Tag Archives | Google Android

The Verizon Nexus One is Vaporous–and That's Okay

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 26, 2010 at 12:18 pm

Ever since Google announced back in January that it would be selling be a Verizon Wireless-compatible Nexus One in the spring, I’ve known people who planned their whole smartphone-buying strategy around that fact. As of January, the Nexus One was the hottest Android handset on the market, and plenty of folks swear by Verizon. It sounded like a match made in heaven–or at least a potentially attractive combination,

Well, spring has sprung, and it sounds like the Verizon Nexus turned out to be DBA (Dead Before Arrival): Bloomberg is reporting that the handset has been scrapped. It’s not entirely clear why–the story begins by saying that Verizon “retreated” from being involved with the Nexus One, but then it quotes a Google spokesperson saying that Google decided to skip it because of “amazing innovation happening across the open Android ecosystem,” and a Verizon spokesperson who seems to say that the carrier is still interested. Maybe it was a mutual decision.

In any event, it’s no biggie. Verizon has already launched the Droid Incredible, a well-reviewed phone that’s essentially the Nexus One only more so. And for all Google’s talk of changing the way people buy phones, it remains unclear what the benefit is of getting your phone from Google rather than a carrier–especially in the case of Verizon, since there’s no such thing as a Verizon-compatible phone that’s unlocked and able to work on other networks. The Verizon Nexus One was going to be a Verizon Nexus One, even if it was Google doing the order fulfillment.

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Google Working With Adobe on Android Flash and AIR

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 21, 2010 at 10:13 am

The saga of Flash on the iPhone may be ending–at least for now–but Google is announcing that it’s collaborating with Adobe on the Android versions of Flash and AIR. It’s not clear what that means, exactly (details are to come at next month’s Google developer conference). But if there’s one prominent phone OS with no Adobe stuff, and one with the best possible Adobe stuff, consumers will get to decide just how big a selling point Flash and AIR are. And that’s good news.

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Droid vs. iPhone 3GS: An Update

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 16, 2010 at 5:23 pm

As I wrote a few weeks ago, frustration with AT&T coverage in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood led me to put my iPhone 3GS aside and switch to a Verizon Wireless Droid. I found that I liked the reliability of Verizon’s  service, and loved certain things about Android–but that the overall experience was way less polished and predictable than the iPhone.

Here’s an update: Over the last week or so, I’ve been using the iPhone most of the time. It still has severe issues in SOMA (or at least a bunch of places in SOMA where I hang out–it claims perfect signal strength, but the most reliable thing it does is to drop my calls). Otherwise, though, I’ve spent far less time futzing than I do when I’m in Androidland. I’m coming to the uneasy realization that I may want to use both phones, depending on what sort of limitations I can deal with at any given time.

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Verizon Gets Another Droid. And It’s Incredible!

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 15, 2010 at 10:43 am

There’s the Droid. And the Droid Eris. And now there’s the Droid Incredible, a new Verizon Wireless Android-based handset made by HTC.   It’s got a 1-GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.7″ OLED display, an 8MP camera, and Android 2.1 with HTC’s Sense user interface. The Incredible is $199 after $100 rebate with two-year contract–just like the Droid was when it shipped last November. (Actually, the Droid is still officially $199, but for most of its life Verizon has had 2-for-1 deals and other incentives–and other sellers have had the phone for as little as $50.)

As long as you don’t want a physical keyboard, the Incredible is clearly the new flagship of the Droid line. And, on paper at least, maybe the Android handset to beat for the time being–although new Android phones arrive so quickly that it could well lose that honor shortly after it ships on April 29th.

The Bay Area, incidentally, is still rife with “Droid Does” billboards–although the new ones focus on apps, so the message is presumably less that the Droid trumps the iPhone than that it’s not completely uncompetitive. The fact that there’s a plain-old Droid as well as an Eris and an Incredible is kind of confusing–I assume that future advertising extravaganzas are more likely to focus on the sexy Incredible than the aging–hey, it’s been out for five months!–Droid.

