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Posts Tagged ‘android’

Okay everyone, Path is really sorry that they did something really creepy and didn’t think tot ell anyone first. The mobile start up is attempting to talk its way out of the outrage stepping from a discovery recently that user address books were being uploaded to the Path servers without any notification. CEO Dave Morin has posted a lengthy apology on the Path blog explaining what the company has done to smooth things over.

According to Morin, Path was using the address books to help improve the functionality of the “Add Friends” feature. Path would also use the stored data … [Read More...]

Windows Phone has struggled to differentiate itself in the market against established rivals such as Android and iOS, but through it all Brandon Watson was the developer evangelist making sure a lack of apps was never the reason people opted for the competition. His commitment to platform has helped to inspire app development beyond Redmond’s wildest expectations, however ZDnet blogger Mary Jo Foley has just confirmed that Brandon is moving on, and being tasked with leading Amazon’s cross-platform Kindle efforts. 

So far Microsoft hasn’t named any successor for Watson, and did little more than confirm his departure. According to a … [Read More...]

Google’s Android OS often takes a beating from security companies for it’s occasional malware scares. Google has not been silent on the matter in the past, but the OS maker revealed today that it is taking action to combat Android malware. In fact, it has been taking action for the last few months without telling us. Google’s Bouncer project is an automated security scanner that will apparently filter malware from the Market.

Google allows anyone to pay the $25 to become a developer, and start uploading apps to the Android Market. Unlike Apple, Google does not review apps by hand. … [Read More...]

One of these things is not like the other

Media streamers like the Western Digital WD TV Live and Netgear NeoTV make just a little less sense than they did a couple of years ago. In those days, they were the perfect alternative to stuffing a home theater PC into your entertainment center. These days, you can get nearly all the same functionality from a new Blu-ray player or a Smart TV.

On the other hand, the latest incarnations of these two products cost less than a new Blu-ray player, and they’re several orders of magnitude cheaper than a new … [Read More...]

Tablets are nifty, but for the most part, they’re built to be walled gardens; Apple is notorious for its heavy-handed curation, Microsoft plans on keeping Windows 8′s Metro-style apps close to the chest, and the hot-selling Kindle Fire is a deeply tweaked and thoroughly managed variant of Android. One Linux developer hopes to make things more customizable with Spark, a Mer/KDE Plasma Active-powered tablet that’s fully unlocked and open for tinkering.

Ars Technica pointed us towards the blog of Aaron Seigo, the brains behind the Spark. Seigo claims the €200 tablet (that’s around $260 USD) packs ” 1GHz AMLogic ARM … [Read More...]

The Obama presidential campaign is again pushing the bounds of technology in politics by using Square mobile payments in its fundraising efforts. Square’s mobile payment device is a secure magnetic stripe credit card reader that can be attached to the headphone jack of iPhones, iPads, and Android devices to accept payments.

The company is obviously thrilled to have the publicity, and has sanctioned a special app for the campaign to use for donations. Currently, only staff have access to the Obama Square app, but it will be released to the general public soon. This is similar to the way Square … [Read More...]

You’ve found that hot new app on the Android Market, and you can’t wait to click the Install button. But you’re getting the message that the app isn’t compatible with your device. Being the good Maximum user that you are, you’d rather find out for yourself. Those messages are sometimes wrong, after all. Or perhaps you want to take advantage of the daily giveaways in the Amazon Appstore. Or, if you’re one of the millions of Kindle Fire owners, you may want more choices than the limited Amazon Appstore provides. All of the above comprise sufficient reason to start sideloading … [Read More...]

Motorola’s Droid Xyboard a slick, well-performing tablet that’s easy on the eyes. Too bad it has such a stupid name.

The Android device, which runs on Verizon’s 4G network and is available now in Verizon stores, is actually Motorola’s second shot at the tablet game. The Xyboard is the company’s follow-up to its pricey, not terribly popular Xoom tablet, which was released in February of 2011.

The design has been overhauled to match Motorola’s newest mobile hardware — the tablet has clipped corners like the Droid Razr. The Xyboard comes in both … [Read More...]

This is the year millions of owners of so-called feature phones — devices which handle little beyond voice calls, texts, and photos — will finally upgrade to true smartphones.

