Facebook has released an update to its Android app today that should give users of the social network on Android devices a more integrated and instant experience — and takes Facebook another step closer to making its mobile app experience more like the one people have when using the social network on the web.
Specifically, the new version lets users share photos and messages direct from the home screen of their devices, and it includes several features that had been in the standalone Messenger app. → Read More
As bad as Nokia’s financials look right now – a $4 billion drop in sales won’t make anyone’s day – don’t consider the Windows Phone move a failure just yet. They’ve done what many phone companies have thus far failed to do. They’ve changed swiftly with the times and, more important, they’ve done it in quite admirable way.
If you’ll recall, the first real Android phone was HTC’s G1. Considered a clunker by all but the most die-hard of users, the device sold fairly well, topping out at 1 million units in 2008. But the G1 did something more important than make T-Mobile the first Android carrier – it grabbed a certain user contingent who understood Android, understood the framework, and would follow the platform to the grave. The popularity of the G1 was a direct reaction to the burgeoning iOS platform. The same thing happened in the WebOS space, but WebOS was exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time and is a disaster distinct from the Android launch.
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Chrome for Android is becoming somewhat of a flagship product for Google, but given that it’s only available on phones and tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich, its reach is pretty limited. It’s still one of the best mobile browsers on the market, though, and Google is adding a number of cool features to it today. Chrome for Android is now also available in 31 additional languages and in all countries where Google Play is available.
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While Google’s top brass were busy dissecting the company’s Q1 earnings on their scheduled conference call, it was business as usual for the rest of the company. Over on the official Android Developers blog, for example, Google announced that developers in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Israel, and Poland can now sell Android apps and in-app additions in the Google Play store (and in their native currencies to boot).
“But wait,” you may say. “Developers from Israel and Mexico have been able to sell their apps for years now!” You’d be absolutely right — the Czech Republic and Poland are the only really new additions, but there was a bit of a catch for the other two. → Read More
As if producing commercial airliners, helicopters, and satellites didn’t keep Boeing busy enough, the company revealed earlier this week that they would soon be branching out into a slightly different market. National Defense Magazine reports that Boeing is currently working on an highly-secure Android-based smartphone of all things, and that it should see a release later this year.
Boeing President Roger Krone declined to go into specifics when it came to the device’s hardware or release date, though he did note the Boeing Phone (the company hasn’t officially decided on a name yet) is nearing the end of its development cycle. It seems as though the device has been in the works for a while so it’s a safe bet that the spec sheet won’t be the most competitive, and I wouldn’t expect to see anything newer than Froyo or Gingerbread running on it.
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Last December, Google launched Currents, its attempt at challenging mobile apps like Flipboard and Zite. Since then, the company has added about 400 new publishers and over 14,000 self-published editions to its lineup . Until now, though, Currents, which runs on Android and iOS, was only available in the United States. That’s changing today, as Google is taking Currents global. Local publishers can now start adding their content to the app and U.S. publishers can now turn on a translation feature to make their texts available in any of the 44 languages that are supported by Google Translate. → Read More
If you’re an Android and a PC, you should check out BlueStacks — before hackers catch on or Chrome sneaks in this functionality, take advantage. The startup’s software has been going like hotcakes over the last few months, as it’s offering a much-needed service for Android and PC users, having developed software that allows Android users to run their apps on all Windows PCs, tablets, and laptops — without any modifications. Thanks to this appealing concept, BlueStacks lured $7.6 million in venture funding pre-launch, $6.4 million more a few months later, and now it seems the yet another investor is on board.
The startup finally released its public beta on March 27th, and so far users have been eating it up. In the first 10 days after its release, BlueStacks’ App Player racked up more than 1 million downloads, with over 12 million apps collectively being run by its users. It’s on the heels of this early traction that the company is today announcing that global telecom giant Qualcomm has joined as an investor. → Read More
Hey all you Sprint customers, you haven’t been forgotten after all! Sprint has just revealed that the device’s Ice Cream Sandwich has finally gone live, which is great news if you’re looking to squeeze some more life out of your aging Nexus S 4G before you move into something a bit more modern.
Sprint has said the update will be pushed to all devices over the coming weeks, but if you’re impatient — which I can’t blame you for — you should be able to jumpstart the process by going into the device’s settings and checking for the update. → Read More
In the spirit of connecting your phone’s activity to the cloud, a trend that has inspired one of this week’s more interesting launches, Phonedeck, there now comes another application that wants to automatically track your activity in order to provide a history of your communications, additional analysis, and even a search engine for your own life.
The app is called Friday, and it’s now available in private beta (invites below) for Android users only.
Friday comes from Dexetra, the same folks who brought you the Siri-like Android app Iris. They’re a team of six who got together in April 2010, and who recently raised a seed round of $200,000 just this fall. Their first app Iris is already seeing some decent traction – 1.7 million users have used it for some 75 million answers to date. → Read More
According to new data released today by mobile analytics firm Flurry, Amazon’s Appstore for Android is generating more revenue per daily user than the Google Android Market, which was recently rebranded as the Google Play store. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that Amazon vets apps for quality, runs promotions to entice users to return daily, and perhaps most importantly, is able to leverage its established user base of Amazon account holders who already have credit card information on file – perfect for one-click checkouts. → Read More
Here we go again: the rumors of Google branching out into the tablet space have been floating around for what seems like ages now, and the Wall Street Journal has jumped into the fray. They cite the usual handful of unnamed sources, who this time say that Google is planning to open up their own online store a la Amazon to sell Android tablets.
