Mobile Android News

At last I found a companion for my Fallout3 BobbleHead that sits on my desk. He is so lonely, being alone all the time. He was very happy as my kids started to play with him but after a while it did hurt him.

Now he will get some friends. I hope that he won't have any problem with the fact that the friends will be non-biological. In any case they are more friendly then super mutants

One of the signs that shows that a brand is well established is when the community starts to create fan art around the brand. Is seems that Android has matured so far. New York based artist Andrew Bell has designed several neat Android figures as a secret project.

Since February 1. the project is not secret anymore. Production of the first series will start in a few days. Head over to Dyzplastic to claim your figure or rather box of figures. The figures will come in 12 different flavours in blind boxes, that means, you will not know which figure you get. To bring in even more excitement, there will be some very rare figures that collectors will WANT to have.

The figures can rotate their head and arms and seem to be very friendly. There is no information on prices and availability yet. If any new information comes, I'll keep you posted. 

I could imagine to put some identification tags in/on the figures to provide additional fun. For example you could track your collection with your Android device, or you could let the figure sneak into your phone as a background image. Anyways that is a great idea, BobbleHead will be so happy...

Google have today announced that the launch of their Nexus One handset in China has been postponed.

The search giant are currently in a dispute with the Chinese Government over censorship and e-mail hacking, that could see them leave the country entirely.

Google Inc. spokeswoman Marsha Wang confirmed that a planned launch event scheduled to take on Wednesday has now been canceled, but wouldn't elaborate on the decision to delay the launch other than to confirm that "It is postponed".

According to a source familiar with the situation, Google feel that currently due to the publicity surrounding them in China it would be difficult for their customers to have a "positive experiance" with the product.

Google revealed last week that they no longer want to censor the content on their Chinese Google.cn search and want to begin talks with Beijing about providing a legal, unfiltered search engine in the Country.

[via news.yahoo.com]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Google Nexus One Launch Postponed In China

If you were ever wondering, how you could see if someone is using Google Talk from an Android device, here is the solution. In your Google Mail web interface go to Settings, select the Labs tab, and turn on the "Green Robot" extension: this will display a robot icon for the users from an Android device, while the coloring indicates the availability of the person.

It really makes sense: your friends can see, that you are logged in from your phone, so they know if you are available and do not answer, this is maybe because you do not have a free hand at the moment.

To be honest, there is still some room for improvements. The robots only appear on the web interface, and not in the Windows standalone chat client. On the other hand if you are an Android device owner, you have to notify every friend of yours, that they should enable this extension if they want to see whether you are sitting in a front of a PC, or you are on the go. This should happen somehow the other way round: you enable that your friends can see if you are on Android, and then everyone should see the Droid icon...

A report from mobile app analytics firm, Flurry, Google's Nexus One handset sold around 20,000 units in its first week sales.

According to the data compiled by Flurry that figure is 12 times less than the Motorola Droid (250,000 first week sales), and 80 times less than the iPhone 3GS at 1.6 million first week sales.

Flurry monitors usage of more than 10,000 developers' applications on iPhone and Android platforms. In total, Flurry tracks applications on approximately four out of every five iPhone and Android handsets in the market, generating over 25 million end user sessions per day. To estimate first week sales totals for the Nexus One, myTouch 3G, Droid and iPhone 3GS, Flurry detected new handsets within its system, and then made adjustments to account for varying levels of Flurry application penetration by handset. Flurry additionally crosschecked its estimates against Apple actual sales, released for iPhone 3GS, which totaled more than one million units over the three days, June 19 - 21, 2009.

Ofcourse the Nexus One didn't have the huge marketing push that saw the Motorola Droid gain huge mainstream coverage, factor that with Google's online only distribution and higher initial costs, and it's easy to see why sales were slow in comparison.

[via blog.flurry.com]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Google Nexus One Sold Just 20,000 Units In Opening Week?

Verizon Wireless has begun sending HTC Droid Eris owners a new OTA (over the air) update to fix a small bug with the signal indicator display.

The new update:  ROM: 1.17.605.1/ Radio: 2.32.40.11.09, will fix a bug with the display, which in some cases has rendered the display locked or in an out-of-service state when trying to wake the Eris from screensaver mode.

The install process is very simple, and Verizon have included a well detailed guide to the whole process.

Let us know how you get on in our Droid Eris Forum.

You can find more information on the Droid Eris update over at support.comvzw.com.

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Verizon OTA Update For Droid Eris – Sadly Not Android 2.1

The long rumored Google phone is now officially announced, it's name is Nexus One. The hardware is manufactured by HTC, and it contains everything a smartphone of today can have:

• Qualcomm 1 GHz processor
• 512MB Flash, 512MB RAM, Micro SD Card slot
• 3.7-inch AMOLED touchscreen with 800 x 480 pixel resolution
• UMTS Band 1/4/8, HSDPA 7.2Mbps, HSUPA 2Mbps GSM/EDGE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, A2DP stereo Bluetooth
• AGPS
• 5 megapixels & LED Flash
• Digital compass, Accelerometer

To operate all the underlying hardvare and to interact with the user Android Mobile Technology Platform 2.1 is in charge.

Official page

Less than a week after the launch of the Google Nexus One handset, Google have released the Android 2.1 SDK to developers.

The 2.1 SDK includes all the new features we've seen in the Nexus One, including new APIs for animated wallpapers, webkit browser geolocation support, and more.

Hopefully it won't be too long now before we start seeing the Android 2.1 update being pushed to the Droid, the Hero, and other Android handsets.

Just yesterday Motorola also confirmed that the 2.1 update would be made available for their European Motorola Milestone (Droid), and Motorola DEXT (CLIQ) handsets.

[via android-developers.blogspot.com]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Android 2.1 SDK Now Available