Working full time at Betanews and going to school full time has really cut into my personal blogging time, but as we approach the holiday season and new year, I’m going to make an effort to better voice my personal opinions on Android and smartphone-related matters in general.
What am I looking forward to?
1.) Windows Phone– Don’t panic. I’m expecting a Windows Phone from Microsoft any day now, which I plan to rotate into regular usage. Before Android and iOS existed, I was a Windows Mobile user, and I do strongly believe Microsoft’s Web-based services are high quality. However, I don’t particularly think that Windows Phone has the best chance of survival until Xbox Live and Kinect can somehow be integrated into it…then they’ll change the game. For now, I’m just going to use the Windows Phone to master it, test apps, and generally enjoy it.
2.) Android Open Accessory– Admittedly I’m not much of an electrical engineer. I can’t read a schematic, and all of my “making” involves soldering wires to various parts of junk boards to circuit bend them. However, I talked to the folks at Sparkfun about the Electric Sheep board for ADK development, and I have high hopes for the platform, and I’m confident that someone with more skill than I will be able to make something completely mind-degaussingly awesome that we’ll all want to have.
3.) Asus Transformer Prime– A quad-core Tegra 3 tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich. I have grown to absolutely love my Samsung Galaxy 10.1. I thought tablets were pretty much a pointless luxury until I started using it for school-related productivity purposes and e-reading. Now I really have a grasp on some of their real value. So this super powerful device has me kind of excited.
4.) WIMM– Like Android Open Accessory, WIMM is not a a “three screen” application of Android, and therefore conjures up a special bit of excitement. I don’t wear watches, but from what I’ve seen from WIMM, I might have to change that.
5.) Samsung Galaxy Nexus– This is my next phone, it’s just a matter of time before I can get it.
I just got a very random, no-bullshit pitch from Marvel Digital (some Hong Kong company I’ve never heard of) for their TBT-10C 7″ Mercury Pad. If the iPhone 4 and 7″ Samsung Galaxy Tab had a random encounter at the Christmas party and this would be the unwanted bastard child.
The email just said the name of the product, listed its specs, listed the price, linked to the video I’ve embedded below, and said nothing else. It was actually kind of cool that there was no pitch. If that’s not exactly what most Internet geeks are looking for, I don’t know what is.
So here are the specs…
CPU : 1GHz Samsung S5PV210, ARM Cortex-A8 processor
Memory : DDR2 512MB
Storage : 4GB/8GB/16GB
OS: Android 2.3
LCD : 7″TFT, 16:9, 800 x 480
Touch Screen : Capacitive Multitouch
Camera : 0.3M forward facing 2 megapixel regular
SD Card : MicroSD up to 32GB
HDMI : 1080P HD Video Output
USB : USB Host 2.0, USB Device 2.0
Audio : Built-in Stereo Speaker, 3.5mm Stereo Headphone, Built-in Microphone
WIFI : 802.11 b/g
3G : External USB 3G Modules only (HUAWEI:E220, E1750, E156G, ZTE:MF637U)
G-Sensor : 360 Degree G-Sensor
Battery : 2250 mAH
Power : 9V/2A power adapter (100 – 240v input)
Power jack : 9V/2A power adapter (100 – 242v input)
Weight : 510 g
Here’s the price…
$259
and here’s ten minutes before this baby was conceived…
I’m not slacking, I’ve just been busy at Betanews trying to adhere to the prime directives.
You know…serving the public trust, protecting the innocent, and upholding the law…
That’s how I do.
But I’m gonna do better and spread my work out among a couple of other blogs soon. For now, here’s a look at the two different builds of AVG’s Android antivirus software: phone and tablet.
AVG did a pretty good smartphone survey in February and they shared the results with me at CTIA when I shot this quick video. It was kind of ridiculous, actually. Like many security surveys, it was sort of geared to show how ignorant most people are.
Of nearly 30,000 smartphone users that participated in the survey, 25% DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT OS THEY WERE USING!
That was more than any other single OS named. iOS had 24%, RIM BBOS had 19%, Windows Mobile had 12% and Android had only 9%.
51% said they had, at some point, accidentally signed up for some product or service without knowing it cost money.
59% said they were unsure if they had ever shared their location via photo metadata.
53% said they were unsure if their “confidential payment information” was being shared through third party apps.
AVG is free/freemium. While I’m not personally convinced of the utility of smartphone security apps against good old fashioned conscientious usage, you can’t really argue with their intentions and their price point.
Stay Tuned, I’ll be posting a review of Mikrosonic’s MPC for Android that goes by the name SPC.
