Tag Archives | Google Android

Firefox for Android: Desktop-Like Browsing for Your Phone

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 29, 2011 at 11:53 am

For all the rapid improvement that both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have seen, one thing about both mobile operating systems hasn’t changed much at all: their browsers. True, their technical underpinnings have been refined. But featurewise, they haven’t evolved at anywhere near the pace of their counterparts on PCs, where the competition among browsers is never-ending.

That’s one reason why I’m in favor of browser competition being as healthy on smartphones and tablets as it is on computers. On iOS, that’s not going to happen anytime soon–Apple doesn’t permit full-blown browsers with their own rendering engines in the App Store. (Ones that use the Safari engine, such as the excellent Atomic Web Browser, are permissible; so is Opera Mini, which does most of its work on Opera’s servers, not on your phone.) On Android, however, there’s nothing stopping other companies from competing with the OS’s built-in browser. Opera announced new versions of both Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for Android a couple of weeks ago. And now Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 4 for Android.

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Rumor: Official Google Tablet in the Works, But Why?

Posted by Jared Newman on March 29, 2011 at 6:33 am

After showing phone makers how it’s done with the Nexus One and Nexus S smartphones, Google may be moving on to a Nexus tablet.

The Google-branded tablet would be manufactured by LG, CrunchGear’s John Biggs reports. However, the rumor says nothing about the hardware or software inside. Presumably, it would run Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the version of Google’s mobile OS designed with tablets in mind.

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Android Apps on the PlayBook: This Doesn’t Change Everything!

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 25, 2011 at 7:51 pm

Yesterday, BlackBerry maker RIM confirmed what sounded at first like a wild rumor: Its PlayBook tablet, coming on April 19th, will run Android apps even though it’s not an Android tablet per se. Apps written for Android 2.3 Gingerbread will be another PlayBook option along with native programs written for RIM’s new QNX-based tablet OS and ones built in Adobe AIR.

As usual with RIM execs, co-CEO Jim Balsillie explained the news in a way that was, um, a bit twisty. (Balsillie and fellow co-CEO Mike Lazaridis have a manner of spelling out their company’s strategies that reminds me of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.) But if I understand Balsillie correctly, he’s saying that the Android compatibility isn’t there as a primary source of apps. People are going to want to run software that’s been designed to take advantage of the PlayBook’s hardware. The large quantities of Gingerbread apps–what he calls “tonnage”–are there in case anyone’s worried that there won’t be enough PlayBook apps, or the right apps for every purpose.

That sounds reasonable enough to me. But it also sounds like it’ll be a distinctly minor aspect of the PlayBook’s, well, playbook.

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Is HeyTell the Next Killer Smartphone App?

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 24, 2011 at 1:57 pm

I have a confession to make. I am absolutely addicted to HeyTell, and I’ve actually managed to get a good portion of my friends on it. What is HeyTell? Putting it simply, it’s a smartphone app for both iOS and Android which gives you “push-to-talk” capability. Users send messages to one another by recording messages. The company says that these audio files typically are no bigger than an e-mail, allowing them to be transferred quickly.

The fun factor of this app hasn’t escaped mobile phone users: about four million registered users are now on the app. The most surprising thing may be the fact that there is no huge company behind this: it’s merely a husband and wife developer team–Steven Hugg and Jen Harvey.

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Fun with the New Squeezebox Remote Android App

Posted by Mari Silbey on March 24, 2011 at 10:32 am

What happens when you install the new Logitech Squeezebox Remote app from the Android Marketplace and proceed to play around with the interface from a remote location? You scare the pants off anybody who’s still at home and wondering why the little radio box is suddenly playing music all by itself*. That’s what happened this afternoon when I decided to test out the new Android app despite not being anywhere near my Squeezebox. The app loaded beautifully, and apparently it had no trouble communicating with my player. Here’s the text message I received from home shortly afterward: “Your squeezebox just came on by itself. #afraidtogodownstairs”

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Color: Share Photos With Those Around You–Automatically and Instantly

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 23, 2011 at 5:00 pm

Back in November, entrepreneur Bill Nguyen–the founder of Lala and other companies–bought himself a cool domain name: Color.com. Now his new startup is announcing a cool free app to go with it: Color, a photo- and video-sharing program for iPhone and Android handsets. It should be available for both platforms tonight.

While I’ve met with the company, received a demo, and played with the app a bit, I haven’t had extensive hands-on time with the service. So this isn’t a review. But I’ve seen enough to know that Color is a fresh take on the seemingly well-trodden concept of photo/video sharing; it’s nothing at all like Flickr or Instagram or Path or other services you might be using. And if it lives up to its potential it could be a big hit.

Like umpteen other apps, Color lets you snap and share photos and videos. But instead of sharing them with people you specify, it shares them with people near you–and if those people are using the Color app to capture stuff, you can see it, too. It all happens in real time in one shared stream, without anyone involved having to do anything except shoot photos. And it creates a group-created visual record of events large (like a concert or a conference) and small (a birthday party or a dinner out).

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Adobe’s Better Mobile Flash: Coming March 18th

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 11, 2011 at 8:16 am

Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.2 for Android–the first version that supports the tablet-friendly Android 3.0 Honeycomb and which supports the performance-boosting, power-minimizing Stage Video feature–will be available on March 18th. One way or another, Its arrival will surely restart the whole “Should iOS users be distraught over Apple’s refusal to permit Flash?” debate…

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Sorry, Two Operating Systems Aren’t Better Than One

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 9, 2011 at 4:22 pm

Leo Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, says that in 2012, every HP PC will run the company’s WebOS operating system–presumably in conjunction with Windows in most cases, although no details are available just yet. ViewSonic has an Atom-powered ViewPad that dual-boots between Android 1.6 (a version so old that I’ve forgotten what its dessert-themed codename was) and Windows 7. Lenovo continues to demo its Windows laptop that lets you pop out the screen and use it as an Android tablet. Other companies are also working on split-personality, multiple-OS computers. More than one of the hardware makers that are doing this is using the phrase “the best of both worlds” to explain why it makes sense for one device to run two operating systems.

Is it just me, or is this a profoundly lousy idea?

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