With the impending release of the Verizon Droid, we already know that Android 2.0 is on the way. There have been some leaks regarding what’s going into the next version of the mobile OS, and now Google has made them official. The new version will add a lot of interesting features that could lead to some interesting new devices, as well as better functionality.
Among those new features is support for a larger variety of screen sizes, which will allow for the Verizon Droid’s massive 845 x 480 pixel display. The new screen sizes will allow all apps to work on all phones, but larger screens will obviously see more than smaller screens. The biggest improvement aside from allowing for larger screens, which should make most users of stock Android rejoice is an improved virtual keyboard with multitouch support. No more typing too fast for the keyboard by using two fingers, finally. It would make sense for multitouch to also come to the now improved browser, but sadly Apple has the patents on that is seems. Instead, the new browser will feature double-tap to zoom, as well as HTML 5 support and an improved UI. Other improvements include a combined inbox, Quick Contact to easily select just how you want to contact someone, and a host of camera improvements among others.
Android 2.0 looks to be the Android version we’ve all been waiting for. Sure, the platform, like all platforms, will never please anyone, but it’s certainly improving a lot. The SDK was just released today and the consumer version should be ready by November by the looks of it. It might not have the app selection or the brand that is associated with the iPhone, but for those who don’t want to be stuck with AT&T or Apple, Android is becoming a more viable option. With 2.0 and the upcoming Droid, it might finally be Android’s time to show off what it can do.
Good grief. Cruising over at the AT&T site and like some adult sites, you’re whisked away to refurb-phone-land looking at an 8GB 3G iPhone and asking yourself, why look at anything else? Does an Android phone, a BlackBerry, webOS or WinMo phone even come close? Chances were pretty good you’re considering getting a new iPod anyhow.
Palm will be launching their new Pixi, the cute candybar webOS sibling on Sprint next month at $99. The phone, to its credit looks great, runs the fun webOS and even one-ups the Pre with a new Facebook app. But can it stand a chance against the $49 iPhone?
AT&T and high monthly data plans might give the others a chance. Carrier loyalty might do it as might the stigma of refurb (my iPhone is a refurb - shhhh). Nah, none of this. It is the in-store gotta-have-it-now crowd that will keep a refurbed $49 iPhone our secret. And I am sure that works for them.
You’ve got to wonder what lower monthly data plans might do to iPhone sales. Provide a GB limit of data transfer and make data a palatable $20 a month. Now AT&T isn’t about to do that, they get a lot of income out of the hefty iPhone data fees, but we can dream about demand curves, right?
Over in refurb land, you can find the Pantech Matrix Nokia Surge, LG Vue and Samsung Rugby as well.
US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) has issued a warning about a new app that could allow someone to eavesdrop on a BlackBerry user's phone conversation. The app, called PhoneSnoop, is free and was released by an Indonesian man who said he just wanted to make a point that the BlackBerry platform isn't infallible despite its strong security features.
“My intention was to raise awareness that even though the BlackBerry is one of the more secure platforms, there are still means where its users can be spied upon,” Gunasekera wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. “I wanted to highlight that even with such technical security controls, the human element can be exploited through social engineering.”
The app doesn't hide itself once installed, so a user should be able to easily figure out it's there. For those wondering what else may be lurking on their BlackBerry devices, another free app, called Kisses, will find and display all hidden apps on the device.
If you're looking for something even stronger, there is a full fledged security suite available for the BlackBerry as well. SMobile Security Shield offers two versions. The Security and Anti-Theft version is $19.99 and offers malware protection and web based services including remote wipe, GPS tracking, locking and backup and restore. The Parental Control version is $29.99 and allows parents to monitor their children's BlackBerry use from a web based console. They can monitor emails and text messages and be alerted when the child's contact list is updated, track their location via GPS and monitor social networking apps like MySpace and Facebook.
