It’s official, you can now get an Android handset on the carrier of your choice. That is of course, you pick from the top 4 providers in the United States. Starting today, the Motorola Backflip is available on AT&T for $99 with a 2-year agreement and a mail-in rebate (via AT&T Promotion Card). The 3G capable handset features a 5 megapixel camera, a flip QWERTY, and MOTOBLUR. For those of you into that sort of thing, the Backflip offers a 528 MHz processor, 256MB RAM, and 512MB ROM.
If you’re relatively new to Android, MOTOBLUR provides a custom interface designed for social network enthusiasts. Below are a few bullet points to help you get a better understanding of what it does for you.
Your friends and Facebook™, MySpace and Twitter updates, along with your latest emails, news and favorite apps and widgets. All just the way you like them.
Continuously syncs your phone and email contacts with your friends from Facebook™, MySpace and Twitter. Automatically.
Delivers your texts, emails and messages in one unified inbox.
MOTOBLUR continuously updates and backs up your information into a secure environment. So you’re connected and protected, even if you lose your phone.
Bad news for Motorola Milestone users. Apparently, Motorola are still undecided on whether or not they should bring Android 2.2 (Froyo) to the Motorola Milestone. The marketing director of the Motorola European region, James King, states that Motorola has yet to make final decision on whether they will be offering Froyo to their users.
James King himself also made quite a speech about this matter. He said that over the past few days the decision about Froyo to Milestone has been under major discussion, with his team collecting key pieces of information and views from Motorola forum community over the last month. James himself claimed that he has pushed Motorola to make a decision as soon as possible. However, this doesn’t mean that Froyo is never going to come, just that it could be further off in the future than we expected it to be.
Sprint announced today that they will be bringing the push-to-talk Motorola i1 to their customers later this month for $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate. Available next Sunday, July 25th, the ruggedized i1 features a 5 megapixel camera, a 3.1-inch HVGA screen, and a strong lineup of preloaded applications. Unfortunately, the phone is hampered by the fact that it runs Android 1.5 and there’s no telling when an update will arrive. On the other hand, this is the most advanced smart phone that Nextel customers have had to choose from. It’s also worth pointing out that the target demographics is highly unlikely to care about games and downloading the latest apps.
Pre-loaded Sprint partner applications available for businesses:
Xora™ mobile workforce management solutions provide businesses with real-time visibility into field operations, and helps automate payroll and job workflow processes. The Android version of Xora Time Track™ includes new features like photo barcode scanning and signature capture, eliminating the need to purchase additional hardware to support such capabilities.
TeleNavTrack™ uses the latest technologies to make mobile workforce and asset management reliable and affordable for businesses of all sizes. It lets businesses use wireless barcode scanning to track inventory and assets, manage deliveries, better predict arrival times, change schedules on-the-fly and deploy workers. It can also reduce paperwork by allowing the mobile workforce to complete invoices, orders and timesheets on the device.
Sprint Mobile Locator is a Web-based solution that allows businesses to easily track and locate workers, and view a mapping display on a PC in near real-time using a wireless phone’s built-in GPS capabilities.
Availability
Available first on Sunday, July 25, through direct ship sales channels, including Business Sales, telesales (1-800-SPRINT1) and Web sales (www.sprint.com/motoi1) for $149.99 with a new line or eligible upgrade, two-year service agreement and after a $50 mail-in rebate (taxes & surcharges excluded). It will then be available in all remaining Sprint sales channels beginning on Sunday, Aug. 8.
Word just came down from a trusted Boy Genius Report source that Verizon’s Droid Incredible will see Android 2.2 “Froyo” in the coming weeks. Targeted for end of July, early August, the update is listed with many of the same features found in the current release hitting phones this week. It’s likely that this small update will get shelved in favor of the bigger, better Froyo-flavored release.
According to BGR’s source, these are the features in the update:
We compare five of the best Android phones on the market today, including the Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Incredible, and Google Nexus One.
The last time we surveyed the landscape of Google Android phones in October 2009 was a bit like scanning the New York City skyline in 1929: Gorgeous, but clearly, much better things were right around the corner. The Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street – some of New York’s most iconic buildings – all sprung up in the next two years, and Google Android has seen much the same flurry of virtual bricklaying in the past eight months. Ready to sign a new lease for some office space with a view? Take a look at some of these newcomers that now tower above many former competitors.
The phone that we could only see the scaffolding around in October has since finished construction, clipped its opening ribbon and become one of the most prominent Android phones on the market. It’s easy to see why. The Motorola Droid managed to permanently cement “Google Android” into the mainstream zeitgeist with a razor-sharp 3.7-inch screen, five-megapixel camera, and slim metallic chassis. A huge slide-out QWERTY keyboard, although far from perfect, also managed to satisfy many holdouts waiting for a killer smartphone with keys. The $100 million marketing budget from Verizon and Motorola probably didn’t hurt, either, rubbing salt in the iPhone’s wounds – like its lack of multitasking. Motorola’s comeback phone even managed to beat the first-generation iPhone to 1 million units sold.
