How would you like to turn that giant 10-inch tablet screen of yours into a remote control? That’s possible now, assuming you have Comcast service with one of their compatible set-top boxes. Available in the Android Market now, the latest version gives tablet owners the ability to you can scroll TV listings, select a program to watch on television, search through thousands of On Demand titles, and schedule your DVR to record shows. Read more on the XFINITY TV app in the Android Market.
Who’s ready for a long weekend? I’m sure those here in the States are looking forward to celebrating some Fourth of July festivities with family and friends over the weekend, and here at Phandroid we’re about ready to do the same ourselves. If you still need more to satiate your Android cravings we will leave the below tidbits for your perusal.
Official HTC desktop dock is available for $ 60. Charges, syncs and even comes with a spare battery slot. [HTCPedia]
Who’s ready for a long weekend? I’m sure those here in the States are looking forward to celebrating some Fourth of July festivities with family and friends over the weekend, and here at Phandroid we’re about ready to do the same ourselves. If you still need more to satiate your Android cravings we will leave the below tidbits for your perusal.
Official HTC desktop dock is available for $ 60. Charges, syncs and even comes with a spare battery slot. [HTCPedia]
Who’s ready for a long weekend? I’m sure those here in the States are looking forward to celebrating some Fourth of July festivities with family and friends over the weekend, and here at Phandroid we’re about ready to do the same ourselves. If you still need more to satiate your Android cravings we will leave the below tidbits for your perusal.
Official HTC desktop dock is available for $ 60. Charges, syncs and even comes with a spare battery slot. [HTCPedia]
Who’s ready for a long weekend? I’m sure those here in the States are looking forward to celebrating some Fourth of July festivities with family and friends over the weekend, and here at Phandroid we’re about ready to do the same ourselves. If you still need more to satiate your Android cravings we will leave the below tidbits for your perusal.
Official HTC desktop dock is available for $ 60. Charges, syncs and even comes with a spare battery slot. [HTCPedia]
Check your Market now, because Facebook for Android just got an update! It is not necessarily a huge one but it does improve and bring a couple of features to the mobile app: Improved News Feed, Pages Support, and Video Upload.
The News Feed has been improved in a sense that it will load more types of posts and open the posts natively in the app. Pages is also supported…sort of. You may now click on a Page that appears in your News Feed and browse the Page within the app. That is cool and all, but there is no way to quickly search for a Page. You must find it in your News Feed. This is a bit of a downer, especially since iOS’ Facebook app has had this feature for ages. Finally, and likely the biggest feature added to the Facebook for Android app, is video upload! We can now (finally) upload videos taken from our devices directly to Facebook while staying in the app.
Go give the update a spin, and let us know what you think! It seems as if the app is not showing up in the Market for tablet owners. If you own a XOOM, a shiny new Galaxy Tab 10.1, or any other Android tablet, PLEASE let us know if you can update, or even see the app.
It’s kind of become a rite of passage for new Android devices to get their own custom ROMs. Every major Android tablet and phone has gone through it, and it looks as though the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is joining the club. This comes just 9 days after the Moto Xoom got its own custom ROM. The Tab 10.1 ROM appears to be a faster, deodexed version of the stock ROM that the device ships with. Granted, it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely usable.
So, if you’ve got a hankering for a faster experience on your Galaxy Tab 10.1, you can check out the KhasMek ROM here. Has anyone installed this ROM yet? What do you think? Sound off in the comments below, or on our Facebook Wall!
The delay angered other companies participating in the group, including GPS equipment makers Trimble and Garmin. They say LightSquared is simply trying to stall the release of tests results that reveal serious problems.
“The working group results show massive interference to GPS,” said Jim Kirkland, Trimble vice president and general counsel. “Delay will not change these results. It is disappointing that LightSquared has misused its control of the study group process filing process to delay this filing.”
GPS users are lining up against Lightsquared:
The National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing — a federal organization that advises and coordinates among federal agencies that rely on GPS technology — released results last week, from a series of tests conducted by various government agencies in New Mexico in April that found potential for widespread GPS interference.
General Motors’ OnStar unit on Tuesday wrote to the FCC asking it to carry out a more in-depth review of the system as its tests showed LightSquared systems could interfere with OnStar gear used to notify emergency services of car crashes.
RTCA, a nonprofit group that advises the Federal Aviation Administration, also recently released the results of its own interference tests, which found that LightSquared’s use of airwaves closest to the GPS spectrum would cause a “complete loss of GPS receiver function” over large metropolitan areas.
This morning I awoke to a brand new application in the Android Market: Google Video. I can browse movies and even see the ones that I have on my XOOM, but it takes me to the web interface and not a native rental store. Plus, the Market states that only the Verizon version (say that five times fast) is supported for movie rental and playback.
