A big news for the Android ecosystem: Larry Page announced today a 12.5B acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
This acquisition will have a significant impact on many aspects for the Android world: from its Nexus brand, carrier availability, and better OS integration with hardware to a better defense against recent patent attacks on Android.
More reaction to follow.
I like buttons on Android phones: Back and Home buttons are absolutely essential, while Menu and Search are also useful. When I said buttons, I indeed meant real physical buttons that can be pressed without looking at the phone. However, over the last few years, Android manufactures shifted from physical buttons to ”soft” buttons and it’s a pity.
One feature that makes soft button experience slightly better is a haptic feedback: a brief vibration when a soft button is pressed. In addition to soft buttons, vibration also occurs when phone dialer buttons are pressed. Depending on the model of your Android phone, this feature may or may not be enabled by default.
On Gingerbread and Honeycomb devices (Android 2.3+) haptic feedback can be enabled or disabled in the Settings -> Sound -> Haptic feedback.
Haptic feedback setting on Gingerbread devices
A great news for potential Android phone buyers: on July 24 Best Buy will start selling Nexus S phone fully compatible with AT&T network for $99 with 2-year contract. AT&T joins T-Mobile and Sprint in supporting Nexus S, which leaves Verizon as the lone carrier without Nexus branded phone. Nexus S ships with the latest version of Android (2.3.4) called Gingerbread and has 4” Super AMOLED screen, a 1 GHz processor, front and rear facing cameras and support for NFC (overview of specs, full specs, list of features). Best Buy Nexus S page is not showing AT&T version of the phone yet, but it will be available for pre-order soon.
The most significant advantage of Nexus S is that it provides a pure Google experience, which means stock version of Android and no carrier or manufacturer bloatware. Another significant benefit of stock Android is built-in support for USB tethering and portable Wi-Fi hotspot for no extra charge (at least, that’s the case on T-Mobile network). Google experience also means that Nexus S will be the first phone to receive future Android OS updates.
Catching up with the last week’s news:
Recent news:
Notable articles:
Ever since Google Talk added video and voice chat support for Android phones in April, T-Mobile has been blocking Google Talk calls over its 3G/4G network. Calls worked, of course, over Wi-Fi and cellular networks of other carriers, such as Verizon.
This has changed today and both video and audio calling now works flawlessly over T-Mobile’s cellular network. Google Talk video and audio chat requires Android 2.3.4+.
Source: Android Police.
Android stock SMS Messaging app is quite good and does its job nicely, but some Android users like to get fancy with their SMS apps. Enter Handcent SMS app, which supports MMS with picture, video and audio attachments, great customization, group send, themes, different ringtones and LED notifications, 20+ languages, SMS history search, message password protection, schedule sms delivery and much more.
However, once a custom SMS app such as Handcent SMS is installed, you will start receiving duplicate notifications for each received text message: one for the stock messaging app and another one for the custom sms app. To fix this, go to Messaging app -> Settings and uncheck Notifications.
I personally have never ran into this problem, but a friend of mine just did and found a very nice solution which is worth sharing. The launcher on his Verizon Samsung Fascinate (a variant of Samsung Galaxy S) went into a permanent Force Close loop, which means that the launcher would crash every few seconds not allowing to launch any apps, including settings. The displayed error message: “The process com.sec.android.app.twlauncher has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.” Rebooting and removing the battery did not help.
In this case, however, notifications did work. The solution was to go to market.android.com in the computer’s browser and install a 3rd party launcher to the phone (ADW.Launcher in this case; LauncherPro is another popular option). He was then able to pull down notifications on the phone and start ADW.Launcher and forget about the stock launcher.
Not only did this solve a problem of the stock launcher being stuck in the Force Close loop, but he is now enjoying multiple advantages of the ADW.Launcher and wondering why he didn’t try it earlier. For few examples of the ADW.Launcher niceties see this post.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Swype. Despite it’s permanent beta status for Android phones that do not have Swype preinstalled, it is by far the best onscreen keyboard that I’ve tried. Swype is the reason I almost never miss physical keyboard.
