Find: Is Amazon Working on an Android Kindle?

Kindle needs to get cheaper if it is to survive (free with subscription?). But does it need to? Only if amz wants a closed ecosystem, and they don't seem to now. 

Find: Android 2.2 is now the dominant version of Google's OS with 61.3 percent

Gingerbread at 1.7%, Honeycomb at 0.3%.

Find: Smart Cover magnets can turn your Apple tablet into a FridgePad

Haha! Don't forget about the peanut butter kiddie fingers.

Find: BlackBerry PlayBook priced at $500 for 16GB WiFi model, pre orders today

Playbook says "hutt 1"

Find: 'Hummer' handsets now account for 24 percent of US smartphone sales, prove Steve Jobs wrong

Remember when Steve Jobs had a dig at Apple's mobile competition and proclaimed that "no one" would buy their Hummer-like 4-inch-plus smartphones? Well, going by the latest NPD data, that group of "no ones" among US smartphone consumers is now a meaty 24 percent. Separating handsets into screen categories of 3.4 inches and below, 3.5 to 3.9 inches, and those above 4 inches, the stat mavens discovered that the midrange is holding steady, but smaller-screened devices are starting to lose out to their jumbo-sized brethren. No prizes for guessing that Android-powered devices were behind that big sales increase, with the HTC EVO 4G and Motorola Droid X leading the way, followed by Samsung's multivariate Galaxy S range. Now, care to tell us more about our mobile future, Steve?

[Thanks, Skylar]

Disclaimer: NPD's Ross Rubin is a contributor to Engadget.

Continue reading 'Hummer' handsets now account for 24 percent of US smartphone sales, prove Steve Jobs wrong

'Hummer' handsets now account for 24 percent of US smartphone sales, prove Steve Jobs wrong originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  NPD  | 

Sent from my iPhone

Find: HTC EVO 3D first hands-on!

Bad idea. 

Find: Windows Phone 7 update starts rolling out, brings copy / paste

Finally!

Find: Android in-app billing coming next week, starts developer testing today

Google promised us the ability to buy stuff while inside Android apps, and sure enough, it's now just about ready to deliver it. Eric Chu, responsible for the company's Android Developer Ecosystem, has announced app submissions are now being accepted from those wanting to offer up purchasable items within their software. He also points out there'll be about a week's worth of internal testing before the whole system opens up to the public, likely before the end of the month so that Google may stick to its word of rolling out the service in the first quarter of this year. Once that's done, you'll finally be able to buy your way to in-game glory instead of having to grind away at it like some unenlightened schmo.

Android in-app billing coming next week, starts developer testing today originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Mar 2011 06:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Android Developers  | Email this | Comments

Sent from my iPhone

Studio: second crit begins

Folks,

Tuesday we will begin our second crits.

We have several goals this time around:

• Respond to the comments you received in the first crit.
• Improve your prototype -- go higher fidelity
• e.g. slide to slide linking in Powerpoint
• e.g. a bit on the phone -- but only front end
• Compare your plans to existing apps, even if they are not very similar

Best,

Ben.

Lecture: text (updated)

Folks,

Next Thursday I will lecture about text input on mobiles, with notes (updated) here, and images here. Please read the following papers in preparation:

• Seungyon Lee and Shumin Zhai. 2009. The performance of touch screen soft buttons. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 309-318.
• Antal van den Bosch and Toine Bogers. 2008. Efficient context-sensitive word completion for mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services (MobileHCI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 465-470.
• Lewis, James R.; Commarford, Patrick M.; Kennedy, Peter J.; Sadowski, Wallace J. 2008. Handheld Electronic Devices. Reviews of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 4, 105-148. For this week, please read only the "Alphanumeric input" section.

Other papers of interest:

• Zhai, S., Kristensson, P.O., Gong, P., Greiner, M., Peng, S., Liu, L. Dunnigan, A., Shapewriter on the iPhone: from the laboratory to the real world. ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts. pp. 2667-2670.
• Tim Paek, Kenghao Chang, Itai Almog, Eric Badger, and Tirthankar Sengupta. 2010. A practical examination of multimodal feedback and guidance signals for mobile touchscreen keyboards. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services (MobileHCI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 365-368. 

Fond: Insert punchline: Duke Nukem Forever delayed again

Hah hah.

Find: Motorola reportedly building new HTML-powered mobile platform

Bad idea. 

Find: rim will put its tablet os on "superphones". What's next? Superduperphones? Puhleez!

Find: RIM adds Android app support to BlackBerry PlayBook

Smart, if they work well. Will they integrate well?

Find: RIM deems BlackBerry OS 6.1 a 'major upgrade,' promises a spring release

We weren't expecting to hear too much about it, but RIM's year-end / Q4 fiscal 2011 earnings call uncovered a good bit of information surrounding BlackBerry OS 6.1. As you've likely learned by now, we weren't exactly throwing our iPhones and Droids into the nearest refuse bin after handling the Torch, and it seems as if quite a few bigwigs at RIM were equally disappointed. In response to a question about the rollout of BB OS 6.1, we were told that it would truly be a "major upgrade" over what's out there now, and rather than being an incremental update, it'll be more like "an overhaul." The company made no bones about its excitement for the release, and frankly, we're having a hard time keeping our expectations in check after listening in. Thankfully, we'll be able to get our paws on it at some point this spring, with a number of elements to be teased at BlackBerry World this May. Naturally, we'll be there to keep you up-to-date with how it's rolling along.

RIM deems BlackBerry OS 6.1 a 'major upgrade,' promises a spring release originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Sent from my iPhone

Find: Apple sues Amazon for App Store trademark infringement

Hey, it's MY app store. But they may have a point: did you hear of an app before the iphone?

Find: webOS 2.1 SDK now available to all comers

WebOS for all!

Find: AT&T agrees to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion

Watch your wallets. Maybe FCC will find its inner regulator and make wireless neutral.