You may find this hard to believe, but almost 60% of the traffic I get on this site goes to one article…my review of Electrum, the drum synth app. I didn’t even give it that great of a review, but apparently Android musicians are STARVING for music apps, so I’m more than willing to give you a look at all of Android’s musicmaking apps.
RD3 Groovebox by Mikrosonic is the other noteworthy sequencer/synth app for Android, and has been available for about six months already. If you were to download it now, you’d be getting version 1.1.1, the second major iteration since it was released.
It’s a dead simple app to pick up and use, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sophisticated. It’s just very efficiently arranged. The interface is made up of three screens: Beats, Bassline, and Mixer. Let’s take a look at each…
Beats
The drum track isn’t a synth but is a beat sequencer with 8 different classic beatbox sample sets. The sample kits include Roland’s 606, 808, 909, and CR-78, the Oberheim DMX, the Korg KR-55, Casio RZ1, and the classic Linn. Each drumkit has six samples which vary slightly between them, but generally include kick, snare, two high hats, rimshot and then some other one which could be anything from a clap, to a conga, to a tom or cowbell. It’s not super versatile in terms of sample variety, but it’s more than enough of a selection of popular drum machines to play with, and you can mix the levels from that screen.
Setting up sequences is ridiculously easy. Along the bottom of the screen is a 4 step/4 bar phrase, and you simply select the sample you want to sequence, and the sequencer along the bottom switches to that sample. If you have played with any step sequencers, it’s a setup you should instantly recognize.
Bassline
The bass track is pretty much a virtual Roland TB-303. It’s got the same square/saw oscillator and some of the filter knobs. An awesome part of RD3 is that it supports multi-touch so you can tweak multiple knobs for the full filtration effect.
Sequencing the bass can be done in two ways: step by step, or by “following.” The first way involves selecting a step, and then assigning a note to it. It’s a little awkward, but once you know what to do, it instantly becomes second nature. You poke the step, you poke the note, and then you can select the octave, and pick if you want it accented or held. “Follow” mode is pretty much like having it on record, and you can play your bass phrase more or less live, and then assign octave and accent in step mode.
Mixer
You can record four different drum patterns and four different bass patterns, and then choose how you’d like them to play in the master screen. For example, you can just pick the patterns as they’re playing, have them played in order, or have them played randomly.
Also from this screen, you can select the volume of the bassline and the beats, and even apply distortion to the bass to make it sound more aggressive (or more like the classic Acid House bass, if you’re so inclined.) Finally, the master “play” button (labeled “run”) and tempo selector are located here.
Once you’re done laying out all your sequences, you can save the song and export it as a .wav file. When you export it, you’re presented with sharing options such as bluetooth, email, SMS and whatever other methods of sharing you may have installed. On my Galaxy S phone, for example this includes things like AllShare and Yahoo! email. There’s also an option to share via SoundCloud, but every time I’ve tried this so far it doesn’t work.
This video is me playing around with RD3, but I can’t actually hear what I’m doing because it’s running directly into the camera, so it’s no masterpiece, but you at least get a good idea of how easy it is to use.
Bottom line: Solid Music-creation Android apps are few, ones this good are even fewer. It’s a must-have.
Tomorrow is Christmas and all I can think about is all the new stuff I’m going to have to keep track of at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in the first week of January. It’s going to be my fifth year in attendance as a professional journalist, and the previous years I’ve gone are starting to blend together in my mind. Fortunately, I can gauge the year in history by the amount of Android stuff I see there. Two years ago, there was only the smallest bit of Android-based stuff because the first open source version of the OS was only just released. Last year, the presence had increased significantly, and I saw a lot of new smartphones, a couple of e-reader/tablets and a couple of strange and unique contributions like desktop video phones and Android-powered Microwaves.
This year, aside from the Verizon LTE Android phone that we’re expecting, everyone thinks CES 2011 is going to be all about tablets.
I have my reservations about that prediction.
Yes, Motorola is undoubtedly revealing an Android tablet of some sort, and LG, NEC and Dell have all said they will be showing something off too…but other than that the field is pretty wide open.
Speaking of LG though, there’s a company who’s in the Android space way less than it should be. Last year I saw two Android phones from LG, and earlier this year the company pledged more presence in the area, but frankly I was highly unimpressed with its smartphone attempts. Many of the phones LG showed off last year were solidly based in the pre-iPhone, post BlackBerry design ethic. The company’s got a lot of clout in consumer electronics, but last year it looked to be focused solidly on its TV sector, maybe a tablet would kickstart interest in their smartphones.