The long-rumored “Google Phone” finally became reality in January when Google lifted the veil on the Nexus One. The Android superphone made waves with an incredibly vibrant OLED screen, multi-touch support, and perhaps most importantly, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, making it among the first mainstream phones to find room for Qualcomm’s supercharged V8 of a processor under the hood. Google adopted the unusual strategy of selling the Nexus One both through T-Mobile for $179 with a contract, and unlocked for $529. Although the phone was supposed to show up on Verizon and Sprint, both carriers have axed plans to carry it. Don’t let that scare you: We suspect the decision had more to do with sluggish sales than the quality of the hardware.
Overcoming the hype of both the Droid and Nexus One has been a tall order, but HTC managed to do it with raw specs with the HTC Incredible. Snapdragon processor? Check. 3.7-inch OLED screen? Check. Five-megapixel camera? Nope, this guy’s shooting eight. Most reviews have chalked it up to the fastest Android phone to date and possibly the sleekest, too, with its slim body and sculpted back panel. HTC’s Sense user interface even puts a spit shine on the already gleaming Android UI. Unfortunately, our own time with it revealed battery life and voice quality on Verizon’s NYC network were lacking, but neither is egregious enough to overlook this otherwise very capable phone.
This retake on the original Motorola Cliq trims the fat by removing the keyboard for a much slimmer, sleeker profile, but preserves what made the original one of our favorite Android phones: Motoblur. Motorola’s custom Motoblur interface caters to social networking addicts by taking bits of Twitter, Facebook and Myspace and neatly tying them together on your home screen for easy access. The Cliq also supports multi-touch, comes with the unique Swype keyboard for typing without tapping, and has a competent 5-megapixel shooter on the back.
Not ready to shell out $200 for a device you’re more than likely to drop, lose, or otherwise accidentally eviscerate? The Droid Eris weighs in at less than half the price of many competitors, but still brings a full slate of Android features to the table. That includes a 3.2-inch touch screen, 5-megapixel camera, and even an 8GB microSD card preinstalled. Early reviews dinged the Eris’ score for relying Android 1.5 while many competitors had shifted forward to 2.1, but a recent over-the-air update to 2.1 will fill that hole and leave the Eris looking like a better deal than ever.
At Google IO this morning Adobe unveiled its Flash 10.1 beta for Google’s Android mobile OS. With Evans Data now reporting over 3 million Flash developers, it’s a platform that’s gone a long way beyond its original designer audience. Flash 10.1 is the first mobile version of the full Flash player and Android will be the first platform with full Flash support. (the previously available Flash Lite could only be installed by handset manufacturers and only offered a subset of an older version of the Flash platform).
Flash Player 10.1 is a major update, with support for new interaction models and APIs. There’s support for multi-touch, for gestures, and for accelerometers. The same features will work on mobile devices and on touch desktop and notebook devices.
Most existing Flash content just works in the Android beta, though Adobe says that it will continue to refine content with its partners. There’ll also be design guidance for developers wanting to build or update mobile versions of their Flash applications. One big change is a reduction in memory usage, in many cases up to 50% less.
Performance is much more important on mobile devices than desktop PCs, as resources are extremely limited. The Android version of the Flash Player performs well, thanks to work with Qualcomm as well as with Google. Qualcomm isn’t the only silicon vendor with Flash optimisation, as getting hardware acceleration is key to delivering an effective mobile solution. One key feature for improving performance is what Adobe is calling “smart rendering”, where content outside the viewable screen area isn’t fully rendered. There’s also support for low power states, reducing frame rates, and for sleep modes. This has also required Adobe to update its existing streaming protocols.
This results in a test H.264 video stream, playing in Flash with no hardware acceleration, running for 3 hours over 3G on a Nexus One. Playing casual games should offer 4 hours battery life.
Adobe has worked with Google to deliver additional features in Android, including support for over-the-air updates and content-triggered installation. This has meant that instead of the original expectation that Flash would run on Android 2.1 it now requires Android 2.2 (and can take advantage of a faster OS for AIR support). In a comment directed more at Apple than the keynote audience, Google’s Vic Gundotra described the partnership as “It’s great to work together to serve users, it’s much nicer than just saying no”.
This will be a public beta release, with software initially downloadable from the Android market. Adobe also separately announced that Flash Player 10.1 will be generally available in June, for Android and for desktop PCs (including a 64-bit release). While Adobe has a focus on Android at present, work is continuing on other platforms including Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Symbian, and WebOS.
FroYo, Android 2.2, is the next version of Android to be released. It’s a major update to the OS, and will run on many of the most recent Android devices. We’ll be looking at in more detail soon, but the features demonstrated on stage at IO make it clear that Google has set its sights firmly on Apple and the iPhone. As well as Flash and AIR support, there’s a new JVM with a JIT compiler that promises considerable speed up for existing apps and the arrival of Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine.
