Android

Does Google's mobile Android 2.3 operating system, aka Gingerbread, lie beneath its tablet-only Android 3.0 os, aka Honeycomb?


A modder by the name of Graffix0214 has discovered a way to unlock the Gingerbread user interface on his Dell Streak 7 tablet, which runs Honeycomb, by simply changing the system's pixel settings.

Using the app "LCDDensity for Root," he changed the LCD pixel density setting from 160 to above 170, then rebooted. The tablet then displayed a Gingerbread login interface. You can revert back to Honeycomb by simply changing the pixel density back to 160, he said. Check out his demonstration in the video below.

"It's safe to say that Honeycomb wasn't built from the ground up. Looks like it was taken from Gingerbread," Graphix0214 concluded.

Perhaps Android 4.0, codenamed "Ice Cream Sandwich," which isn't expected until the fourth quarter, is already in place. At Mobile World Congress in February, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that Ice Cream Sandwich will combine elements of Gingerbread and Honeycomb:

"The two of them – notice that starts with a G and the next one starts with an H. You can imagine the follow-on will start with an I and it will be named after a dessert and it will combine capabilities of both the G and the H release," Schmidt said.

Watch Graphix0214 unlock Gingerbread on a Honeycomb-based Dell Streak 7:

Android eat Apple

Piper Jaffray believes that Apple won't ship its fifth generation-iPhone until late in the September-ending quarter. "We recently spoke with an iPhone manufacturing equipment supplier who indicated that orders for new equipment are several months later than usual," Munster and Murphy wrote.
Apple shipped an impressive 16.9 million iPhones in the first three months of this year, according to Gartner Relevant Products/Services. The downside for Apple, however, is that 36.2 million Android-based smartphones shipped in the first quarter -- up from 8.36 million units one year earlier.

Android's steep rise suggests that Apple's hold on the leadership position in the smartphone Relevant Products/Services application Relevant Products/Services space is slipping. If past history is any indication, however, Apple may begin offering the iPhone 4 at a reduced price after the new iPhone 5 launches later this year, noted Gartner Research Vice President Carolina Milanesi.

"Apple has been decreasing the price of the previous generation device Relevant Products/Services when the new one launched so I would expect a similar trend this time around," Milanesi said in an email Friday. "It will depend what kind of [iPhone 5] improvements we will see as to how much discount we will see on the iPhone 4 and indeed if the 3GS will continue to ship."

LTE On The Backburner

Still, Apple will need to do more to keep from eventually being overwhelmed by Android's startling growth, which rose 36 percent year-over-year in the March ending quarter. By contrast, Apple's iPhone shipments grew 16.8 percent growth during the same period, according to Gartner.

Earlier this month, Google Relevant Products/Services said it was activating over 400,000 Android-based handsets on a daily basis, and with more than 100 million devices based on Google's mobile Relevant Products/Services platform already in play. Android Market is also growing rapidly. Over 200,000 free and paid applications were available in Android Market as of May 10, with more than 4.5 billion applications already installed on handsets worldwide.

One looming issue that gives Android-based handset makers a potential edge is the wireless Relevant Products/Services industry's ongoing transition to LTE. According to Piper Jaffray, LTE modems currently consume too much power Relevant Products/Services to meet Apple's battery Relevant Products/Services life requirements, and hence are "not likely be in the next iPhone," noted the firm's analysts Gene Munster and Andrew Murphy in a note released Thursday.

Still, Apple expressed no sense Relevant Products/Services of urgency when the topic came up during the company's conference Relevant Products/Services call with investors last month. "The first generation of LTE chipsets force a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those, we are just not willing to make," Apple CEO Tim Cook said.

Delayed iPhone 5 Launch

Apple's postponement of its iPhone 5 launch from the usual early June release date gives Android-based handset makers an opportunity to make short-term market-share Relevant Products/Services gains at Apple's expense. Piper Jaffray expects Apple to sell 16 million iPhones in the June ending quarter, versus the 16.9 million iPhones Apple in prior quarter, according to Gartner.

Piper Jaffray believes that Apple won't ship its fifth generation-iPhone until late in the September-ending quarter. "We recently spoke with an iPhone manufacturing equipment supplier who indicated that orders for new equipment are several months later than usual," Munster and Murphy wrote.

Earlier this week, Gartner noted that a 13 million unit bump in global Relevant Products/Services handset inventories occurred in April due to an overstocking of the channel in response to the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, which "caused an initial panic over shortages," Milanesi observed. However, what happened in "Japan does not seem to have impacted Apple," Milanesi said.

Still, Piper Jaffray thinks it's possible that supply Relevant Products/Services issues related to Japan's earthquake and tsunami had affected Apple's hardware Relevant Products/Services ramp for the iPhone 5. Alternatively, dithering over whether to support Relevant Products/Services LTE or add an audio codec socket might have contributed to the delay as well as having to deal with software Relevant Products/Services-driven features not "fully-baked" in time to permit a normal June release. On the other hand, the analysts added, "we have no tangible insight as to which one or group of these reasons caused the slip."