A ton of Android-based tablets pour out of China every day. I mean, just check out dealextreme and you’ll be treated to a new piece of shit $99 plastic tablet running Android 2.2 every day of the week. I really hope predictions for CES 2011 will be proven wrong and that there will be something to take my breath away, because I want to see how far companies have taken Android out of its comfortable niche of portable/pocketable touchscreen devices.
Specifically, I want to see OTHER devices running it, like point and shoot cameras, pocket camcorders, media players, clocks and watches, game systems, in-car systems, DVD players and TVs, set top boxes, digital toys, and home automation gadgets.
Frankly, after hearing that Samsung is on track to sell 10 million Galaxy S smartphones before this year is even out, I’ve accepted that Android is now the mainstream smartphone OS. It has reached the average user who upgrades his phone only when his contract runs out, and my efforts will be best invested in tracking the smartphone market overall, and the specific unique applications of Android’s open source branch.
If you’re like me, you read MG Siegler’s post on Techcrunch entitled “Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With,” and were a bit ruffled by it.
In the article, Siegler breaks down the myth of Android openness, and though his reasoning is a bit suspect, this is the kind of thing new Android users needed to hear. Describing Android as “open” is about as subjective as you can get. It’s like describing it as “good.” Therefore, people have assigned all kinds of crazy expectations to what “open” means, and most of them are false.
At one point, Siegler says, “Open is proving to mean that the carriers can choose what they want to do with Android.”
Proving to mean?
Wasn’t that what it meant all along?
I point you to Steve Horowitz, Google Engineering Director, speaking at Google I/O in 2008, before Android 1.0 was launched.
There, he said the following:
“We are going to give [Android] to the industry to allow innovation
on top of the platform, and to enable the industry at large to build and deploy devices with rich and powerful features and functionality.”
I’ve embedded a video of Horowitz’s presentation, which includes a nice walkthrough of a pre-release version of Android. I encourage you to watch this and remember why Android was developed in the first place.
So who do we have to blame for this whole “open” thing? Naturally it’s the Open Handset Alliance, that famous group of 78 different mobile technology companies and service providers who fostered the development of Android.
“Android was built from the ground up with the explicit goal to be the first open, complete, and free platform created specifically for mobile devices,” the group’s website still says. Check out this early OHA promo video explaining Android…
Talk about mixed messages. On one end you’ve got the people saying “you will be able to have a phone that does whatever you want it to!” On the other, you’ve got Android co-founder Nick Sears, telling it like it is:
“Andy Rubin…myself…and Rich Miner…the three of us all believed that it was too difficult to get new products out to consumers in a timely fashion, and we thought the missing link was not having an open platform.”
The open platform is to help get new products TO CONSUMERS faster, not to help the consumers do more with those products.
And yes, there are two development branches…Android “with Google,” and the open source version of Android. Personally, I think they should have different names because even the tech journalists are confused. Google’s Android should just be called Android and everything else should have its own name, like MotoBLUR, Sense, TouchWIZ, UX, and so forth. There are 20 handset makers in the OHA…and each will have their own UI, which is actually a whole new OS built on top of the free and open Android framework.
You just need to look at TouchWiz 3.0 to see how vastly different the experience can be on an OEM-customized version of Android. Seriously…try the media player in TouchWiz. It could pass for a whole different OS.
Similarly, we have to look at the OPhone phenomenon in China. That’s a carrier UI and not a manufacturer one, and it again is a totally different OS (called OMS, even though it’s built on Android). Dell’s got a phone running it, and the same phone running Dell’s custom Android UI in the US. That’s kind of the idea behind the openness…not whether or not you’re allowed to tether the phone or sideload apps.
If carriers just re-branded the different versions of Android like China Mobile does, we wouldn’t even have to have this discussion.
They do it to me every time. A carrier announces something that I want, and then starts teasing for something a little further down the road. It makes it very hard to be an early adopter, for sure.
Tomorrow, the most powerful Android phone on T-Mobile, the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant will land. Unfortunately, it’s not an HSPA+ capable device, and the rumor is that T-Mo is going to launch their faster networks on July 21, just one week from today. The first phone capable of taking advantage of the new network is rumored to be the HTC Vision…which won’t launch ’til September. And even then, we don’t know the specs of it.
We do know the Vibrant is powerful, and I have handled the beautiful thing. It’s skinny and the screen is big and bright. If I pick one up tomorrow, it won’t be with any great hesitance or regret. I just can’t help but wonder what’s next.
I’ll update with the Samsung Vibrant tomorrow if it’s available in stores. It’s certainly not available as an upgrade on mytmobile.com. It’s been in their database of phones for weeks, but you couldn’t order it.