Both apps are available for download from BlackBerry App World. The US-CERT strongly recommends password protecting your device and being very careful of what you download onto it and who you let use it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, PC sales are expected to see a huge boost in numbers as a result of the October 22 release of Windows 7. Initial figures are showing that the operating system is performing better than expected and should lead to an upturn in PC sales throughout the year. Windows 7 has already generated an estimated $1.5 billion in pre-orders for Microsoft.
Analysts believe that the earnings from Windows 7 will extend beyond the consumer market and grow in the corporate world as well. Since little excitement was generated from Windows Vista, it is expected that many small to medium sized businesses will make the upgrade to 7. The timing of Windows 7 could not be better for the PC industry as well with the holidays just around the corner.
Although no official numbers have been release from Microsoft, reports surfaced last week that distributors could not keep up with the demand as stock dwindled from many retail locations.
Nobody seems to be content with Amazon owning most of the eBook reader space with the Kindle. Sure, there are other alternatives both equally priced (Nook) and a bit cheaper (Sony Reader Pocket Edition). None seem to have ability to completely own the market as they’re all fairly expensive for most consumers. Enter ECTACO with its new jetBook-Lite.
The jetBook-Lite is actually ECACTO’s second eBook reader and according to the company, the cheapest reader out there now at $149. On possibility for why the reader is so cheap is because rather than the standard built-in battery, the jetBook-Lite uses four replaceable AA batteries. With the batteries, ECTACO is claiming 23 hours of continuous reading. On the upside, the jetBook-Lite supports the Barnes & Noble eBook store, as well as a variety of file formats, so it should support just about anything you throw at it, even PDFs.
What the jetBook-Lite doesn’t offer, however, is the good looks of the Nook, or the wireless downloads of the Nook and Kindle. It does support SD cards, so loading up books shouldn’t be too difficult for the average user, even if it’s not as convenient. On the plus side, it come with the CIA World Factbook preloaded, which wouldn’t be useful for everyone, but could be good for random fact checking. It might not be the best eBook reader, or the most attractive, but for the price, and for some the replaceable batteries and the cheap price could put it over the Nook, Kindle and Sony Reader.
A little bit of surprising information has come in regards to the recently announced Barnes & Noble Nook ebook reader. It seems that the Nook will not be available for purchase and take home at every retail store, which considering Barnes & Noble has about 700 this could have been a huge advantage over other readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader.
Personally, it seems only logical that Barnes & Noble would have at least some Nook’s in stock and ready for those that want instant gratification. But that is not the case, instead it looks like only select locations will have them available to purchase and take home.
Instead the remaining retail locations will have a unit available for display that will allow those who are curious to check out the device. But assuming they want to make a purchase they will have to either go home and place and order or allow Barnes & Noble to place the order for you and have it shipped directly to your home.
Not that I think Barnes & Noble is listening to me, but I would imagine that I am not the only one that thinks it is strange that the Nook will not be available for purchase and take home at every retail location.
Tomorrow, Wednesday the 28th is a big day for Google’s Android operating system. The biggest carrier in the USA will launch its first Android-powered device. You’ve read the reviews, you’ve seen the galleries, you’re ready to go. But what do we really know about Android? There are some downsides, right?
The Adware attack
That is the argument presented by RoughlyDrafted. The site takes a long look at how Google will use Android to hunt you down like the depraved internet addict you are. Android is reduced to nothing more than mobile adware:
Google is an adware vendor. You may decide that this is an acceptable tradeoff, but you can only do that if you actually stop and weigh the costs yourself. It's completely delusional to blindly buy into Android as the free lunch with no strings.
This attack is a tough one to qualify for consumers. Roughly Drafted presents it as a free lunch problem (you’re paying at some point, we just don’t know when). Will it matter to consumers? Tough to say, the problem with this line of thinking it, the experience is open-sourced so any forced ads are likely to be circumvented in short order.
“...now that Apple has apps the world has changed and challengers to the iPhone will find it very tough. Here's why: everyone is using a different set of 20 apps. Trillions of combinations. You can see this on Appsfire's VIP list (my iPhone apps are listed there, along with a number of others). None of us have the same set of apps.