Developers get access to new debugging tools that deliver crash reports from devices to the Android market, where they can see a complete stack trace of any crash. The Android Market gets a considerable upgrade, with support for automatic updates. The keynote also demonstrated a future update will allow OTA delivery of applications to devices from a web version of the store. The market will also include music, and SimplifyMedia’s streaming media plugin for existing desktop media players will turn your own media libraries into streamed music sources, wherever you are. Applications will also be able to be installed to an SD card – and run from it.
Enterprise users looking for an alternative to the classic Windows Mobile platform will find Android 2.2 very attractive, with support for two Exchange Active Sync connections (as well as sync with the Google cloud services). There’s also the ability to make any Android device a mobile-to-WiFi hotspot, connecting any WiFi enabled device to the internet (including Apple’s iPad). The new Exchange capabilities include account auto-discovery and calendar sync. There’s also (finally) a set of device policy management APIs that allow developers to write applications that can control security features of the device, including remote wipe, minimum password, and lockscreen timeout.
Another option is support for a new set of backup APIs, which add data backup to application backup, allowing an application’s last data to be restored when installed on a new or a reset device. There’s also a new Cloud-to-device Messaging API, where an application server sends a message to a messaging server which sends it on to an android device. In a swipe at Apple, Google describes it as “Much more than a push notification service designed to make up for a lack of basic features like multitasking”.
Developers can download the Android 2.2 SDK and Android NDK, Revision 4 now from the Android developer site. Froyo will be made available to OEMs and the open source community in the coming weeks.
Dell is set to unleash their latest Android tablet ‘Streak (aka Mini 5)‘ in the UK. Unveiled back in January, the device offers a 5-inch touchscreen display, a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, a front facing camera, a 2GB of internal memory, a microSD card slot (up to 32GB), GPS, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, a 3.5mm headset jack and runs on Android OS. The Streak will become available in the UK from June via O2 and Carphone Warehouse, however, there’s no word on pricing yet. [Electronista]
So I just happened to notice Adobe Reader in the Android Market a few minutes ago, sitting there with less than 50 downloads! What a sneaky little product release that was, Adobe. This marks only the second title from the company, following last year’s Photoshop app. The photo editing tool has seen over 250,000 downloads since launch so we fully expect Reader to hit that mark too. A free official PDF client has long been asked for by fans.
Features listed in the market description include:
Open PDF files as email attachments and on the web
Interact with PDF files using advanced multi-touch gestures like Pinch zoom, Double tap Zoom, Flick scrolling & Panning
Reflow view fits the page contents to the screen for easy viewing
After spending a couple of minutes with the app, we’re already hoping to see support for opening locally stored PDF files. We’d love to sideload our Watchmen comics to read back on a 4.3-inch EVO screen!
BE ADVISED: Reader needs the following in order to install and work properly – Android v 2.1 and above, 550 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, and4.3 MB of available disk space
Pandigital, a company known for digital picture frames, will be dropping their first e-reader, the Novel, next month. For $200, users will get a 7-inch color touch screen, WiFi (802.11 b/g/n) connectivity, and 1GB of internal storage. Like many other e-readers, the Novel supports PDF, EPUB, and HTML formats and features a mini-USB port for transferring files to and from a PC or Mac. There will be full support/integration with the Barnes & Noble eBookstore providing access to scores of books, magazines, and newspapers. Preloaded applications include a web browser, email client, alarm clock, and calendar. Don’t expect this to eat up too much of the nook market share as it will only have a limited release when it streets next month.
Here’s a quick walkthrough of the Novel courtesy of CNET/Crave:
Might We Suggest…
Devs Root the Barnes & Noble Nook
“thought i would share this with you before going to bed. it took only 120 hours after launch (12/8/2009) 2 root #nook. world record? gnight” That was the last tweet from nookdevs last night. On…
Not content with their Android 2.1 update from a few weeks ago, Motorola Droid owners are already looking for 2.2 (Froyo) information. Our inbox and twitter feed has been hammered with requests from Droid users begging for the latest Android release. “How long will we have to wait?” seems to be the question of the week. The guys over at SlashGear decided to reach out to Motorola to see if the handset maker has an update in store.
“We’re excited to see Google’s news of the next version of the Android operating system and look forward to integrating it on our Android-based devices as it’s made available to the open source community.”
While I can’t comment on specifics, we do expect DROID by Motorola users will receive Android 2.2 as a software upgrade in the near future.
Until someone can get Motorola to pin down an actual time frame, ‘near future’ will have to suffice. It could be worse Droid owners – you could be running MOTOBLUR on Android 1.5 like Backflip, Devour, Cliq, and Cliq XT users.
Pandigital