Android Toy

The bad news: Google's Android platform has a vulnerability that could allow the credentials used to access Google Calendar, Contacts and possibly other accounts to be stolen. The good news: Google fixed this in Android 2.3.4. More bad news: Android 2.3.4 is only on 1 percent of Android handsets (it's that fragmentation thing).


The problem stems from an error in Google's implementation of an authentication protocol known as ClientLogin in Android versions 2.3.3 and lower. Once a user submits valid credentials for Google Calendar, Contacts and possibly other accounts, an authentication token is delivered, but the problem is that the token is sent in cleartext. The authToken allows access to the logged-in service for up for 14 days, without requiring another login.

The researchers, from Germany's University of Ulm said that hackers could capture such authTokens en masse if they leveraged the fact that devices will attempt to reconnect to a previously known network (assuming that setting is enabled in the OS). The reconnection is based on the network's SSID. Thus:

“To collect such authTokens on a large scale an adversary could setup a wifi access point with a common SSID of an unencrypted wireless network, e.g., T-Mobile, attwifi, starbucks. With default settings, Android phones automatically connect to a previously known network and many apps will attempt syncing immediately. While syncing would fail (unless the adversary forwards the requests), the adversary would capture authTokens for each service that attempted syncing.”

For the 99 percent of people who do not have a fix, the best way to avoid the issue is to avoid unsecured wi-fi networks. Google is aware that even with the fix in place, devices synchronizing with Picasa web albums transmit sensitive data through unencrypted channels; they are working on a fix.

Android Tables

Barnes & Noble updated its Nook for Android app Friday, adding support for digital periodicals on a variety of Android tablets.
Previously, the Nook app only offered digital magazines and newspapers on the Android-powered Nook Color. Now, it will now be available on Android tablets 7 inches and larger, running Android OS 2.1 and higher, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom. It will not be available on Android smartphones.


The update will provide access to the largest selection of digital periodicals for Android tablet customers, Barnes & Noble said, with more than 140 top magazine and newspapers available, including Rolling Stone, Popular Science, The Economist, USA Today, and The Washington Post. All are optimized for high-resolution, color displays.

Nook for Android also now features an optimized library grid view and reading experience with enhanced book margins and line spacing, as well as an improved shopping experience. The app offers full-color pages in landscape and portrait mode and Barnes & Noble's exclusive ArticleView technology, which was formerly available only on the Nook Color, allowing users to view only the text from magazine articles.

The new version is available for free in the Android Market.

Barnes & Noble recently unveiled a free software update for the Nook that added apps like Angry Birds, as well as built-in email and support for Adobe Flash. On Monday, Barnes & Noble announced that readers have since downloaded more than one million apps.

In a statement, the company said the top five paid Nook Apps are Angry Birds, Drawing Pad, Solitaire, Aces Jewel Hunt, and Astraware Mahjong, and the top five free Nook Apps are Fliq Calendar, Fliq Notes, Pulse, Nook Word of the Day, and Fliq Tasks.

Barnes & Noble seems confident that the device is a viable tablet competitor, stating that the Nook Color is "now the best tablet value on the market at just $249." In early May, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealed the company is readying an updated e-book reader; an annoucement regarding the new launch is expected on May 24.

Google said Wednesday that it had revamped its Android Market, with an eye toward putting a greater number of popular, quality apps in front of users.

The new features, which include "Editor's Choices" and other editorial recommendations, are currently live on the Web version of the Android Market, and will be arriving on tablets and phones "soon," Google said in a blog post and an announcement at Google I/O, its developer conference in San Francisco. "The Web version of the Market allows us to iterate quickly," said Chris Yerga, director of engineering for Google's cloud services.

The new version of the Market includes five new features: new top app charts, the "Editor's Choice" lists, a list of top developers, related apps, and trending apps.

Google made the announcement after its morning Google I/O keynote, where Google announced its first Chrome OS "Chromebooks", complete with per-user, per-month plans for businesses, schools, and governments.

And that was after the first day of Google I/O, which included the formal disclosure of its next Android releases, improved video services, and the so-called future of Android, or Android@Home. Google also launched its Google Music Beta, possibly including anti-piracy protections. It also disclosed that it could pay up to $500 million to settle a Department of Justice investigation.

"Surfacing" as many apps as possible is Google's goal. "The reason we wanted to introduce a bunch of different lists is that we did a lot of work on what type of lists would be best used to surface an application," said Eric Chu, who oversees the Android Market for Google.