If I wake up with a headache and it wasn’t the result of drinking the night before, I feel like it was given to me for some cosmic reason. Sort of like Daphne in this early episode of Frasier I happened to catch the other day…she got these psychic headaches whenever somebody nasty was nearby. (In that episode it was Lillith, but I digress.) I feel like there are greater forces at work that are making me take things slow on mornings that I wake up with brain fuzz.
So I woke up with a ripper this morning, and I came downstairs to see that Symbian Guru has abandoned Symbian for Android. Because my head was throbbing, I lingered on this blog entry a bit longer than I normally would, and I realized it was because I had to say something besides “welcome to the platform*.”
I have watched with excitement as my friends and family one by one switch to Android. My brother got the EVO 4G yesterday, my Sister-in-law got the Backflip two weeks ago. My girlfriend, who is terrible at remembering names, has repeatedly brought up the HTC Aria, asking about it and recalling the advertisements shown during the early World Cup 2010 games.
This is not about building a community any more. With 160,000 Android devices being sold per day, this is about being at the right place at the right time.
Ricky says this in his Symbian-Guru farewell post:
While European carriers stumble over themselves to carry the latest Nokia devices, American carriers tend to pick up the lame-duck and low-end versions of Nokia’s phones. This is improving, but at a snail’s pace. Both Symbian and Nokia are dying brands in the U.S., if not already dead, and I’m sick and tired of banging the gong alone.
I spent much of my last month in Europe taking pictures of billboards, noting TV advertisements, and comparing displays in mobile phone shops, and I can say this: Nokia and Sony Ericsson still rule Europe. But HTC is making a huge push there. When I drove into Prague on the 611, I passed by the biggest HTC Android advert I had ever seen plastered on the side of a warehouse. It must have been a football field long.
Furthermore, because of Sony Ericsson and Samsung’s support of Android, the platform is gaining a lot of recognition over there. In the newsstands in Munich, publications like Mobile Zeit and Mobile News all had the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 prominently featured on the cover. It was in display windows all over the place, and there were advertisements for it on walls, on TV, and on the radio.
I keep telling Americans that Sony Ericsson is going to break Android through to the European market, but I don’t know if anyone believes me.
But back to the abandonment of Symbian. With the new top-of-the-line Nokia N8 rocking the first version of Symbian^3 on the way, you’d think that a Symbian enthusiast would be all over it. But Ricky totally nails it:
When the Nokia N8 was first announced, I was dead convinced I would purchase one out of my own pocket. I started putting money aside, ready to even pre-order the N8 as soon as I could. However, the more I use the Nokia N97 as my primary device, the less I’ve been convinced that the N8 is going to be better. Time and time again, Nokia’s high-end smartphones have arrived with pathetic processors, stingy amounts of RAM, and small batteries – why should I put up another $500 of my own money ‘just to see’?
When I reported about the N8 on Betanews, I talked to Nokia about the device’s 680Mhz processor, noting that their absolute top of the line device has a processor only as fast as the current generation of mid-range Android phones.
They said “there are optional ways to achieve great performance” outside of raw processing capabilities.
It kind of upset me that they’d put a freaking 12 megapixel camera into the device, but chose to rely on “options” to deliver a screaming user experience. It just reminded me of the people who put stripped-down Linux distributions on old machines and claim they run just as fast as newer, more powerful machines.
They may be efficient, but why should efficiency only be employed when it’s a necessity?
But I digress. This is not proclaiming the death of Symbian in any way or naming winners and losers in the mobile world. This is just another reminder that one by one, people important to other mobile platforms are becoming Androids.
Android is not perfect. But no technology is, and that’s part of why it’s such a wonderful and exciting field. You get familiar with the limitations of your hardware or software and delight in the workarounds you devise. You learn their strengths and exploit the hell out of them.
That’s what technology is all about, that’s what Android is all about for me.
Well, the rumors are coming in, and they’re not exactly the most positive things. As usual, people are throwing around the same tired-ass fragmentation argument.
Rumor 1.) Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) is due in mid-October, with the first handsets shipping in the Nov/Dec range for the holidays (which sounds like a revisitation of 2.0)
Rumor 2.) Minimum hardware requirements for Android 3.0 devices are: 1GHZ CPU, 512MB or RAM, displays from 3.5″ and higher.
Rumor 3.) A New 1280×760 resolution is available for the devices with displays of 4″ and higher (I keep screaming “convergence,” but I don’t know if anybody is listening…)
Rumor 4.) Completely new 3D-esque UI. This one seems almost logical. Hopefully you will be able to turn off all animations.
Rumor 5.) 3.0 will be for high end devices, and lower-end handsets will keep Android 2.1/2.2