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Needed: Tweetie for Android

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 14, 2010 at 5:47 pm

I’m still at Twitter’s Chirp conference, where Cofounder Ev Williams told a questioner In the audience that there will be an official Twitter client for phones based on Google’s Android operating system. He wouldn’t say if the company I’d building a new or will acquire an existing app. But he said they’d hoped to have been ready to announce the details at Chirp but fell short, so I assume it’s not too far off.

And I know what I think Twitter should do: it should bring Tweetie–er, Twitter for iPhone–to Android. The application which Twitter bought last week has just about everything about doing Twitter on a phone figured out perfectly. Why build or buy something else for Android that almost certainly wouldn’t be nearly as good? Shouldn’t the mobile Twitter experience be consistent across all phone platforms?

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Return of the Android Set-Top Box

Posted by Dave Z on March 18, 2010 at 6:19 am

Just a few weeks back we heard noise of Google heading into the set-top box space. With DISH Network. At the time, it wasn’t clear if this was merely a rehashing of the upcoming DISH apps or a more significant Android set-top platform play. As it turns out, it does look like Google aims to conquer the television with a dedicated offering. And why wouldn’t they take their open source platform and ad serving business to a larger screen? Following in the footsteps of Yahoo TV, Google has also partnered with Intel and is going with the generic “Google TV.” Beyond DISH, other likely launch partners include Sony and Logitech. Although no concrete functionality, timing, or pricing has been revealed. From the NY Times:

For Google, the project is a pre-emptive move to get a foothold in the living room as more consumers start exploring ways to bring Web content to their television sets. Based on Google’s Android operating system, the TV technology runs on Intel’s Atom chips. Google has built a prototype set-top box, but the technology may be incorporated directly into TVs or other devices.

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Marvell Shows a New Android Tablet Design

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 16, 2010 at 8:02 am

I’m spending the day at the Future of Publishing Summit in New York City, a conference on the digital transformation of books, magazines, and newspapers. The room is packed with execs from the New York publishing industry, plus a few Silicon Valley types. Among the latter are the folks from chipmaker Marvell, who are showing off some prototype devices based on the company’s low-cost, power-efficient Armada processors.

The newest of these is a reference design for a 10.1″ Android-based color tablet that Marvell just finished putting together. Here it is:

As a reference design, this (rather chunky) tablet is mostly about technological guts rather than industrial design: I’d expect the companies who build devices based on it to make them sleeker and sexier.

Marvell says that it expects tablets based on this design to go on sale by the end of this year. It’s not talking about pricetags yet, but with the iPad starting at $499, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the starting price for tablets from other companies will be substantially lower. Manufacturers should certainly be able to sell an Armada-based tablet running the free Android OS for less than a “Slate PC” running full-blown Windows 7.

Marvell’s version runs Android in a form that looks pretty much like the Android on phones such as the Nexus One and Droid, only on a bigger, higher-resolution display. Assuming that tablets are here to stay, I hope that Google–or someone–builds an Android interface that was designed with big touchscreens in mind. Despite the theory that the iPad is merely a big iPhone, the most interesting thing about it is that Apple went to the trouble of designing a new interface tailored to its needs. I don’t think tablets running a stock copy of Windows 7 or Android are going to be anywhere near as interesting as ones that rethink the experience for a new class of gizmo.

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Opera Mini 5 Beta for Android

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 11, 2010 at 8:26 am

Opera has released a beta of its Opera Mini 5 browser for Google’s Android OS. Mini’s signature feature is the way it caches and compresses Web pages on the server side so they’re relatively snappy on a phone even via a sluggish wireless connection. As its name suggests, Mini started out as a pretty basic browser, but version 5 is full-featured for a phone browsser: It’s got tabs, a password manager, and Opera’s Speed Dial feature that provides one-click access to favorite sites.

In my brief time with Mini 5 so far on a Verizon Droid, it felt fast but not strikingly faster than the standard Android browser (an experience which PCMag.com’s Sean Ludwig also encountered). Formatting is never as faithful as in the stock browser, and some of the sites I visited with the beta looked just plain wonky. But on the plus side, Mini let me get into one Web site–the back-end part of WordPress.com I use to update Technologizer–which I haven’t been able to access with the bundled Android browser.

Worth a look if you’re a browser buff with an Android phone (and I’m glad that Android users have the option of choosing Mini–here’s hoping that iPhone owners get to choose, too).

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