Articles about Android

Taiwanese PC maker Asus has announced its quad-core Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android tablet will be available for order December 12th online and December 19th in physical retail stores.

The tablet is the first device to be built on Nvidia's new Tegra 3 system on a chip, and will carry a pricetag of $499 for the version with 32GB of storage, and $599 for the 64GB version. The Eee Station keyboard dock adds $149 to the total, but comes with the benefit of an additional battery that expands the life of the Transformer Prime by approximately six hours, bringing it to a total of 18 hours of battery life.

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PC benchmarking software company Futuremark announced on Tuesday that it has begun developing a version of its 3DMark software for Android tablets which it expects to have ready in 2012.

"In 2012 we will bring 3DMark to the Android platform with a professional grade benchmark that can be trusted by manufacturers, suppliers and vendors to provide the definitive measure of gaming performance on Android while showcasing the very best in real-time graphics and effects," said Jukka Mäkinen, CEO of Futuremark in a statement on Tuesday.

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Verizon kicked off helluva holday sale for XOOM LTE on Black Friday -- and you can still get it today online: $199.99 with new two-year activation. But hurry, if interested. Surely pricing like this can't last. That's $529.99 less than the closest comparable iPad 2, and you won't get an LTE radio from Apple.

Is that price low enough for you to buy? In February, when XOOM pricing first leaked, I asked: "Would you pay 800 bucks for the Motorola XOOM?" Eh, no, you wouldn't. You didn't like $600, when I asked about it later on. But now the price is way less, so I'm asking again. Would you pay $200 for Motorola XOOM LTE? Please answer in comments.

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Today marks the official beginning of the holiday gift shopping season in the United States; a time when commerce shifts into high gear and product sales spike for the year.

And with each passing holiday, retailers seem to focus even more closely on consumer electronics.

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PhatWare, makers of WritePad, CalliGrapher, PenOffice, and PhatNotes, launched the public beta of PhatPad for Android on Wednesday, a brainstorming, note taking and free drawing app for tablets.

PhatPad lets users draw with their fingers, jot handwritten notes, or use a mixture of pictures and drawings, handwritten text, typed text, and audio notes in a single field. With its handwriting recognition engine, users can hand write notes, and then convert them to copy-and-pasteable text. Documents created in PhatPad can then be synchronized with Dropbox, or exported as a PDF to local storage.

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Last night I watched Samsung TV commercial "The Next Big Thing is Already Here" about a dozen times on YouTube. I'm a sucker for good advertising, and this one is clever to a punch and already is viral among tech blogs. Apple used to make adverts like this one -- inventive, clever, memorable -- now they're staid and boring. Anyone remember Apple's hugely successful "Switchers" and "Get a Mac" marketing campaigns from the last decade? This new TV spot is a hilarious poke at yokels waiting in line for the newest iPhone, all without mentioning Apple; meanwhile something better is already here -- from Samsung.

Now before some commenter calls me anti-Apple, because I watched the commercial a dozen times and it snarks the iPhone cult, my interest is bigger. The advert is clever in so many ways, particularly how it uses jump cuts or little touches make it real. Example: When the iPhone line waiters ask to see a Samsung Galaxy S II, the owner holds it up. Someone in the line leans forward, raises his arm and says: "Can I see it with my hands?" I've embedded the long version above, which isn't as tight or dramatic as the 60-second spot. There's something to be said about tighter editing, more closeups and shorter jump cuts. The 30-second edit is good, too. Update: The 15-second ad is absolutely cruel.

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Using the upcoming Asus Transformer Prime which was rumored to be the first Tegra 3 tablet graphics company Nvidia on Tuesday officially showed off what Tegra 3 and Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich" can do.

This early demonstration quickly shows off the 1080p video playback, and an all-too short demo of Android game Tegra 3-optimized racing game Riptide GP from games studio Vector Unit.

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BlueStacks App Player, the Windows application capable of smoothly virtualizing Android apps has launched for Windows XP. The alpha version that launched in October only ran on Windows 7 machines, but the company says nearly 20 percent of Android users are also Windows XP users, so this new version is for them.

