Articles about Android

If you're writing apps for Android, or even thinking about it, Google has a new site for you: Android Design. Well, I think it's new. A blog post popped into my RSS feeds late this afternoon, but dated yesterday. So I can't say whence came Android Design.

Christian Robertson, the guy behind the Roboto font family used in Ice Cream Sandwich -- you know, Android 4.0 -- calls the new site "the place to learn about principles, building blocks, and patterns for creating world-class Android user interfaces. Whether you’re a UI professional or a developer playing that role, these docs show you how to make good design decisions, big and small". Heck, even if you're just an Ice Cream Sandwich user (gimme Galaxy Nexus), Android Design is worth your time.

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Microsoft now has licensing agreements with Android manufacturers covering 70 percent of all phones on the market following an agreement with LG over Android and Chrome OS announced Thursday. The Redmond, Wash.-based company has long maintained that "Android isn't free", and aggressively pursues licensing deals with manufacturers.

For the most part it has been successful, and already has deals with HTC, Samsung, Suanta, Copal Electronics and Wistron. Motorola resists Microsoft's efforts, but an International Trade Commission ruling finds the company is infringing on at least one Microsoft-owned patent, making an eventual deal more likely.

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Leading PC chipmaker Intel shook the Consumer Electronics show on Monday with the announcement that its Atom processors will be shipping in Android-based smartphones by Motorola and Lenovo in the second half of the year.

“The best of Intel computing is coming to smartphones,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini in a statement on Monday. “Our efforts with Lenovo and Motorola Mobility will help to establish Intel processors in smartphones and provide a solid foundation from which to build in 2012 and into the future.”

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Last week, when Roku debuted the Smart Stick, essentially a set-top-box in a USB stick form factor, I made a point to seek out products at the Consumer Electronics Show that utilize the Mobile High-definition Link (MHL) standard that the Roku Smart Stick uses. Fortunately, I found representatives from the MHL Consortium who were more than happy to show how easy it is to connect an Android device to an MHL-compatibile television, and witness the uncompressed MHL experience first hand.

As of right now, there are about 50 devices (smartphones, televisions, tablets, etc) that support MHL; with the majority of them coming from South Korean CE leader Samsung.

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Finally, after a two-day delay, we have a winner for a shiny, new Galaxy Nexus smartphone. We asked you to offer 2012 New Year's resolutions for Google -- and you did, and some too late to qualify (you missed the deadline, sorry). Among the many on-time submissions, we chose 25 resolutions that Google should consider for the year ahead.

The resolutions aren't as broad as we expected and perhaps the prize is reason. More of you offered suggestions about Android than anything else. In the list below, some submitters appear more than one time, but they were only considered once in the prize drawing. We randomly chose from among all submitters meeting the deadline. In the interest of time -- and preparation for next week's Consumer Electronics Show -- we didn't check to see if all submitters met the other qualifications. We qualified the winner only and would have drawn another name had he failed to meet them (The two absolutely required with the resolution submission: Tweet the post and follow BetaNews on Twitter).

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Cloud storage and collaboration service Box has rolled out the 1.5 update to its Android application on Thursday, adding three big new features to the mobile app which take advantage of Android's unique capabilities.

First, the application now includes a homescreen widget that shows whenever a file is updated by a collaborator, and it launches files direcly without having to take the additional step of launching the Box app.

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It's only fair. When iPhone 4S customers complained about poor battery life, I raked Apple for ongoing design problems. Now that I'm having problems with Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket and AT&T, the Android camp deserves its due. Perhaps with different AT&T customer service you wouldn't see this post at all.

There's a problem with the Skyrocket I purchased on November 8 from AT&T. Battery life sucks. But it wasn't always that way. During the first 3.5 weeks, battery life was exceptional -- on par with what I had with iPhone 4. Then something dramatically changed, quite suddenly, like someone cutting the electric lights and replacing them with candles. My experience went from bright to dim, and I don't like living in the darkened room.

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Open-source software engineering group Linaro has pushed out a build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich for low-cost development boards from Samsung and ST-Ericsson. The build supports hardware acceleration for Systems on a Chip utililzing ARM's Mali-400 graphics processor.

Linaro is a year-old nonprofit group that focuses on optimizing open-source software for the ARM architecture; and besides ARM, its due-paying members include Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments. It creates ARM hardware-optimized middleware upon which developers and OEMs can build their own Android or Ubuntu distributions.

