Q: What do you get if you cross the Android Robot with Nintendo’s Mario?
A: A neat little game called Replica Island.
Android and Mario, as one in Replica Island
The game brings the classic retro side-scrolling back to life with it’s cute cartoon graphics and insane midi-style music.
For me, games are important on my mobile phone; they’ll never replace my Xbox 360 but they are there to fill in train journeys, car trips and just general boredom. So I almost cried when I saw this cutsey [is that a word?] little Android bot jumping around the screen on this trailer for the FREE Android Market game called Replica Island. Check out the video below and be sure to visit the site for more information.
I haven’t written about Android at all on this blog. From a Canadian perspective I think there is no better blog than Androidincanada. I must check them out about once every few days for updates. So I won’t try and simply rehash what they are talking about unless I think I have something unique to say, that being said… I love Android.
I own an LG GW620 (Rogers Eve) which runs Android 1.5. This phone is a replacement for my HTC Magic that was kidnapped at gunpoint and taken to a house across the street from the park I was visiting where it continued to report its GPS co-ordinates until someone changed the SIM card in it and turned off the GPS… but I’m not bitter…. I had it replaced with Rogers newest Android offering the LG Eve GW620. I was initially excited to be getting something with a flip out keyboard and a headphone jack, (Seriously… HTC… I think the whole 3.5mm Headphone jack might catch on. I’ve seen some company selling these things that people stick headphones into to listen to music… so you might want to look into that, I’m just saying. Sadly the new phone gives me nothing but grief. (Except for the cool headphone jack) I am writing this entry in the hopes that other people out there that have had this issue can perhaps point me in a direction to fix it.
The Rogers LG Eve (GW620)
This particular GW620 is the replacement of the original GW620 that I got when it first came out. The first phone I had froze all the time requiring me to remove the battery and restart the phone on about a daily basis. To make matters worse, the email function on the phone was so poor that I could not use it at all for business email. What happens is when I first setup the phone for email I can read email, however, after about a day of using this the process of downloading messages takes longer and longer. At last count it took nearly 20 minutes to give me the most recent list of messages. To make matters worse, upon clicking on any of those messages I am greeted with one of three scenarios.
1 – The message opens (this happens about 1 out of every 12 or 13 tries)
2 – Connection Error
3 – Data Error
The errors don’t seem to be related to the 3G network as the same errors occur when I am on wifi. I have googled this term over and over, and have NEVER gotten a single hit.
Rogers says there is no problem, but this is the second GW620 I have had that does this. As well, my co-workers each have one of these phones and both of them have the same issues as well. One simply uses the gmail feature (this works fine) and doesn’t check his POP3 email on the phone. The other had his pop3 email forwarded to gmail so he could do the same.
The problem I have is that this did NOT occur on the HTC Magic. Both phones ran Android 1.5, both are in bad need of an update to 2.0… (hurry LG) but something I have noticed is that the email client on the Magic was different than on the GW620.
If anyone out there has a solution PLEASE comment and point me in the right direction. I’ll update this entry if I figure one out, or anyone is able to help.
As I wrote about earlier, HTML5 (Javascript, Canvas, WebGL, etc.) is allowing people to create rich, interactive applications that run in your browser and don’t require flash or java. Cloud computing (such as Google App Engine and others) and AJAX are also allowing us to run things in our browser that before were typically run on the desktop because they required quickly saving and retrieving a bunch of info. Google docs, gmail, etc.
So it’s no so surprising that there are now even some programming environments starting to emerge that you can run and develop from inside your browser. These are websites where you can edit code, run your application, and sometimes even instantly share your application for others to try. This is much more convenient than the typical process of downloading and installing a huge IDE such as Eclipse or Netbeans, and then compiling and packaging and distributing an application on your own. However, these browser-based IDEs are still nowhere near as powerful and flexible as traditional IDEs. Bespin is probably the most developed and powerful at this point.
Here are some browser-based coding environments I know about. All are free and most are open source.
HasCanvas – an IDE for Processing.js. Processing is a very popular java-based development environment, with a free IDE you can download. Processing.js is a port of that to javascript. With either one, you can create animations and artwork and so forth. HasCanvas has a weird interface – hover over the arrows on the left side to show the source code for any animation, and use your mouse wheel to scroll. Click Browse to see other scripts.
Bespin – an editor from Mozilla that you can use either on their site, or embed into your own site.
CodeRun – Develop ASP.NET, php and Ajax applications in your browser. Not open source.
App Inventor for Android – This is unique in that it has a visual designer, along with visual blocks-based language for creating application (similar to that in Lego Mindstorms and Scratch). From this description it does appear to be web-based, although you use it to develop applications that run on an Android cell phone, not the browser. Here’s a course that used the tool last fall, along with the beginnings of a textbook. Unfortunately, it’s still only in private testing and not available to the public. I’ve signed up to use it with students in my multimedia development course this fall. If that works out I’ll post all the resources and videos online, just like all my courses.
