success of Android tablets such as Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble's Nook, Arment and Android app makers Mobelux have ported Instapaper to Android.

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Rumor stories are uncommon here at BetaNews, and rare when we don't get the information ourselves. But Android Police has got one so tasty and so in line with others, I can't resist. In less than one month, Google could debut the highly-anticipated Nexus tablet, produced in conjunction with Asus and packing quad-core Tegra 3 processor and Android 4.1. The only question, if rumors prove to be true, is price. What would you pay for a 7-inch Asus-made, Googe-branded Nexus tablet?

David Ruddock reports evidence from Rightware's Power Board benchmark and Android Police server logs showing instances of Androd 4.1 and Nexus devices. But the benchmark tool is more revealing: 1.3GHz nVidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor, 1280 x 768 resolution display, Google brand and product name Google Asus Nexus 7. That's hardly a smoking gun. Asus and Google could be testing a prototype device, or even several. But given that Google I/O starts June 27, developers received tablets there last year and the search giant promised a Nexus tablet in about six months half a year ago, the discovery is too credible to ignore.

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Google announced on Thursday that Android developers can now use in-app Billing to sell monthly or annual subscriptions from inside of apps sold in Google Play. The feature brings Google Play up to speed with Apple's iTunes App Store, which rolled out this feature over one year ago.

With the new feature, developers set the price and billing interval and Google Play manages the purchase transactions for both the seller and the subscriber. Users can view their subscriptions in the "My Apps" screen in the Play Store app, the same place they view their updates, or they can view them in the app's product details page in the Play Store app. This is where users can cancel subscriptions if they choose.

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Well, perhaps I should qualify that with "almost", depending on what matters more to you as a user. On Thursday, 15 days after releasing a major Google+ update for iPhone, the Android version arrived. Timing is interesting. According to NPD, considerably more Android users access Google+ from the browser than the app -- 16 percent to 10 percent overall reach, in March, respectively. My question for you quick downloaders, will that be true for you, or is the app now preferred? It's no idle question, because the web experience is now so vastly different from the app.

Like its counterpart, Google+ for Android offers bleeding-edge photos. Pretty much everything about Google+ bleeds the edge of the screen. The effect is immersive. You just want to scroll and scroll -- and you will since so much less content fills the screen now. But the Android version has better visual flow than its iOS counterpart. Stated differently: It's snappier, more alive. "We're building for a mobile future", Google senior veep Vic Gundotra says. That's apparent from just how different the app is from the web experience -- and how immersive.

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The fight between Oracle and Google over Android's use of Java took a turn in Google's favor, filings from the District Court for the Norther District of California showed on Wednesday. The jury in the patent phase of the case unanimously voted that Oracle did not prove Android had infringed on Oracle's Java patents.

This decision settles only part of the lawsuit, which Groklaw remarked has been the "longest civil trial" they have ever covered. However, it is a big part. Oracle was calling for an injunction on Android plus damages in its suit, and now that the jury has found no patent infringement, the threat of injunction is nullified.

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Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company Via Technologies on Tuesday unveiled its affordable, low power Android PC system, known simply as APC.

The $49 board uses the Neo-ITX form factor, which at 170 x 85 millimeters is the same length as Mini-ITX, but half as wide. It is powered by the VIA WonderMedia ARM 11 system on a chip, which is equipped with an 800MHz processor, 512 MB of DDR3 RAM, and has integrated GPU capable of video outputs up to 720p in resolution. It also has 2GB of NAND Flash storage, HDMI and VGA ports, four USB 2.0 ports, 1/8" headphone jack and mic input, microSD slot, and 10/100 Ethernet connectivity. The whole thing runs off of a 15 W power supply and is loaded with a version of Android 2.3 optimized for keyboard and mouse input.

Much like the wildly popular Raspberry Pi project PC which debuted last February, the APC is meant to be a "technology enabler" more than a powerhouse for computing. The board gives users with few resources the ability to build a cheap, usable computer without having to roll in the superfluous features associated with full-scale desktop OS computing.