Anybody out there get this working yet, or did this one get out of the GooglePlex in the dead of night?
When Google’s new movie rentals and accompanying app were announced at this year’s I/O developers conference, the Motorola XOOM was announced as one of the first Android devices to receive streaming of rentals from the Android Market. The Google Videos (formerly Movies) app came to carrier-branded XOOM tablets along with the Android 3.1 update, but the same OS upgrade did not enable the app on WiFi-only versions of the slate. Motorola confirmed that the omission was intentional. Today that changes, as the app has been updated to include support of the WiFi XOOM.
The app still won’t work with rooted XOOMs, and unlikely ever will. If you don’t fall into that category, head over to the Android Market link below to grab Google Videos for your tablet now.
The Motorola XOOM has received it’s first custom-baked ROM, the result of work undertaken by bigrushdog of XDA and the Tiamat Team. The ROM goes by the fairly uninspired XOOM Rom 1.0 Deodexed name, but the custom software is far from basic. – all sorts of advanced options come neatly packaged inside. The bad news is though the ROM is based off of a stock build of XOOM software taken from the Verizon 3G version of the tablet, installing it will break 3G service if you are a current VZW subscriber. A pretty epic win for the XOOM community, nonetheless. Find full instructions at the source link below.
I read about the Ovi Store version 2.08 update on All About Symbian and fired up my Nokia N8 to see that the update had arrived. After signing in to the Ovi Store I saw that there was one application update available for my device, as shown in the screenshot to the right.
Getting application update notices is essential in today’s mobile world so I am happy to see it finally come to Nokia’s Symbian line. According to the guys at AAS, here is what is improved in the new Ovi Store client:
Users are able to review and apply updates to apps they’ve downloaded from the Ovi Store. The server now sends version numbers automatically down to the client on the phone.
Nokia’s algorithm for delivering ‘Top Free’ and ‘Best Sellers’ has been tweaked, to “make app and game listings more relevant for consumers”. Internal rankings are now filtered better by device and region, so that popularity in one niche won’t skew the whole.
Finding relevant apps has been made easier, with the addition of a “users who downloaded x also downloaded y” system.
Localization of S60 clients to Arabic Store clients for S60 5th Edition and S60 3rd Edition.
My new Nokia E7 also received the update the first time I launched the Ovi Store on it. I also fired up my Nokia Astound to check for the Ovi Store update and found it too had the update available so now all three of my newer Symbian devices are running the latest Ovi Store client!
This morning a report was released stating that Android puts more money in Microsoft’s bank than Windows phone. HTC, which runs Android on a number of its devices is required to pay Microsoft, $ 5 per unit sold, due to an out of court settlements involving patent violation. That being said, if HTC sells around 30 million devices, that would mean they would be paying Microsoft a grand total of (I’m sure our reader can do the math) $ 150 million. Now that’s a good chunk of cash just from HTC that’s going straight to company that owns the mobile platform, Windows Phone.
Now if you take the above information that was released by Citi analyst Walter Pritchard and compare it to Window Phone’s position, Android seems to be the money maker. Microsoft’s information says that Windows Phone has sold 2 million licenses. So at $ 15 a license, that would total to $ 30 million. Not quite the cash cow that Android seems to be.
Microsoft is making truck loads of cash from HTC, so it only make sense they would go after all the other Android device manufacturers, looking for a per unit fee, so as to get a cut of the profits across the board, as also reported by Walter Pritchard.
We’ve recently seen Samsung Galaxy’s 10.1 Tab get some keyboard and dock love after the Asus Transformer has been stealing all the thunder for a while. Check out the video of the dock below. The video doesn’t reveal a whole lot of functionality but you can get a good size comparison and feel just from looking at it. The gentlemen in the video does a lot of walking around and comparing the tab to a few things but you can get a decent take on the keyboard itself from the last couple of minutes or so. Unlike the Transformer, there is no touch pad and thanks to the video you can see the keyboard has a 3.5 mm headphone jack on it. Do you think this is nice enough of a keyboard dock for you to spend some big bucks on the 10.1-inch Tab? Is it a must have accessory to replace your laptop? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
At the 2nd annual Augmented Reality Event (ARE) at the Santa Clara Convention Center, May 17-18, the future in e-commerce, mobile products and services looked to becoming alive.
In one form or another, AR technology dates back at least 30 years, says Ramesh Raskar of MIT’s Media Lab. With faster devices, AR-based smartphone products are becoming more practical. The Nintendo 3DS provides 3D gaming without glasses, while Sony recently revealed a new kind of AR, called SmartAR, which uses “markerless” object recognition, designed to make more realistic interactions with the environment. No word yet on when this system will be integrated into shipping products.