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This is the droid you've been looking for.

There's saying "three times is a charm" and proven axiom about one of Google's biggest rivals: Microsoft gets products right the third time. Galaxy Nexus, running Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich), is the third Google phone, following the Nexus One (January 2010) and Nexus S (December 2010). If you're an Android user looking for something much better or iOS user/wannabe disappointed there is no iPhone 5 LTE, Galaxy Nexus is for you. Verizon released the long-anticipated US 4G LTE model on December 15. Galaxy Nexus is fast, furious and fun. If not for the 5-megapixel camera, which delivers better photos than I expected, the Android smartphone would be perfect, and it's certainly leaps and bounds above every other handset currently available in the United States.

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The year 2011 will go down in the history books as a great year for tablets mostly for Apple’s iPad, however -- not all tablet vendors fared as well as Apple. It'’s not for lack of products that prevented Android tablets from taking any market share away from Apple this year. By our calculation, over 100 tablets were introduced since the iPad.

However, we defy even the most tech-savvy of you to name more than a few of them. What was so wrong with the competition that it failed to make any inroads in the tablet market, at least until the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook came along? I'll explain why we think Apple and Amazon will continue to dominate the market well into 2012.

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Suddenly, Microsoft is a major developer for iOS. The software giant better known for Windows dropped three iOS apps or updates in just two days, and there are rumors of more coming (e.g. Office). But what about Android? "What about Android?" you ask, surprised. "Why should Microsoft give a hoot's fart app about Android? Google and open source are reasons enough why not Android". Yes, but Microsoft makes heaps of money from Android. Nothing from iOS.

Shouldn't Microsoft support the platform that is more personally profitable? The Redmond, Wash.-based company now has convinced most major Android developers to pay licensing fees, presumably because the open-source OS violates Microsoft patents. Perhaps threat of lawsuit is enough. It's serious money, too, $10 or more per device -- if rumors are to be believed. "Patent trolling with Microsoft" I called it in July. Microsoft makes what from iOS? Diddly.

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Why keep those special moments to yourself, when you can share them with the people that matter most? There's Facebook, or even Google+, but what good is that when you're Skyping Claire Beauvoir in Brussels and you're in Washington, DC? Today, Skype 2.6 posted to Android Market, and its big new feature is sending photos and videos. Share and share alike. The new capability works over cellular data networks as well as WiFi.

"We've also improved battery life and video quality with Skype 2.6 for Android on devices using Nvidia's Tegra 2 chipset, which include amongst others; the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola XOOM and Acer Iconia Tablet. Now you can take full advantage of the big screen with better video quality than ever before", says Dan Chastney, Skype senior product manager.

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This week, Nielsen listed the most popular Android apps by age group -- 18-24; 25-34; 35-44. Well, well, talk about age discrimination. Perhaps people 45 or older are considered to be iPhone users? For shame! The data is interesting not for what is there but what's not. Facebook tops all three age groups, when looking at actual apps. Android Market ranks higher. Google+ -- and Twitter, for the matter -- is nowhere in sight.

For all the buzz about Google+, and I am a big fan, it's not among the top-15 apps for each age group. That's no small thing. Mobile phones are by and far the most personal devices everyone uses. They're where people connect to other people and things that are important to them. Facebook clearly matters, Google+ and Twitter do not -- as measured by most-popular apps. I suppose some people could use browsers to access the services, but why would they?

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The world of smartphones and mobile media tablets may be dominated by processors based on the ARM architecture, but other instruction sets are getting their due with Android.

There is development on Android on x86, spearheaded by processor makers AMD and Intel; and this week, MIPS Technologies announced the availability of the first mobile tablet running Android 4.0 on the MIPS architecture.

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Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless on Tuesday introduced two new Android-powered tablets sporting the Droid brand name and 4G LTE connectivity and the promise of an Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) upgrade: The Droid Xyboard 10.1 and 8.2. The devices are the successors to the popular Motorola Xoom tablet which first debuted in early 2011.

As the names suggest, one model of the Droid Xyboard has a 10.1" touchscreen and the other has an 8.2" touchscreen. Both models have dual-core 1.2 GHz processors, 1GB of RAM, LTE radios with 8-device hotspot functionality, 5 megapixel flash cameras and 1.3 megapixel chat cameras.

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