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The figure is so important, I'm breaking it out from the long analysis posted mid-afternoon about the smartphone market consolidating around Apple and Samsung. The South Korean electronics giant is doing to Android on smartphones what Amazon does on tablets: Hugely fragment the market around a forked operating system. I warned about this three weeks ago in post "Google has lost control of Android". Now there is sales data to back it up.

Earlier today, Gartner released first quarter sales data for global handsets. Not shipments into the channel, but actual sales to end users. Market leader Samsung accounted for 40 percent of all Android smartphone sales, with no other manufacturer topping 10 percent. Sure Samsung's success lifts overall Android smartphone share -- 56.1 percent up from 36.4 percent a year earlier. But what's good for Samsung isn't necessarily in the best interests of the broader Android ecosystem.

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There are many manufacturer-created user interfaces for Android, and sadly, most of them are unpleasant.

Some are polluted with unremovable bloatware, some are sluggish performers, and some are just badly designed. For as many different versions of the Android user experience as there are, there are very few major builds that add remarkable innovations on top of the Android platform.

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"The US availability of the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE has been delayed due to a standard U.S. Customs review of shipments that is required after an ITC exclusion order," a boilerplate statement from Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC said on Wednesday.

The company's flagship smartphones are being held up in customs as a result of patent litigation with Apple, and their availability to consumers is currently on hold. Though it only launched on May 6, AT&T currently lists the One X as "sold out," and Sprint's EVO 4G LTE which was slated to launch on Friday, May 18, will be delayed. Pre-orders of the device do not have a guaranteed ship date.

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.NET software development tool company Xamarin on Monday launched Xamarin Designer for Android, a drag-and-drop visual environment for creating native user interfaces for Android apps from within Visual Studio or within the Mono for Android IDE.

Xamarin is a young company made up of more than twenty ex-Novell team members who built the Mono open source .NET development framework. So far, the company is responsible for releasing Mono for Android, and MonoTouch for iOS.

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I never expected my 70 year-old mother to ride the cutting edge of technology, but she's there, living in the cloud, which she embraces enthusiastically. What's that saying about not teaching old dogs new tricks? Perhaps you can.

Mom's daily tech is way out there, and you can blame or credit me for lifting her there. But she's a willing participant, happily adopting new habits, which in the end wasn't so difficult once she recognized the benefits. Perhaps your mother will, too, if you give her the chance. Mom uses Android phone (Samsung Nexus S), Chromebook (Google Cr-48) and Google TV (Logitech Revue). She lives in the cloud via these Google-powered devices and associated services.

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May 9 is, in a way, a watershed day for Android -- and that's not necessarily a good thing. Many developers I communicate with repeatedly say they confront the same quandary: Android or iOS first? Maybe they choose to develop for iOS, only to ask: Android or iPad next? Google is a software developer, too, and this day put its priorities in order with a stunning iOS-first update. The new iPhone app for social network Google+ is stunning, breathtaking, immersive and makes the already great experience on Ice Cream Sandwich seem outdated -- although some of the best visuals migrate to iOS.

In a way, Google sets the wrong example for its development partners by putting iOS ahead of Android. But why not? The iOS install base is larger than Android (365 million to 300 million at last reveal); countless analyst surveys show that iOS device users are more connected and engaged; and fragmentation isn't a problem since the majority of the iOS install base is on the newest version (versus about 5 percent of Androids). Google wants Plus to succeed in a big way, so improving the experience everywhere should be a priority. But iOS first, for the next big thing, is the priority.

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McAfee says that Android malware is taking a worrisome turn, with cybercriminals mimicking popular strategies used against Windows. The latest attacks tap IRC bots, where the malware gets further operating instructions from an Internet chatroom.

Called Android/Multi.dr, the attack masks itself as the game Madden NFL 12. Multi.dr is comprised of three separate components, including a root exploit, an IRC bot, and SMS Trojan.

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