Tag Archives | Google Android

MOG Goes Mobile

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 20, 2010 at 8:20 am

Music service MOG has launched the iPhone and Android apps I wrote about last month. For $9.99 a month, you get unlimited streaming and album downloads in your browser and on your device. And MOG has a unique “artist radio” feature that can play only songs by that artist, rather than the more typical combination of songs by the artist, related artists, vaguely-similar artists, and not-similar-at-all artists.

MOG offers a three-day trial that’s worth checking out. Nitpick on the iPhone edition: It’s been waiting for Apple approval for so long that it’s not an iOS 4 app. That means that it can’t play in the background while you use other programs. Once it has that feature, it should be a killer alternative to iTunes. (As should Rhapsody, which says it’s working on a multitasking version.)

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Droid X on Lockdown, But Hacks Won't Brick It

Posted by Jared Newman on July 16, 2010 at 5:28 pm

If the Droid X’s U.S. launch had just one pockmark, it was the hoopla that transpired when one Android enthusiast declared the phone would become a brick when hacked.

It all started when My Droid World forum admin p3droid declared that a chip called eFuse was triggered to blow when the Droid X’s digitally-signed bootloader is tampered with, rendering the phone unusable. Attempts to run custom ROMs on the phone, such as Cyanogen, would likely produce a Motorola-branded doorstop that only the company could fix. MobileCrunch’s Devin Coldewey ran with the story, as did other sites, and a debate ensued on whether the phone does, in fact, have a hardware-killing security feature.

So Engadget cleared the air with Motorola, who said the phone is not rigged to blow, but it does go into “Recovery Mode” when booted with unauthorized software. This is for security reasons, and for meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements, Motorola said. Re-installing Motorola-approved software restores the Droid X to normal.

Okay, great. But I think the debate yesterday was misdirected. The problem is not that the Droid X becomes a brick when hacked, but that it cannot be hacked. While the lack of a phone-killing security feature means hackers are at a greater liberty to tinker, they won’t get anywhere. Motorola Milestone, the original Droid’s overseas sibling, has the same digitally-signed bootloader, and its security measures haven’t been broken yet. There are workarounds for loading custom ROMs on the Milestone, but they are difficult to perform, and there are other drawbacks, as explained by TheUnlockr.

Any tech topic with the word “brick” in it makes for a better headline, but I’d rather see the discussion focus on why Motorola doesn’t want its users hacking the Droid X, rather than what nasty things will happen to the phone if they do.

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Android Gets a Build-Your-Own-App App

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 11, 2010 at 10:56 pm

Got an idea for a smartphone app? If you’ve got an Android phone you might be able to build it yourself, thanks to App Inventor for Android, a new Google Labs program for Windows, OS X, and Linux that’s designed to make building Android programs as easy as piecing blocks together.

Steve Lohr’s story in the New York Times makes it sound sensational; here’s a video from Google showing a lady creating her first App Inventor app:

App Inventor is in closed beta at the moment, and Google says it’ll let folks in “soon”–you can sign up here. As you’ll see if you fill out the sign-up form, Google sees the program as an educational tool of particular interest to teachers and students.

It’s an exciting idea that’s more than slightly reminiscent of HyperCard, the brilliant visual programming tool that was a big deal on the Mac more than twenty years ago, and which is missed to this day. HyperCard or something similar would be a boon on the iPhone–even Steve Jobs has says he thinks so, although Apple apparently doesn’t have any interest in building such an application itself, and new restrictions in the iOS developer agreement prevent apps developed with the HyperCard-like RunRev from being distributed on the App Store.

(More and more, I think that the surface similarities between Android and iOS are less interesting than the fundamental differences in emphasis and philosophy–and the more different the two OSes get, the more interesting they’ll be.)