The secret to Swype’s success is that it is a word based text entry. In a single motion you draw a path over the letters of the word and swype figures out which word you meant. As a result, Swype is very forgiving of inaccuracies: you don’t need to hit each letter precisely - getting near the letters of the word is usually good enough.
Once I started playing with Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (thank you Google I/O 2011), my first reaction was: “Where is Swype”? Swype 2.x did not support Honeycomb and typing using stock keyboard on a 10″ device turned out to be much more exhausting then typing on regular Android phone with Swype. Well, Swype 3.0 has just been announced and it adds support for Honeycomb devices (Android 3.0 and 3.1). Here’s the list of new features:
- Swype v3 introduces two major new features: Tap Correction and Horizontal Word Choice List
- Our Tap Correction engine utilizes many of the concepts that make swyping so accurate. Seamlessly go from typing to swyping and back without missing a beat!
- The Horizontal Word Choice List replaces our popup word choice window, giving users an experience more in-line with evolving Android standards. It also makes dictionary control and word selection faster and easier.
- Swype v3 is available for devices with HVGA, WVGA, FWVGA, QVGA, WQVGA, WSVGA, qHD screen sizes
- Introducing a special Honeycomb-only WXGA version for Android tablets, with features like “moveable keyboard” that you won’t find anywhere else!
When I thought about using Swype on a tablet, one thing was very clear: there’s no need to utilize the full width of the 10″ tablet in either landscape or portrait mode for the onscreen keyboard. And I’m very glad to report that Swype got it right and 3.0 supports 2 modes: full-size and condensed:
Swype supports 11 languages: Chinese, Dutch, English UK, English US, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Get it at beta.swype.com.
If you just bought your first Android phone, here are some useful tips on using phone’s buttons, Home screen and customization.
1. You can install apps to your phone from the computer’s web browser. Open market.android.com in your computer’s browser, login to your Google account, find an app, click Install. The download of the app will start automatically on your phone.
2. Press mic icon in the onscreen keyboard to talk into any text field.
3. To assign custom ringtones and alarms you have two options. First, you can create a folder on phone’s sdcard called “ringtones” and copy the music files that you want to use as ringtones there. Same trick works for “alarms” and “notifications” folders. To assign a custom ringtone, open a contact, select Menu -> Options -> Ringtone -> Android System.
Second option is to install Tone Picker app. Once it is installed, open a contact, select Menu -> Options -> Ringtone -> Tone Picker -> Music and select a ringtone from a list of all tracks found in the phone’s media library.
4. You can install additional input languages by going to Settings > Language & Keyboard > Android keyboard >Input languages. To switch between languages in the stock Android keyboard, slide the space key sideways.
5. Normally, the Back button button navigates from the current screen to the previous one. But when the onscreen keyboard pops up, first Back button press hides the keyboard.
6. The Menu button opens a context menu for the current screen. Usually, advanced menu items for the current screen are located in the context menu to save space.
7. When viewing the Home screen, the Search button searches your phone and the web. But you can also use it for searching contents within applications. Simply press Search while inside an app to see if it supports search functionality.
Full details on using buttons can be found at Google’s mobile help article.
8. Long press on the Home button shows the list of 8 recently launched apps.
9. Long press on the Search button launches Voice Actions, which allows you to send email, sms, control music player, launch navigation and much more with voice commands. Check out this introductory video of Voice Actions on youtube and full list of voice commands.
In general, if you are looking for advanced options and don’t see them on the screen, long press on UI elements. For example, long press on entires in the list will usually show selected item’s context menu with advanced options.
10. To add application shortcut from the Launcher to the Home screen, long press on the app icon in the launcher and then drop it to the Home screen.
11. Long press on the Home screen to add shortcuts, widgets, folders and customize wallpapers. For details on how to use shortcuts for direct dialing, navigation and bookmarks, see this earlier post.
12. To move an app shortcut from one Home screen to another, long press on the app icon and drag it to the edge of the current Home screen. The Home screen will slide allowing to drop icon in the new screen.