There are also many programming command line interpreters (repls – read-eval-print loop) that work in the browser, such as Lord of the REPLs (lotrepls), which lets you try many different languages out.
Google is working with Intel, Sony, and other partners to develop Google TV, a service aimed at putting the Internet search giant’s Web offerings in people’s living rooms, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
Google TV will combine the company’s Android mobile operating system and applications with television devices made for the OS, including set-top boxes, the paper says.
The TV technology will run on Intel’s Atom chips and Google will develop a new version of its Chrome browser for the TV project.
The use of Android for TV could put applications and other software developed for the OS on TVs in addition to smartphones, the devices the OS was designed for. The companies working on the project, which also reportedly include Logitech, “envision technology that will make it easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site, as it is to change the channel,” the New York Times says.
Google will open the TV platform to Android developers as part of the initiative, with a software developer’s kit.
Several companies have already started using Android in devices made for TVs, including set-top boxes and 2D/3D graphics accelerators, designed around MIPS Technologies’ chip architecture. MIPS and its partners have done the development work on Android to tweak it for use in such devices.
Android was designed to work with Arm processing cores, the most popular cores in smartphones, but some companies have ported Android to other chip processing architectures, including MIPS and Intel’s x86 processing architecture.
Over on our sister blog jkOnTheRun, Kevin is reporting that ZumoDrive, a nifty cloud file syncing and backup service, has made clients available for Android (s goog) and webOS (s palm) devices, adding to the existing iPhone (s aapl) app and Windows (s msft), Mac and Linux clients.
Kevin’s been taking the Android app for a spin on his Google Nexus One, and he likes it, particularly the ability to stream audio files — check out his post for full details of the app and his opinions of it. The mobile apps are free, as is a ZumoDrive account with 1GB of storage.
Have you tried the new mobile clients for ZumoDrive? Let us know what you think of them below.
Normally Google does not give the number of applications in the Android Market, but today the representatives informed that Google Android Market includes 30,000 free and paid applications.
Three months ago there was an estimation from AndroLib that the Android Market included 20,000 applications. Google at the time matched these claimed stats against its own count, and said there were in reality some 16,000 apps in Android Market in December 2009. And today Google says the number grew from 16k to 30k apps in exactly three months, a beautiful performance.
Google will not say what percentage is paid or free. But AndroLib, a website which keeps an eye on Android Market, says that 39% is paid and 61% free. Interesting is the fact that paid applications are hardly sell well. FADE analyst has calculated that the estimated 8 million Android users from around the globe have downloaded 289 million apps. Of that 98.9 % was free. Compared with other phones, owners purchase relatively low-paid Android apps. This is around 35 applications per user, so that’s quite a bit. Calculate how much the developers earn from this users, then the number is very disappointing: the average user for Android has bought apps for $ 0.50. For the iPhone it is $ 1.
Some of you may know that you cannot upload videos clipss and replies to Youtube in Korea.
It is because Korean law that requires every internet services with more than 100,000 users per day should confirm users’ identity to upload a posts or replies. Once you identify yourself, then you can write with your nickname.
Rather complying with Korean regulations, Google Korea chose to block uploading from Korea in April 2009 when it approached the 100,000 user bar. “Don’t be evil.”
But don’t worry. You can upload videos or replies by simply changing your ‘Country Preference’ to another countries other than Korea.
Still annoyed? Then why don’t you take a shoot with your iPhone and send it to Youtube? It is no problem to send a video clip from your iPhone.
Nobody cared whether you could upload a video to Youtube with iPhone in Korea, till Google removed Youtube upload function from Motorola ‘Droid’, the first smartphone with Google’s Android OS in Korea. Google removed the functions over the concern for the Korean user-identifying regulation.
After the iPhone-to-Youtube issue aroused, KT, the Korean carrier which provides iPhone, considered blocking video uploading from iPhone. KT also postponed launch of new Android smartphone from LG Electronics because it had the direct Youtube uploading function.
But the chances are it ends up with just a silly fuss, as Korean Communication Commission (KCC) does not take it seriously. “Youtube is not subject to the Korean regulation that requires user identification because videos uploaded from iPhone go directly to Youtube global site, and Google Korea does not participates the operation of Youtube,” said an official of KCC.
I haven’t written about Android at all on this blog. From a Canadian perspective I think there is no better blog than Androidincanada. I must check them out about once every few days for updates. So I won’t try and simply rehash what they are talking about unless I think I have something unique to say, that being said… I love Android.
Over on our sister blog jkOnTheRun, Kevin is reporting that ZumoDrive, a nifty cloud file syncing and backup service, has made clients available for Android (s goog) and webOS (s palm) devices, adding to the existing iPhone (s aapl) app and Windows (s msft), Mac and Linux clients.