I still have a cranky-old-man rant about PCs getting boring when they stopped coming with BASIC and normal people therefore stopped learning how to write their own software. I can’t wait to get my hands on App Inventor–and to see whether it’s capable of creating programs which anyone other than their inventors will want to use…

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The Best Mobile Version of YouTube is Now YouTube, Not an App

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 7, 2010 at 1:11 pm

YouTube is launching a new version of its mobile site today for HTML5-capable smartphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. I saw a demonstration at a press briefing this morning, and it looked like the most YouTubey mobile version of YouTube to date, with most of the major features of the full-blown version of the service, playback of videos within the browser (rather than in an external media player) [CORRECTION: I got the previous point wrong], and higher-quality video than is currently provided by the YouTube apps for iPhone and Android. Judging from the demo, it’s extremely snappy for a Web-based app–screens popped up as quickly as they would in a local application.

It also has a user interface that’s designed to be as touch-friendly as possible, without demanding the user to poke at the screen very precisely–Product Manager Andrey Doronichev even conducted part of this morning’s demo using…his nose.

The new YouTube Mobile looks cool, but it’s most interesting as a salvo in the war between local apps (a form of software championed by Apple) and Web-based ones (Google’s bread and butter). When Google writes iPhone apps–like, say, Google Voice–it’s at the mercy of Apple. When it creates browser-based services, it doesn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to distribute them to every iPhone user who cares to give them a try. And with YouTube, at least, it looks like there’s no particular advantage to writing an iPhone app–the Web-based incarnation works at least as well as a piece of native software would.

Even if the unique challenges of getting into the iPhone App Store weren’t an issue, there’s much to be said for YouTube being a Web app rather than a local one. With a Web app, YouTube can roll out new features on as aggressive a schedule as it chooses, instantly putting them in the hands of everyone who uses the service. It can’t do that with the YouTube app for Android, and the one for iPhone is completely out of its hands, since it was written by Apple. (For what it’s worth, a YouTube exec at the briefing I attended said he hopes Apple continues to update its YouTube app, and that YouTube would be happy to help.)

You gotta wonder: How long will it be until Web apps are capable of doing nearly anything a local app can? It’s not going to happen in 2010, 2011, or 2012…but it will happen.

Here’s YouTube’s blog post on the new YouTube Mobile. One surprising note: The company says that it hasn’t finished polishing up the service to work well in Safari on the iPhone 4.

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HTC's Android Gamble is Paying Off

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 6, 2010 at 11:11 am

Smartphone maker HTC was one of the first manufacturers two years ago to announce devices for the then-unproven Android mobile OS. It was a gamble — there was no guarantee that the new platform would survive, even with Google’s muscle behind it. If HTC’s latest financials are any guide, that gamble is paying dividends (literally!).

The company reported a $268 million profit for the just ended quarter, up a third over last year. It also sold 4.5 million phones just in April — beating current smartphone juggernaut Apple and its iconic iPhone as consumers pulled back from the iPhone 3GS in anticipation of the iPhone 4.

HTC had for much of its corporate life focused on Windows-powered devices. However with Microsoft’s mobile phone division apparently in chaos, and the company’s mobile focus on its Windows Phone 7 operating system due later this year, the company is increasingly turning to Android as its primary operating system.

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AT&T's Other June Smartphone

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 14, 2010 at 8:33 am

Four days before the iPhone 4 goes on sale on June 24th, AT&T will start stocking the HTC Aria, which sounds like its first Android smartphone that a serious smartphone fan might take seriously. For $130 (on two-year contract after rebate) it’s got decent specs, a trackball, and what AT&T describes as an especially pocket-friendly size. It also runs Android 2.1 with HTC’s Sense interface (Google’s own Nexus One remains the only Android 2.2 phone, but please don’t call that fragmentation).

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Phone.com Launches Advanced Calling Features for Android Phones and iPhones

Posted by Jacqueline Emigh on June 10, 2010 at 6:00 am

Today is the official launch date for a pair of mobile software applications from Phone.com aimed at giving users of Android handsets, iPhones and other smartphones sophisticated telephone and VOiP calling features that might otherwise coat a boatload of money.

Already downloadable from Google’s Android Market, the new Phone.com Mobile Office provides users of cellular voice networks with features such as free (or relatively cheap) international calling, call histories, the ability to block calls from both unwanted and unidentified numbers, multiple call routing options, “professional” voices for messages, background music during hold times, and integration of voice calls with faxes and SMS text messages in a single mailbox.

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