13. To remove an app shortcut from the Home screen, long press on the app icon and once the trash bin pops up, drag the icon to the bin.
Enjoy!
The amount of Android news at Google I/O 2011 was impressive. Let’s recap the most important announcements from the conference.
This is possibly the most important news for Android users: the alliance of hardware manufactures and providers announced that new devices will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released. The alliance is ”working together to adopt guidelines for how quickly devices are updated after a new platform release, and also for how long they will continue to be updated”. The participating partners are: Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T.
This is a big deal. With the exception of the Nexus phones (Nexus One, Nexus S, and Nexus S 4G) and Motorola Xoom, timely Android updates are an issue. Galaxy S owners in the US learned the hard way how long OS updates can take and any agreements that set strict guidelines are very welcomed. Until more details are available, it’s hard to say how successful this initiative will be.
Cloud-based music service from Google opened for beta testing (US only). The service is similar to Amazon Cloud Player and allows uploading unlimited number of songs to Google’s servers and playing them back on any computer or Android device. The service is free during beta period and invitations can be requested here. The service is optimized for offline use: recently played music automatically stored to the device and users can make specific albums or playlists available offline. As opposed to Amazon offering which allows purchasing songs from its MP3 store, Google Music doesn’t have a music store.
Movie rental service Google Movies went live and is now a part of Android Market (US only). Movie rental starts at $1.99 and is available for Android 3.1 only. Support for Android 2.2 and above is expected to roll out soon. After renting a movie, users have 30 days to start watching and 24 hours to watch it once playback starts. Movies can be streamed or downloaded to the device for watching offline.
The goal of the home automation project Android@Home is to move Android OS beyond phones, tablets and TVs and control any electrical device in the home: light bulbs, light switches, washing machines, speakers, thermostats, etc. New Android Open Accessory protocol and development kit allow hardware accessories to work with Android devices. All components of the Android Open Accessory Development Kit are available for download:
The Android Open Accessory Development Kit (ADK) provides an implementation of an Android USB accessory that is based on the Arduino open source electronics prototyping platform, the accessory’s hardware design files, code that implements the accessory’s firmware, and the Android application that interacts with the accessory. The hardware design files and firmware code are contained in the ADK package download.
As a demo, project Tungsten was previewed which creates distributed audio solution similar to Sonos ZonePlayer.
Android 3.1 update includes numerous bug fixes and performance improvements, resizable widgets, full support for Adobe Flash player 10.2 and most importantly, USB Host support. USB devices such as keyboards, game controllers, mice, video cameras and others can now interface Android devices. During one of the demos XBox 360 game controller was used to play games on the Motorola Xoom tablet. The update already rolled out to Motorola Xoom.
Google TV will get updated with Honeycomb 3.1 and will then get an Android Market.
During fireside chat with the Android team, Dan Morrill acknowledged that there are no plans to open source either Android 3.0 or 3.1.
Next major Android release is scheduled for Q4 and will be called Ice Cream Sandwich. It has an ambitious goal of merging Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) into one OS that works on all Android devices: phones, tablets and TVs.
All Google I/O 2011 sessions are available in HD on youtube. Keynote on the first day of the conference was dedicated solely to Android:
P.S. Few pictures from the conference by Tim Bray.
Google I/O 2011 starts tomorrow. The session schedule is impressive and contains 9 tracks: Android, App Engine, Chrome, Commerce, Dev Tools, Geo, Google APIs, Google Apps, and Tech Talk.
If you are one of many developers who wanted to attend, but won’t (registration sold out in under an hour), you can watch main events live. Both keynotes (about Android and Chrome) will be streamed via I/O live. Keynotes start at 9AM PST on Tuesday and 9:30 PST on Wednesday.
Video from the two biggest session rooms will also be livestreamed at I/O live. Room 3 will be streaming Chrome videos and room 11 - Android videos. All videos will be captioned and translated using Google Translate. Videos of all Google I/O sessions will later be available online in HD (last year Google I/O 2010 sessions were recorded in 480p).
You can also register and attend Google I/O Extended, which is a series of free viewing parties of Google I/O worldwide.