So, to get me off of the iPhone you are going to have to duplicate all my apps (and I've gotten several more since doing this list a couple of weeks ago).”
Scoble makes a very real and interesting point: if you’re hooked on the almost infinite variety of apps, moving off that platform gets very difficult to do. For example, in the past week I’ve used RunKeeper (a program to track my exercising by GPS), AT&T Navigator for turn by turn, Navionics for navigating by boat, 6 games, Geocaching and eBay. Each iPhone could be as diverse in apps as their owners personality making replicating the experience on another phone almost impossible. You’re trading down.
“With a number of Google's Android OS-based smartphones on the horizon, developers are devoting significant resources to the mobile platform, which will result in a boom in Android apps, according to reports from two Silicon Valley startups, Flurry and AdMob. Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile metrics company, today said that it had seen an unprecedented 94 percent increase in the number of projects started by Android developers between September and October. “
More phones on more networks could work to get Android closer to the Apple App store. Om points out the disparity between earnings for developers between the iPhone and Android platform. Om loosely suggests that the marketing muscle behind Android will help this cause as well.
Om does not come down on one side or another here, merely points out that we just don’t know. There could be a boom, offering benefits to Android users and providing a serious threat to iPhone dominance. The flip side is also possible, users don’t give a darn about what OS their phone is running as long as they can call, text and Facebook, the world is a good place. What more do you need?
Summary
Android-haters have little tangible to hate. We’ve seen the “in the bush” potential threat of Google doing evil things and turning your phone into mobile spyware. We’ve seen the argument of being locked into an app environment and we’ve seen arguments that an Android app boom is looming.
What does that mean for potential buyers of Verizon’s Android Droid phone(s)? Personally, I think it means flux. We don’t know quite what to make of Android yet. Today it is a very usable OS that is about to get a lot of new users on multiple carriers on a variety of phones with multiple form factors. Users coming from another other phone other than the iPhone are bound to get excited about the apps and open environment. Chances are good you’ll like your phone more as time goes on as more apps build in and potentially bad as Google shows more of it’s hand.
Google has just kind of, sort of followed up on an earlier promise and at the same time dealt another potential blow to some of the wireless carriers. That announcement, Google will now allow users to use their existing number with Google Voice.
Of course, like I mentioned in the title, this does come with a catch. To begin with, you will still need to be invited into the Voice service. That comes as expected, however the real catch comes in the form of a little tease.
Those users who choose to go with their existing number will not be getting a full Google Voice experience. Instead they will get voicemail, voicemail transcription, custom voicemail greetings and the ability to receive either email or SMS notifications of new email messages. See the pattern, if you choose to use Google Voice with your existing number its all about the voicemail. Well, the voicemail and also low-international calling rates.
As far as what you miss out on by going with your existing number. No SMS by email, no call screening or listening in. You also lose the call recording, conference calling and call blocking. Finally, and this is the one big feature you do not get—the ability to have your number ring multiple phones.
In other words, those who choose to use Google Voice with their existing number are going to really be getting a fancy voicemail setup. Still it is a nice setup, but for me the killer features of Google Voice are having it ring multiple phones and the ability to block calls.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, those who are not setup with Google Voice will still need an invitation. As for those that already have an account, you can, if you want add Google voicemail to any mobile phone that is already linked to your account. Personally I am not sure why regular Google Voice users would need that last bit, but I guess having the option is nice.
Good grief. Cruising over at the AT&T site and like some adult sites, you’re whisked away to refurb-phone-land looking at an 8GB 3G iPhone and asking yourself, why look at anything else? Does an Android phone, a BlackBerry, webOS or WinMo phone even come close? Chances were pretty good you’re considering getting a new iPod anyhow.
US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) has issued a warning about a new app that could allow someone to eavesdrop on a BlackBerry user's phone conversation. The app, called PhoneSnoop, is free and was released by an Indonesian man who said he just wanted to make a point that the BlackBerry platform isn't infallible despite its strong security features.
A little bit of surprising information has come in regards to the 
Google has just 
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