October 2009
7 posts
1 tag
Striking It Rich: Is There An App For That? →
Not really an Android article, for today, but still of interest. Newsweek trying to pull apart the myth of the millionaire iPhone app developer, talking to a few indies about how the app store is treating them. The story has an obvious message, and is slanted towards that message, but I don’t think the message is incorrect. There absolutely has been a race to the bottom on pricing - which...
1 tag
Reality, improved →
A month-old article from The Economist (whose audio edition works very well on Android, by the way) about the growth of augmented reality, and how in many ways it’s an unexpected fulfilment of the unfulfilled promise of 90s virtual reality. Lots of stuff about various different solutions competing in the market, but it’s notable that most of them are described as running on Android -...
1 tag
Experience Google Mobile Service, Enjoy Android... →
Sciphone are a relatively well-known Chinese maker of knock-off phones. I live in Hong Kong, and go over to Shenzhen around once a month for shopping, massage and food, and you see stacks of their phones, even in the tourist shops at the border, never mind in the actual phone malls. I’ve found myself walking away from a shop more than once, with the shopkeeper waving a fake iPhone - almost...
1 tag
AdBlock (alpha) →
Something slightly different today - this app was posted in the market earlier on, and I was tickled by the comment in the description: “Dear Google, please contact me before delete this app from market.”. The linked developer homepage is in fact just a large STOP sign with a bunch of German text in it, which is apparently a rant against Internet censorship. To be honest, I’m...
1 tag
LG Shows Off GW620 – Plenty of Pictures and Video... →
Pictures and information about the upcoming Android phone from Korea’s LG. It may not be the most exciting phone in the world, although there is a small but vocal minority which is all over any phone with a QWERTY (or AZERTY) keyboard - but it’s a good sign. Android got off to a slightly narrow start, with HTC taking the lion’s share of early handsets, but with LG, Huawai,...
1 tag
HTC’s Hero May Be Your Scene →
Walt Mossberg is one of the best-respected tech reviewers in the US, writing mainly for the Wall Street Journal, and generally considered one of Apple’s friends in the press. This is his review of the Sprint-model (CDMA) Hero, due to be released imminently. He’s pretty positive about it, with a few caveats, and considers it a worthy competitor in the smartphone market. In some ways,...
1 tag
Dunkin' Isn't the Only One Delivering Donuts... →
Looks like Android 1.6 is actually rolling out to at least a few test phones tonight, very soon after being formally released by the AOSP. Of particular note is that the first updates are apparently going out to G1s, refuting the earlier reports that there would be trouble delivering post-cupcake updates to G1s due to the lack of available flash. My Magic is HTC-branded, so I’ll have to...
September 2009
5 posts
1 tag
Building an Ombudsdroid →
Mark Murphy is generally worth reading, when it comes to Android stuff, and his latest column suggests the creation of an Ombudsman, who would serve as an interface between Google and the developer community when it comes to questions which aren’t purely technical. An individual or team with privileged access to Google folks who might not otherwise deal with the ‘public’, but...