For those attending the conference in person, official Google I/O Android app is available to help plan your day. Google I/O hash tag is #io2011.
Over the last two years Google has added capability to edit Google documents and spreadsheets using Android and iOS mobile browsers. Today Google took the next step and released a native Google Docs app for Android 2.1+ devices.
The native app makes it very easy to access documents, spreadsheets and presentations from different Google and Google Apps accounts. It has few features that are unavailable with the mobile browser version such as ability to share items with contacts and rename items. My favorite new feature is that you can now take a photo of a text and convert it to a Google document using OCR (optical character recognition).
Now the bad news: editors for both documents and spreadsheets are not rich native editors one might expect, but mobile editors packaged in a WebView. As a result, editing experience is exactly the same as in the mobile version, which means that many basic editing features such as formatting are not available. Let’s hope that this is just the first version and rich editing capabilities will added down the road.
Source: Google Mobile blog.
Download link: Android Market.
On April 14, Android Police revealed Skype for Android vulnerability issue, which would theoretically allow malicious third-party application to get access to Skype’s profile information and chat logs. The issue was acknowledged by Skype the next day. The vulnerability was caused by Skype using wrong file permissions of the cached profile information and not encrypting profile data. Today Skype announced that the issue has been fixed, so please go to Android Market and update to the latest version. As a bonus, 3G calling is now available in the US.
There are two lessons from this story. For Android developers, the lesson is to be careful with storing user’s private information. For bloggers, Android Police demonstrated how not to publicize vulnerability issues.
Android Police a one of the better Android blogs out there and it is disappointing how they handled this issue. Justin Case, the author of the story, says that Skype was notified, but they didn’t respond. It is unclear how long Android Police waited before publishing the story. Even if no response from Skype was received, maybe more efforts should have been put into trying to get Skype’s attention behind the scenes. And even if publishing the story was the only way to bring attention to the issue, it was irresponsible for Android Police to include full details on how to exploit the issue.
In the comments to his post, Justin Case stated that he believes in full disclosure and thinks it is the only way to get big companies to act. This is not the first time such full disclosures happened at Android Police either: previously, full details of breaking Android License Verification library were published. It is clear that Android Police doesn’t believe in a responsible fault disclosure, which was nicely outlined by Jeremy Ellsworth in the comments. Let’s hope that as Android Police popularity grows, their sense of responsibility grows as well.
Congratulations to CyanogenMod team on achieving a major milestone: CM 7.0 got released last night! CyanogenMod is a firmware based on the open-source Android operating system and CyanogenMod 7 is the first stable Gingerbread-based release.
The number of cell phones that run official version of Gingerbread (Android 2.3) is currently 4. Those are Nexus S, Nexus One, Sony Xperia Arc and Sony Xperia Play.
The number of cell phones and tablets supported by CyanogenMod 7.0 is 30. Here’s the list of the supported devices:
Stable CM7 is not ready yet for such popular phones as Motorola Droid and Samsung Galaxy S, but nightly builds exist, so stable version may be coming soon.
So what does the 30:4 score tell us about the state of Android ecosystem? First, manufacturers of the phones are slow to release updates, which is not news. This should become less of a problem as Android OS matures and Google reduces number of major Android releases per year. However, manufacturers should do a better job of managing upgrade expectations, so when customers buy an Android phone they know how long they can expect to receive future upgrades.
Second, having an open source of the operating system is extremely useful. Not only CM7 is available on phones that may never get an official Android 2.3 release, but CM7 includes numerous features that are not part of official Android 2.3.
If you already use CyanogenMod ROM, consider donating to support this great open source project (donate button is at the bottom of this page).
If you want to start using CyanogenMod (or any other custom ROM), you need to root your phone first. Installing CyanogenMod is easiest using ROM Manager. Remember to do a full backup before modding the phone (e.g. using Titanium Backup). If you have questions or run into trouble, CyanogenMod forum or xda-developers is the place to get answers. Enjoy!