Google said that Android applications have been installed over 4.5 billion times to date, covering 200,000 discrete apps. The idea, of course, is to elicit more. Google takes a 30 percent cut of all Android Market sales, and Google's keynote pitch to add in-app payments through a single line of code provides it another route to higher revenues. Chu said that Google didn't have any plans to cut its revenue share to 5 percent, as it will do for the Chrome App Market.

The new top app charts will rank apps by country. The top free and paid apps will also be available on the main Android Market page, as will a list of the top revenue generators, by gross revenue. A list of trending apps will highlight those on a sharply upwards "hockey stick" growth curve.


The "Editor's Choice" list will include picks by the Google staff. In a related note, Google will also highlight its preferred developers (in terms of quality and popularity) and give them a special star next to their name. The first list will include 150 developers.

The Android Market will eventually come to the Google TV, but Yerga said that he didn't want to steal any of the thunder from the Google TV team with any announcements. He did say, however, that it will be "designed to be a 10-foot experience, not a two-foot experience, one that scales really well for a remote-control device and a pixel density that you would expect for the TV."

Yerga also said that Google may be making some changes to the refund window associated with new Android applications, which currently allows just 15 minutes for a refund after the app is downloaded. "We're going to be making some changes to start at the appropriate place," Yerga said.

Back when we reviewed the Nexus S and Android 2.3, one of our only complaints was that gingerbread sorely needed front facing video chat support. Third party video chat clients take time to be updated to support new devices,
and at that point there wasn't a simple solution. It seemed inevitable that Google would leverage existing Google Talk video support to enable video chat not just between phones but also the desktop.

Google today announced just what we've been waiting for. First party video chat support is coming in Android 2.3.4 to Nexus S devices as an OTA update in the next few weeks. Other Android 2.3+ devices will get the update in the future depending on manufacturer OTA update releases.

The update will enable video chat support on devices over 3G, 4G (if your carrier supports it) or WiFi between enabled Android 2.3+ smartphones and tablets, and the desktop Google Talk client.

In the client, a video or voice chat button will appear next to contacts which can then be tapped to initiate the chat. The client will suspend video chat and continue audio as well if the video chat session loses focus in Android, and any text chat recieved will be superimposed on the ongoing video chat. The interface looks like a slimmed-down version of what we saw in Android 3.0 on the Motorola Xoom.

Google has also provided a short video demonstrating overall functionality.

oogle said Wednesday that it had revamped its Android Market, with an eye toward putting a greater number of popular, quality apps in front of users.
The new features, which include "Editor's Choices" and other editorial recommendations, are currently live on the Web version of the Android Market, and will be arriving on tablets and phones "soon," Google said in a blog post and an announcement at Google I/O, its developer conference in San Francisco. "The Web version of the Market allows us to iterate quickly," said Chris Yerga, director of engineering for Google's cloud services.


The new version of the Market includes five new features: new top app charts, the "Editor's Choice" lists, a list of top developers, related apps, and trending apps.

Google made the announcement after its morning Google I/O keynote, where Google announced its first Chrome OS "Chromebooks", complete with per-user, per-month plans for businesses, schools, and governments.

And that was after the first day of Google I/O, which included the formal disclosure of its next Android releases, improved video services, and the so-called future of Android, or Android@Home. Google also launched its Google Music Beta, possibly including anti-piracy protections. It also disclosed that it could pay up to $500 million to settle a Department of Justice investigation.

"Surfacing" as many apps as possible is Google's goal. "The reason we wanted to introduce a bunch of different lists is that we did a lot of work on what type of lists would be best used to surface an application," said Eric Chu, who oversees the Android Market for Google.

Google said that Android applications have been installed over 4.5 billion times to date, covering 200,000 discrete apps. The idea, of course, is to elicit more. Google takes a 30 percent cut of all Android Market sales, and Google's keynote pitch to add in-app payments through a single line of code provides it another route to higher revenues. Chu said that Google didn't have any plans to cut its revenue share to 5 percent, as it will do for the Chrome App Market.

The new top app charts will rank apps by country. The top free and paid apps will also be available on the main Android Market page, as will a list of the top revenue generators, by gross revenue. A list of trending apps will highlight those on a sharply upwards "hockey stick" growth curve.

The "Editor's Choice" list will include picks by the Google staff. In a related note, Google will also highlight its preferred developers (in terms of quality and popularity) and give them a special star next to their name. The first list will include 150 developers.

The Android Market will eventually come to the Google TV, but Yerga said that he didn't want to steal any of the thunder from the Google TV team with any announcements. He did say, however, that it will be "designed to be a 10-foot experience, not a two-foot experience, one that scales really well for a remote-control device and a pixel density that you would expect for the TV."

Yerga also said that Google may be making some changes to the refund window associated with new Android applications, which currently allows just 15 minutes for a refund after the app is downloaded. "We're going to be making some changes to start at the appropriate place," Yerga said