Two months ago my colleague Patrick Roanhouse wrote "ADOBE FLASH IS DEAD -- on mobile!" and that looked like the end of Flash Player on Android, but as it turns out it is not. According to the BBC, Adobe has brought back Flash Player on the Google Play UK. What made them change their mind?

Flash Player for Android's UK revival can be attributed to pressure placed by strategic local partners. BBC requested the San Jose, Calif.-based corporation to postpone axing Flash Player, since the underpinning of the organization's iPlayer is Flash. The interesting bit is that BBC has refused to comment on its request to bring back Flash to Google Play, but acknowledges working with Adobe on an alternative video player -- sure sounds like great timing to revive it until a new product replaces iPlayer.

Flash Player might not be dead now, but don't expect it to live for long. The software is no longer updated and once the "strategic partners" get up to speed with newer technology, it will vanish forever. That is, if there are no unforeseeable requests in the future.

Continue reading →

Amazon Appstore, the retail giant's marketplace for Android applications, has finally opened for business in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, a whopping 17 months after it first launched in the US.

Jim Adkins, vice president of Amazon Appstore, says of the marketplace’s overseas expansion: "Customers in the US have purchased millions of apps, games, in-app items and subscriptions since the store launched last year, and we’ve received great feedback about discovery features like Free App of the Day. We evaluate and test games and apps before making them available in the Appstore so we ensure customers have a great experience with the games and apps they purchase. Amazon has spent years developing innovative features that help customers find and discover the products that are right for them and have applied that know-how to the Amazon Appstore. We’re delighted to extend that experience to our European customers".

Continue reading →

Add this one to the Smart column. Earlier today, Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure Mobile Services, initially for Windows 8 apps, with support planned for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The concept is a natural extension of Azure as development platform. Hey, why should Microsoft let Amazon and Google build out the infrastructure enabling the cloud-connected device era to trample the PC?

For now, the new service is available in a "public preview", during which time the first 10 Windows 8 apps are free. Developers who don't have an Azure account can create a 90-day free trial one.

Continue reading →

In addition to releasing Firefox and Thunderbird 15 Tuesday, Mozilla also released a new version of Firefox for Android tablets running ICS and Honeycomb!

Last year, I put together a list of what I believed were the ten best apps for Android Honeycomb, and I included both the Dolphin Browser and Opera Mobile in the list. At the time, not even the Nightly build of Firefox was available for Honeycomb devices. That did not come until five months later, and it was still in a very early UI form.

Continue reading →

Well, Microsoft certainly took long enough. SkyDrive for Android is now available. I guess it takes nearly 65 percent mobile OS market share for the software giant to notice. Yeah, the wait is over. If you love Android but not Google Drive, or even Dropbox, Microsoft's cloud locker is your ticket.

There's real sense to this belated release. By market share, most everyone using a smartphone will have Android, while those on PCs most likely will have Windows (and likely Office, too). Windows 8 makes Microsoft Account the required identity, which also unlocks services like SkyDrive. But most mobile users will have Android or iOS, which combined mobile operating system sales share was 82.9 percent in second quarter, according to Gartner. Windows Mobile/Phone: 2.7 percent, or just behind Samsung's Bada. So likely lots more Windows 8 users with required Microsoft Account will have Android or iOS than Windows Phone. Hey, late is better than never, right?

Continue reading →

Did you know that updating Facebook while driving can cause lane veering by up to one meter, or that texting adds 8.5m to the overall stopping distance when travelling at 70mph? Well, it’s true according to a new study by Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) on behalf of insurance company esure. The report also says that 1 in 5 drivers took their eyes off the road for 7 seconds when they heard a ringing phone. Check out the fancy PDF infographic if you want to find out more.

To help remove these distractions (and reduce the number of claims it has to process, presumably), esure has produced a free Android app which eliminates mobile phone distractions. The DriveOFF app, available through Google Play, uses GPS to detect when your car is in motion and travelling above 10mph and automatically turns off all other apps and blocks incoming calls and texts.

Continue reading →

Just like Firefox, Chrome rockets through version numbers as though it is going out of fashion. Although Google’s foray into the world of web browsers for iPhone and iPad is fairly recent, Chrome for iOS already is version 21. The latest release is a relatively minor one, but there is still one feature that brings the browser in line with other more socially aware apps.

The big news in this release: addition of new sharing options. Found a website that you think your friends will love? There is no need to copy and paste the URL into an email as there are now new sharing options built directly into the app. A new popup menu lets you share pages through Google+, Facebook, Twitter or via email.

Continue reading →

Symantec is a company with many strings to its bow but is most often associated with security software. Those with long memories will remember Norton Utilities, a tweaking tool for Windows that Symantec bought. The Norton name lives on and Norton Mobile Utilities revives the Utilities genre for Android users. The tool is designed to help your Android device more efficiently, and the release of version 2.0 of the app sees it splitting into two branches -- free, and paid-for premium versions.

The free version of the app, now referred to as Norton Mobile Utilities Lite, gives users greater control over memory usage, making it easy to terminate apps to free up resources. There are a number of informational components to the app, and these will tell you everything from how much battery life you have left, details of the hardware you are using and how much storage space you have available.

Continue reading →

Social gaming just used to be about having fun, but now there’s a real-money element creeping in. First Gamesys launched a Facebook app that allowed UK residents aged 18 and over to play for real cash prizes while interacting with friends, and now Big Fish Games is getting in on the act with Big Fish Casino for iOS devices. The game is a relaunched and rebranded version of Card Ace: Casino, from recently acquired Self Aware Studios, that offers new games and additional social features, and will soon also allow UK users to play slots for real money.

If the thought of wagering your earnings on spinning reels doesn’t do it for you, you might be more interested to hear that the real-money feature, powered by UK-licensed online gaming company Betable, will also be available in blackjack, roulette and video poker in the coming months.

Continue reading →

When you’re watching TV the remote control seems to have a life of its own, often resulting in it disappearing when you decide you want to switch channels. Being somewhat larger than a standard Sky remote, your iPad is far less likely to go missing, so wouldn’t it be great if you could use the tablet you’re using to check emails while you watch TV to control your Sky+HD box? The release of Sky+ 4.0 means that this is exactly what you can now do.

Getting up and running is very simple -- just make sure that your Sky+HYD box and your iPad ate connected to the same network and you’re ready to go. While the app itself is not new, many of its existing features have been updated and there are plenty of new options that have been added as well. The big new feature is remote control. Using gestures you can control the playback of whatever you’re watching, tapping to play and pause, and swiping to skip back and forth.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

At the end of 2011, Microsoft released Office OneNote for iPad, bringing the cult favorite note-taking application to all of Apple's devices.

But major shortcomings with the freemium OneNote for iPad app have earned it a significant number of negative reviews in the iTunes App Store. Third-party iPad app Outline+, released at the end of July, seeks to provide fixes to these complaints. So far, the app tackles two of the major issues plaguing the iPad version of OneNote: syncing and formatting.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Even though the Windows Store is still only in Preview Mode, Splashtop Inc. on Thursday announced it had launched its flagship remote desktop client for Windows 8 there.

The popular Splashtop application lets users access their PC desktop from their mobile device, and with it, Windows 8 tablets will be able to connect to other Windows desktops and Mac OS desktops over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G data connections, with low enough graphical latency to enable remote gameplay and HD video streaming.

Continue reading →