RIM teamed up with Wikitude to bring their augmented reality solution to BlackBerry OS 7 and the BlackBerry Bold 9900. Wikitude has been available for Android smart phones for over a year, but could only show off your surroundings in 2D. Now Wikitude AR in 3D takes it to another dimension with the Optimus 3D smartphone which includes dual cameras and tri-dimensional display.
Typically, developers could only execute a predefined set of functions to create AR experiences specified by AR browsers. With the introduction of ARchitect, Wikitude now enables the developer to reuse the feature set offered in HTML and JavaScript to create AR Worlds as if they would create their own web page.
Qualcomm recently announced an AR platform for Android after completing its beta program. It enables developers to build interactive 3D experiences on multiple real world images such as books, magazines, brochures, tickets and signs.
Augmented Planet in London on June 1st and 2nd will focus on the development of Augmented Reality (AR) applications and attendees will be able to watch expert developers programming AR applications, view coding demos, hear from industry experts .
We’re still awaiting the official release date, but that doesn’t mean HTC won’t tease us with an ad spread in ESPN The Magazine. The HTC EVO 3D was featured among the pages of the latest issue touting its glasses free 3D. Now when can we get our hands on this again? Oh, at least you can pre-order if you ask nicely.
Well, the Honeycomb porting train is ahead full steam with the Google Nexus One latest to receive. We had heard some HTC devices getting it earlier last week from XDA-Developers (of course), and now we have another HTC device to add to the list. Apparently there really isn’t much working on this port other than just booting into Honeycomb. You can’t make calls, text, or use the camera, but no doubt they’ll have those working in no time.
If you want to find out more about the Nexus One Honeycomb port, and keep up to date on new features working, follow this thread.
Android developers usually don’t like to wait around for a carrier or manufacturer to get the good stuff going on new OS’s. Probably why they send out the SDK’s anyway, get the hard work done by someone else more determined to fix it.
The two videos below highlight Honeycomb ported to teh HTC Evo 4G and the Desire HD, and although none of the buttons work properly, and the OS seems pretty sluggish at times, it still a few steps in the right direction.
The official Google Reader application for Android has received an update, adding widget support to the ever popular RSS application. The update now brings the app to version 0.9.2 and adds two new home screen widgets. We think the screen shot of the update below says it all. So, hit the break and check it out. Check out the application on our apps database as well and don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments below. One thing we did find interesting and worth noting is in the new permissions. For some unknown reason, the app would like access to your contacts list. Read More…
LG is sticking close to their words about starting a war, even though they meant that for the tablet world, one could certainly say they’ve been stepping up their game to compete with the big dogs in the smartphone area. Having special apps designed to utilize your devices specific features is another way to get consumers to see the real advances in technology, and use it to their advantage.
The latest is the youtube app for the LG Optimus 3D, tailored for sharing 3D videos. It’ll come pre-installed on the Optimus 3D, and allow users to upload 3D videos to youtube’s 3D channel, making it easy to share your vision. Users watching the 3D videos will need the 3D glasses to view it properly however, which can be purchasd from Google’s YouTube store for $7.10 per 10 pack. Nice!
INQ has recently announced two Facebook centered devices recently dubbed the INQ Cloud Touch and Cloud Q. The folks over at Engadget happened to get their hands on the Cloud Touch. The device is candy bar styled and has an “HTC Wildfire like” form factor and feel to it, according to the reviewer. The device will come with Android 2.2 along with its oversize Facebook widget which can take up a whole screen of its own. Along with various software elements, the device will incorporate Spotify Premium and come with Fluency, the typing prediction engine that mans the SwiftKey keyboard. The Cloud Touch is definitely shooting for “easy on your pocket” mode with its scaled down specs. But according to the reviewer, it runs just as good as any device with a typical 1 GHz Snapdragon. Read More…
Angry Birds has been teasing us with a Valentine’s Day-themed update. Today, that update went live. A whole new set of levels, teeming with reds and pinks and hearts and all things Valentine. If you already have Angry Birds installed, head for the market and grab the update. And if you don’t, be sure and pick it up from our apps database, or by scanning the QR code below.
We’ve been waiting for more information on the HTC Merge for a while, but there’s been little more than rumors abounding since November. But, we have now seen it get certification from the FCC, which is usually one of the final steps before release dates start coming about. Hopefully some more concrete information will start dropping soon. Rumors have this phone reported likely to arrive on Verizon or Alltel, and with the frequencies the device supports, either (or both) of those is still possible. As soon as official word is given, we’ll bring you the scoop.
Who’s ready for a long weekend? I’m sure those here in the States are looking forward to celebrating some Fourth of July festivities with family and friends over the weekend, and here at Phandroid we’re about ready to do the same ourselves. If you still need more to satiate your Android cravings we will leave the below tidbits for your perusal.
I read about the Ovi Store version 2.08 update on 
Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago have been added to the MacTech Boot Camp’s 2011 tour.
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