Not just any Android tablets, mind you — co-branded ones that bear Google’s name along with that of the manufacturer. Google does many things (some better than other), but they’re definitely not in the consumer hardware production game. → Read More
The other day, Matt made a desperate plea: “Please don’t buy cheap Android phones.” To do so is a mistake, and the more you buy, the more cheap phones flood the market, and thus more people are walking around with crap up against their faces.
And after hearing that Samsung has sold 5 million Galaxy Notes, I think it may be time to make my own plea: Please stop buying giant phones.
Now, obviously I don’t take this request as seriously as the whole cheap Android phone thing. But I was actually musing to myself just last night that if people continue to buy phones with 4.5-inch + screen sizes, phone makers will think that’s OK. It’s not. It’s just as dumb as Motorola’s advertising, directed squarely at men with robots and cyborgs. → Read More
New numbers out from Nielsen today point to just how close the U.S. is to having more smartphone than feature phone users: analysts say 49.7 percent of cell phone users currently own a smartphone, a big leap on the 36 percent who owned smartphones only a year ago.
What’s increasingly clear in that growth is that, at least in the U.S., no other platform is proving to be a contender against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
Currently, Android-based smartphones account for 48 percent of all smartphones owned in the U.S., while Apple’s different versions of the iPhone account for 32 percent. Both of those shares have grown: in September 2011, Nielsen said that Android’s share was 40 percent and Apple’s 28 percent. → Read More
Well, Google certainly seems to be having a productive day so far. In addition to the unveiling of their Account Activity feature and a handful of new Google+ Hangout apps, Google has also pushed out a considerable update to their Google Maps for Android app.
Now at version 6.5, Google Maps now packs improved support for devices with high pixel density displays — any device that falls into that category will now get high-resolution map tiles that make for more detailed views that are less cluttered by unnecessarily large labels.
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Earlier this month, Opera and Android briefly made headlines together when one analytics firm found that Google’s OS, Android, had finally overtaken Opera as the world’s largest mobile browser. Today, the two are in the news again for a slightly different reason: Opera is releasing the newest version of its popular (and free) Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers with added camera, HTML5 and 3D graphics support — one way for Opera to claw back some share on Android, currently the biggest smartphone platform in the world.
The new version of the browser is something that Opera had hinted was in the works back in February, when it announced deals to further its reach in the area of mobile payments. As with that news, today’s release is another example of how mobile browser developers are looking to add more features to make their products more like native platform experiences. The release comes at the same time that Opera has also released a new edition of its browser for Symbian. → Read More
A federal judge has ruled that Asus’ Transformer Prime tablet does not infringe on Hasbro’s Transformers trademark, in spite of the suit actually making sense. Just “Transformer”, or just “Prime”, might have flown right by Hasbro’s lawyers without a second look — those are words, after all — but putting the two together seemed like tempting fate. As expected, Hasbro took Asus to task in December.
But the judge has initially sided with Asus, saying that people were unlikely to confuse the tablet with Hasbro properties, noting they had also waited too long to file the suit.
As a little kicker on the story, court filings have revealed that the device has produced pre-order numbers that are, shall we say, less than legendary. → Read More
Listen, I understand the pain that comes with not being able to afford nice things. I really do. But for the love of everything mighty, do not waste your money, or stand by as your loved ones waste their money, on cheap Android phones.
Thanks to generous subsidies in the U.S., often only a few dollars separates a cheap Android phone from a top-tier model. With the exception of handsets like the Galaxy Note tabletphone, Droid Razr MAXX and Galaxy Nexus, all of which cost $299, there are a lot of quality Android phones to be had for just $199. Why get something like this lump, the $80 (after rebate) LG Lucid, and live with a bargain phone that will likely be shortly abandoned and destined to live without proper updates. You’re setting yourself up for a bucket of fail.
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Computer manufacturer Lenovo has launched its own Android app store today, called simply, the “Lenovo Enterprise App Shop.” As the name implies, the service is targeting the company’s businesses customers by offering custom management, deployment and publication of mobile applications. Apps can also be purchased through volume pricing.
Lenovo says the app store will work on their Android-based tablets running Android 3.1 or higher, but it will also work with those tablets from other PC makers, too. → Read More
Instagram has been iPhone-only for so long, and its executives have been so coy about their plans for other platforms, that it can be hard to believe the company will ever release an app for Android. And no, it still hasn’t announced a launch date, but if you’re an Android owner who wants the app, you should go to this page and sign up right now.
Earlier this month, when TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis interviewed co-founder Kevin Systrom at South by Southwest, he teased the audience by waving around the Android app on-stage. Apparently it wasn’t ready for a real demo, but he claimed that “in some ways, it’s better than our iOS app.” → Read More
YC-backed Tagstand, a company intent on helping make NFC more of a mainstream technology, is rebooting its Android app, NFC Task Launcher with a whole new feature set and user interface. The app was already one of the top NFC-based utilities in the Android Market Google Play store before coming under Tagstand’s control recently, when the app’s creator joined the team.
The company also says it saw a big uptick in demand for NFC tags when Google released the Galaxy Nexus, and it’s now selling as many tags in a day as it did during the entire month of June, when the service first launched.
The company also says it saw a big uptake in demand for NFC tags when Google released the Galaxy Nexus, and it’s now selling as many tags in a day as it did during the entire month of June, when the service first launched. → Read More
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