So far, BlueStacks App Player has been downloaded by 500,000 people, an impressive feat for a company that was unheard of just six months ago. With this new version, the application's reach will grow even larger.

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Early Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" adopters must do without Flash, as Google confirms that current versions are incompatible. However, Adobe says they won't wait long: a compatible Flash release should be available by the end of the year.

Adobe announced earlier this month that it would end support for mobile versions of Flash, a move that acknowledges the shift towards HTML5 among mobile developers. Indeed, Adobe confirms that its port of Flash for ICS will be its last: future versions of Android will not be compatible.

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Malware aimed at the Android platform has increased five-fold since July, raising questions on the open-door policy Android has in installing apps. IT company Juniper Networks says the reason for this is the Mountain View, Calif. company's own lax attitude when it comes to oversight.

"With no upfront review process, no one checking to see that your application does what it says, just the world’s largest majority of smartphone users skimming past your application’s description page with whatever description of the application the developer chooses to include", it says. Of course, Juniper's description of how the review process works in Android is generalized and somewhat inaccurate.

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Adobe is a name associated with design tools, and it has long been associated with desktop software that can be used to create everything from websites and product designs to page layouts and perfect photos. But in recent years there has been a huge interest in mobile devices, and while handheld devices are a little limited when it comes to being used as design tools, the same cannot be said of tablets. The larger screens found on tablets have been put to great use in Adobe’s latest Android apps -- Adobe Photoshop Touch, Adobe Proto and Adobe Debut.

Adobe Photoshop Touch is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a touchscreen compatible version of the company’s flagship image editing tool. The selection tool has been redesigned to make it easier to control with just a fingertip, and the usual raft of filters and effects can be found here to help enhance images on the move. For most people, this app will be the one that appeals most from Adobe’s new range of Touch Apps.

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There is no shortage of cloud file sharing and sync services today, and most of them focus on mobile accessibility: Dropbox with Dropsync, Box.net, SugarSync, YouSendIt…there are tons of options.

As a user, strong competition among service providers is a wonderful thing, so it's a great time to be a user of cloud file management systems.

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Google has made the source code and software stack for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) available for download on the Android Open-Source Project git servers. This means companies and developers who are working on their own devices based on the new version of Android can officially get to work.

"This is actually the source code for version 4.0.1 of Android, which is the specific version that will ship on the Galaxy Nexus, the first Android 4.0 device," said Android Open-Source Project software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru said on Monday. "In the source tree, you will find a device build target named 'full_maguro' that you can use to build a system image for Galaxy Nexus. Build configurations for other devices will come later."

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Verizon waited until 11-11-11 at 11:11 am to launch the Motorola Droid Razr. If that's not enough lucky ones for you, AmazonWireless has more. New Verizon customers can snag the Droid Razar for $111.11. Sorry, existing customers pay more -- $229.99 for an individual account and $244.99 for family account. Verizon sells the smartphone for $299.99.

Droid Razr brings to seven the number of 4G LTE phones Verizon offers, with far greater national coverage than AT&T, which has just two LTE phones -- HTC Vivid and Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket. The new smartphone also marks Motorola's attempts to capitalize on and revive the hugely successful Razr, while leveraging the still successful Droid brand. If you want one, that one-eleven-eleven price is hard to beat.

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HTC will upgrade eight current devices to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in the first wave of updates, the device manufacturer said on Monday. The latest version of Google's mobile operating system was announced in mid-October along with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus -- the first Android phone to run ICS natively -- but current Android phones will have to wait several months for the upgrade.

Relying on its partnerships with carriers, HTC will upgrade the following devices to ICS: the EVO 3D and Design 4G on the Sprint Network, the Vivid on AT&T, and the Amaze 4G and Sensation on T-Mobile. For the Sensation, the XE and XL variants will also get the upgrade. In addition, the upcoming HTC Rezound will be upgraded to ICS. That phone will launch on Verizon's network on November 14.

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