At least, that’s the hope of Microsoft and Nokia. The two tech giants have been floundering to get a foothold in the U.S. smartphone market ever since the iPhone launched in 2007. The two companies have partnered up to make a more cohesive play in the realm of touchscreens, apps, and streaming media, and this is their most accessible U.S.-bound device so far.

The Nokia Lumia 710 runs the latest version … [Read More...]

The jury is still out on Windows 7 tablets — and, at this point, it looks like it may never come in — but with the Series 7 Slate, Samsung at least gives this difficult niche the old college try.

Our last encounter with a Windows tablet dates back to March’s Viewsonic ViewPad 10, which disastrously attempted to combine Windows and Android in one device, dramatically failing at both. Here, Samsung is at least wise enough to pick … [Read More...]

Car nuts race their rides to see whose machine is the fastest. Fitness fanatics run marathons to test their physical limitations and endurance against that of their fellows. Geeks and gearheads? Our battles are fought and won on the basis of how capable our hardware is. While our desktops and laptops might be a thing of wonder to behold, carrying them around with us for the sake of collecting the accolades we deserve isn’t always convenient. Carrying around a smartphone or tablet, however, is. Benchmarking also provides the added benefit of telling you how well your phone manages the current … [Read More...]

Cut yourself a li’l slab o’ Honeycomb

A slew of hardware makers that didn’t start out as online bookstores—including Acer, Samsung, and Toshiba—debuted 7-inch Android Honeycomb tablets just in time for Amazon’s Kindle Fire to steal their thunder. The apparent goal: to discover if anyone is actually interested in 7-inch tablets. Acer’s Iconia Tab A100 serves as our guinea pig for this form factor.

Like most Honeycomb tablets to date, the Iconia A100 is based on Nvidia’s 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, coupled with GeForce graphics and 1GB RAM. The multitouch LCD retains the 16:9 aspect ratio that other Android … [Read More...]

Get your tinfoil hats on, folks. In the documentation released earlier this week by Microsoft on its upcoming Windows 8 Store, the software giant said that apps purchased from the App Store will come with a “kill switch.”  Redmond can use this to disable or remove the app from Windows 8 machines. Even if its intentions are good, users are likely to be suspicious of Microsoft on this one.

Microsoft claims it will use the capability in cases of security or, more troubling, if they are “required to do so for legal reasons.” This is a common capability on mobile … [Read More...]

Discovering that user-activity logging program Carrier IQ might be loaded on your phone is like finding out there’s a peeping tom in your neighborhood: You want to find out if your house was on the scumbag’s route or not. Well, if you have a rooted Android phone, you can do just that, thanks to a utility by Trevor Eckhart, the dev responsible for uncovering this scandal.

Eckhart posted an .APK that allows these Android users to test their devices for programs like CIQ, and it’s available as a free and paid ($1) version. (The latter allows you to not only … [Read More...]

The Blackberry Playbook is the red-headed stepchild of the tablet world. Since being revealed this past year, just about everyone’s taken a swing at it: Pundits dug it’s hearty hardware specs, but decried the device’s lack of native email or calendar functionality. Consumers loyal to the Blackberry name felt compelled to purchase the tablet based on the love they had for their Canadian built handsets, but quickly found the apps on offer in Blackberry App World to be few, with many of the available titles of embarrassingly poor quality. In the face of shrinking profit margins and angry device owners … [Read More...]

Dolphin Browser HD is one of the most popular alternative browsers on Android, which is why the latest news on that front is so disconcerting. According to an exhaustive investigation by Android Police, Dolphin HD is sending all user URLs in plain text to a Dolphin webserver. The goal is to match URLs to a webzine whitelist service that Dolphin then provides to users, but as Android Police said, this is “an amateur solution.” 

It appears that any URL, be it secured or not is sent with no security whatsoever. For its part, Dolphin says that the data is not … [Read More...]

Remember when “Netflix” and “Streaming video” were virtually synonyms? Yeah, those were the days. Then, in the course of three disastrous months, Netflix jacked prices by 60 percent, announced it was splitting off the DVD business, and then announced that, no, actually, it was going to keep DVDs in house after all. The wacky moves sent investors fleeing like rats and confused customers looking for alternatives – alternatives like Amazon Prime Instant Video. The service offers unlimited streaming and Amazon has signed several new content deals since Prime Instant Video’s launch in March. But is it a Netflix killer? Let’s … [Read More...]