A new Android podcast from Leo Laporte’s TWIT network. Frost show was okay, with some rough edges needing smoothing, and there’s still a little too much comparison with everything ‘i’ - but otherwise, a good start!
Some people should not be allowed to… breathe?
Barnes & Noble have been putting quite a lot of energy into their nook platform recently, setting off a minor price war a few weeks ago with their new wifi-only nook, and now releasing a nook app for Android phones. Unfortunately, it’s very big (17.7MB installed) and not all that good compared with the existing leading Android ebook apps, fbreader and Aldiko. Still, good to see support for the platform…
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 has hit the Android market as well - and a huge flood of apps which threaten to overwhelm anything but the most popular apps. There’s a perception that if you’re in the top X% (where X is a very small number), you’ll shift a lot of apps, and if you can’t break that barrier you’ll never hit it big. There’s also an interesting side comment about big companies shipping apps for free, because they can absorb the development costs and make it up elsewhere, vs. indie devs trying to make a living (or at least a revenue stream) directly from their software. There are lessons here for Android…
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 - although they do claim that augmented reality won’t take off until the newest iPhones are wide-spread. The interesting thing is that Android’s open nature has obviously made it the correct platform for innovative research and cutting-edge products - exactly as it should be!
Experience Google Mobile Service, Enjoy Android Market -
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 always made by Sciphone - at me and shouting lower and lower prices. If these guys are actually going into making real Android phones, I think it’s a good thing - they won’t take share from the mainstream phones, but they can be an important route to the mass market. I somehow doubt they will actually allow users to “Enjoy [the] Android Market” though, unless the Chinese phone hackers have knocked-off the Market client…
Oh, and I’ve got two trips to Shenzhen planned for October. I’ll report back as to what’s actually available on the street, complete with photos if I can, and possibly a review if I’m suckered into buying something.
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 not sure why the developer assumes Google are going to delete the app, unless he’s released something similar before which was deleted? I already use a different ad-blocker anyway, which uses the age-old trick of hardcoding DNS values of 127.0.0.1 for well-known ad sources like DoubleClick.
LG Shows Off GW620 – Plenty of Pictures and Video to Go ‘Round -
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, Motorola and Samsung, as well as a number of smaller or knock-off manufacturers, showing off their Android devices, it looks like the multi-vendor strategy is actually demonstrably real.
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, the content of this review isn’t so interesting in itself, but the who, how and where of its publication make it notable.
Dunkin' Isn't the Only One Delivering Donuts Tonight -
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 wait to see what’s going to happen regarding a donut update - it’s quite possible it’ll come with the rumoured ‘downport’ of the Sense UI from the Hero, a little later this year.