Swype is a very fast way to type on a touchscreen and once you get used to it going back to the regular keyboard is impossible. One nagging issue I’ve been having with Swype was that it was disappearing from the list of keyboards after reboot. As a result I had to re-enable it in Settings -> Language and Keyboard and then select it as a default keyboard.
It turns out that this was caused by Swype being moved to SD card. Once I moved it back to the phone memory, the problem disappeared.
The reason I moved it to the SD card in the first place was to free internal phone memory: Swype is over 3MB for English and Spanish and over 12MB for full version (English, Spanish, Chinese, German, UK English, Dutch, Portugese, Italian, Russian and French). But if any app is worth keeping in internal phone memory, it’s Swype.
Swype beta is currently open to all Android users.
Credit: android.stackexchange.com.
Karl-Johan Dahlström of Sony Ericsson announced today that starting this spring unlocking the bootloader on Xperia phones in a “secure and legal way” will be allowed.
It will be possible to unlock the boot loader for certain releases of our 2011 Xperia™ phones, such as Xperia™ arc, Xperia™ neo, Xperia™ pro and Xperia™ PLAY.
This is a great news for Android world. Until now only Nexus One, Nexus S and Motorola Xoom officially supported unlocking of the bootloader with the “fastboot oem unlock” command. Let’s hope Sony Ericsson will set a trend to be followed by other Android manufacturers.
There will be some restrictions, e.g. SIM lock protected phones won’t support bootloader unlocking. This probably means that only phones not subsidized by the carriers will support unlocking, which is not an ideal scenario for the US market. Nevertheless, this is a great move both for Sony Ericsson and Android ecosystem.
If you are an active user of Google Docs, you probably remember a major update a year ago with great new features such as real-time collaboration, advanced formatting tools (ruler, margins indentation, tab stops) and improved revision history. Later, another update brought ability to edit documents in the browser of mobile devices, such as Android, iPhone and iPad.
However, the major problem with those new features was that they were available only in the newly created documents and there was no way to upgrade old documents to the new format, except by exporting and re-importing files. Finally, conversion to the new version is now available.
If you open your old Google document, you should see the following message right above the menu bar:
The two formats of the Google Docs are quite different: old Google Docs format allows direct editing of HTML and CSS, which is useful for web publishing. New version looks more like a standard word processor with more advanced formatting tools, but without ability to edit HMTL or CSS of the document. Some conversions may be imperfect and that’s why Google Docs first prompts you to preview the document in the new version and only then to upgrade it if you are happy with the results.
Few things to bear in mind before performing the upgrade:
The good news about the upgrade process:
Source: Getting to know Google Docs: Upgrade a document to the new version of Google documents
Google Maps for Android just got better: Navigation mode now uses real-time traffic information to automatically route you around the traffic. No update to the Google Maps app is required, as the change has been made on the server side.
In the blog post announcing this change, Roy Williams says that “before today, Navigation would choose whichever route was fastest, without taking current traffic conditions into account. It would also generate additional alternate directions, such as the shortest route or one that uses highways instead of side roads.” Having used Navigation extensively, I don’t think that’s quite true.
From my experience, prior to this change the default choice for directions in the navigation mode was the shortest route. To pick the fastest route based on the current traffic conditions users had to go to Route Info -> Alternative Routes, where traffic-based driving times were displayed. The main difference is that with this update the default route selected by Google Maps Navigation is the fastest one calculated based on the curent traffic conditions. It’s possible that routing algorithm has also been updated to more accurately use traffic information.
After using Google Maps Navigation, regular GPS devices feel ancient. With the high-resolution screens, detailed and up to date maps, great user interface, and most importantly extensive real-time traffic information for most freeways and major streets, Google Maps Navigation is a joy to use. Did I mention it’s free?
Google Maps Navigation showing driving times based on the real-time traffic conditions
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News: 7″ Amazon Fire, Microsoft and Samsung sign a deal, Cyanogenmod and Xperia, Google Voice, Google+, Skype, Hipmunk, Google Wallet and more
It’s been a while since the last news update, so this roundup of the most interesting news from the past few weeks covers a lot: