Credit: gtgt

Apple recently launched the “all new iPad” and during the launching Apple emphasized the power of their new A5X chip. Apple showed a chart comparing the A5X and Nvidia Tegra-3. Apple claims that A5X graphics perfomance is 4x faster than Tegra-3 without any benchmark proof or footnote.

In response to this claim, Ken Brown, a spokesman for Nvidia, said that it was “certainly flattering” to be called out by Apple, but the performance claims are sketchy without more data. “We don’t have the benchmark information,” said Brown. “We have to understand what the application was that was used. Was it one or a variety of applications? What drivers were used? There are so many issues to get into with benchmark.”

So, will Apple provide the real proof of its claim that it smoked the Tegra-3 in graphics perfomance? Or we wil need to wait for the Android community to do the benchmarking ?

Note: Nvidia Tegra-3 powers the latest Android superphones and tablets. 

Source:  ZDNet via Droidmatters

Google Play

The Android Market is has been the household name for Android users in the entire universe but Google decided to drop this famous app store brand and introduce a new service.  I must say RIP Android Market.

The new brand for Google Android App portal is  called Google Play. Google Android Market has gone through  many changes and it evolves from  a simple app store for Android. Google has been adding new services like eBooks, Music and Videos that needs to be integrated to each other.

With this fragmentation of services, Google united this into one place and that is Google Play. Google Play will serve as social media hub, just like Samsung Hub though the difference is that it will be using one single app.

Google Engineering Director Chris Yerga said that this is a planned rebranding for quite sometime now and with new added services, not just app. Google think that this is the perfect time to change the Market name. Google Music will be called now as a Google Play Music.

Android (2.2 and up) Market app will be updated and app for Music, eBook and Movies will be updated as well to incorporate this new brand. There will no changes in sending apps to your phone or tablet however there will be many changes in the way you purchase apps, ebooks, and movies.

Also, Google will be having an app sale!

For more information about the new Google Play, visit the official announcement.

Android apps are getting bigger and bigger so with this increase in the app size, Google increased the size of apps from allowed 50MB to a whooping 4-Gigabyte to be hosted in the Android Market. Android apps like high-quality 3D interactive game with more than 50MB in size are hosted outside the Android Market and developers has this burden due to extra cost of server hosting.  Only the Android application package (APK) is stored inside the market and if you download the app you will download the extra resources from 3rd-party server though it is done automatically.

Who will benefit with this new move from Google? Android Game developers will be the biggest beneficiary because most of the apps that is 50MB-plus in size are Android Games.  The APK file is still at the maximum of 50MB and the main file is split into two expansion files. On newer devices when downloading an app from Android market this expansion files are downloaded automatically and refund will start right after the expansion has been download. For older devices the expansion files will be downloaded via the download library.

For more information about this new rule from Google, visit the official Google Android developer blog.

This means that if developers will develop a music app, the app can be optimize or use Beats Audio technologies. Create newer and smarter lockscreen and widgets that will work with Sense 4.0 and can control the Music app. A music app that can stream multimedia files using the HTC MediaLink Dock and  control the dock using the HTC lockscreen and widget app.

All this app can detect Android phones with Sense 4.0 and once detected it can further enhanced the app’s feature and work at the same time also the app will function in Non-Sense 4.0 smartphpones minus the optimization. This is a great improvement in app development and will reduce work load for developers because they only need to create a single app and update roll outs are faster.

The HTC Open Sense SDK will be available next week and many developers are eager to try this new APIs from HTC and sooner or later we will see some HTC optimized app and probably Android hackers can port this APIs to non-Sense phone. What do you think? Android is all about customization right?

 Cyanogenmod is a 3rd party firmware replacement for most of the Android handsets. It was developed by Steve “cyanogen” Kondik and the community grew  big with more and more developer getting involve to the project plus the crazy support from users who likes to hack their Droids.
Android is an open system where users have the power to modify the system to their liking thus 3rd party firmware developer comes in. It also helps the gap of the Android fragmentation.

The Android update fragmentation is a major headache to consumers. As OEM makes more and more phone and update is quite slow as Google will release a new version of Android and then the OEM will modify the original Android to their needs and add some flavors for their own devices.  With CyanogenMod ROM you can install it to your device and you will have a better system with lots of tweaks, this is one of the reason of the success of 3rd party firmware, not only Cyanogenmod but many others. Users are trying to improve their system performance that original Android and OEM releases can’t provide. Using third party firmware and ROM get rids of any bloatware, add tweaks and fancy to the Android powered devices.

Third party ROM also makes older devices to work with newer Android releases when the manufacturer (OEM) stops providing update to it. One good example is the two year old device  HTC Desire with 237,517 installs and  takes advantage of CyanogenMOD 7 (Android 2.3 Gingerbread based).

If you want to know more about Cyanogenmod get over to the official website and read the manual and wiki.

Via: TNW
Source: Koushik Dutta

For more Philippine Android News just stay tuned here at pinoydroid.net or join our Forum
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The Android OS is free for the reason that this is the way for Google to introduce their product and services to the people. Among the top services are provided by Google are  Gmail, Maps, Google Plus, GTalk, Google Docs and to name a few in both business and social networking services. “Social, local, mobile has been true for humans for at least 10,000 years, so I don’t think it’s going to go away any time soon.” – being said, today’s trend is mobile communication, this includes Mobile Internet, Voice over Internet Protocol, Email and most of all Social Media marketing and Google is rying to be the leader.

In ZDNet article by Stephen Shankland pointed out the main weakness of Android today is Application development. Many app developers prioritize Apple iOS app development over Android. I think this accurate because iOS users are buying more apps compared to Android’s Free apps (with ad support), though Paid apps is also available in Android but not as big as iOS app buyers. In contrast there are more Android app download compared to iOS however most of the numbers of this downloads are free apps.

The Android 4.0 ICS is a revolutionary mobile OS. It is much refine compared to its predecessor, it is fast and currently rolled out in Samsung Galaxy Nexus.  The upgrade for Android 4.0 is coming as early as 2012 and we can see more jump off in the app market sales.

What do you think Apple fans and Android geeks?

Via: ZDNet

For more Philippine Android News just stay tuned here at pinoydroid.net or join our Forum
Subscribe to our mailing list Feeds or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+

Google already released 8 versions of Android in the past 5 years and the latest is the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.  Android continues to dominate the smartphone market, it already over took Apple iOS  in the US. With the strong cooperation between Google and Open Handset Alliance Android is growing stronger despite of patent infringement cases from its main rival Apple Inc.

In the infographic below, shows the Android evolution from its humble beginning to what is now today. It shows every version and new features and improvement added to the OS.

History of Android

Click for Full View

Android will rule the world – pinoydroid.net

Alien Dalvik 2.0 enables the majority of Android apps to run unmodified using Android Package (APK) files and now it supports iOS. Is  this the future of the mobile application development?

This is a good news for developers who will only write one app and it can run on various platform. I am pretty sure that Apple will not allow this but jailbreakers can’t be stop if Apple will try to lock down the iOS for Alien Dalvik.

This support will be useful for non-Android makers for them to have Android apps running on their system, like RIM where their Playbook allows Android apps to be installed but with Alien Dalvik 2.0 it will be painless for them.

• Myriad Alien Dalvik 2.0 to extend Android apps to tablets, TVs, automobiles and more, creating new revenue opportunities and opening up Android ecosystem to new sectors
• Alien Dalvik 2.0 to remove technological barriers to create consistent user experiences and mobilize content across multiple platforms and screens, taking the headache out of fragmentation and content management
• Myriad to demo Android apps on Apple iPad, for the first time, at CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2011

With cool designs and up to 4,400 icons can be used. I am pretty sure that this icon pack is very useful for every Android developers out there.

Download: Android icons pack

• This is the full ROM with no changes EXCEPT to remove identifying watermarks (at the request of my source)
• It’s Gingerbread 2.3.2
• The boot image is included

DOWNLOAD HTC Desire S Leak ROM (ROMraid Load Balancing) – MD5: 8bc4c7c0922b17d04a5178e2cfcbb9cd

Source: Android.Modaco via HTC Source