T-Mobile USA has confirmed an early-August myTouch launch in the US which will be based on the same HTC Magic seen overseas recently. The myTouch in the US will have essentially the same features as the overseas version, plus a focus on customization via wallpapers, icons and the Sherpa personality learning program that will help find restaurants and attractions that interest you.
The phone will come in black, white and merlot colors. Features include a 3.2mp camera, included 4Gb microSD card, 3.2 HVGA touch screen, and one-touch video and photo upload capabilities for YouTube and Picasa.
First off, sorry for the corny headline. Second, the fabled Samsung Bigfoot has actually appeared in a recent photo from BGR. If you missed it, the Samsung Bigfoot is supposedly the successor to the T-Mobile G1 – AKA G1 Version 2, or G2. The rumored specs are:
Sure there are some great applications in the Android Market for stay up-to-date with sports, but Google once again has to trump them all and release the killer app – Google Scoreboard. Straight from Google, Scoreboard allows you to: “Access daily sports scores for Football, Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Soccer, and College Sports. Get Live in-game notifications for your favorite teams.” Check it out in the Android Market, it’s totally free.
Silverlight, Microsoft’s rich Internet application browser plugin, may soon be seen on Android handsets. The news comes from Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie who told TechRadar.com “[The] Google phone is slightly different. It’s more of an open platform, that is something we’re going to continue to look at. Certainly as it’s gotten deployed and if sales are good we’ll definitely keep our eyes out and look at that in the future.”
Apple made a confusing and more-than-likely bad decision to keep Adobe’s comparable Flash plugin off of the iPhone for unknown reasons. This also kept Microsoft’s Silverlight from appearing on the iPhone as well. If Silverlight or Flash are seen on Android phones before the iPhone, it could possibly be a killer blow to iPhone sales.
Sure, we’ve seen plenty of Android demos in the last 8 months, but it’s not every day that Andy Rubin steps in to give a demo of the OS. That’s exactly what he did for CNET Asia the other day. Rubin used a device that “had a shape and dimensions very similar to the HTC TyTN II”, but CNET was not allowed to photograph the device. Rubin stated that the OS requires a minimum 200Mhz processor, so we know whatever the device was it ran at or above that speed. Read the rest of the article over at CNET.
Rich Miner, Google’s head of the mobile-platform division, reveals a few details about Google’s larger plans for Android.
Q: Why get into the phone business?
A: I wouldn’t say we’re getting into the phone business. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible. In many parts of the world, people are never going to have computers. They’re going to have mobile phones. We’re just using phones as a way to deliver on our mission.
Q: Aren’t there other open-source phones out there?
A: There’s open-source, and there’s what the industry refers to as open. There are other Linux-based initiatives but all of the other things you need to build a phone, like media codecs [software decoders], Web browsers, phone dialers, databases, security models—all that stuff is built on top of Linux in ways that aren’t necessarily open. Linux ends up being a very small portion. Everything a developer needs to build a phone, we’re releasing open-source.
Q: Have you seen any particularly impressive or original applications?
A: Somebody wrote an application that would notify him when the bus was turning down his street so he wouldn’t have to stand out in the rain.
Q: Will an Android application have a sort of security seal of approval to let users know that they’re not junky or vulnerable to hackers?
A: The Android platform protects the user from buggy applications. Software can’t read your address book or dial your phone without your knowing about it, for example. But we don’t want to put big hurdles in front of a developer to have to go pay and get something certified and stamped for every single handset they want to be on. We think that’s one of the things that limits innovation.
Q: Do you use an Android phone now?
A: Yes, and I have been for a year. It’s called dog-fooding—in our industry, to “eat your own dog food” is the phrase.
UPDATE: The Revamp is almost complete, just need to drop in my logos and it should be good to go. Let me know if anything is missing. Also, there is no integration of user accounts between the blog and the forums.
In the next couple of days, expect some serious downtime for the site. We’re preparing for a large release of Android on a solid platform, which means heavy traffic. Up until now, AndroidBoards was kind of a side project, but with the new traffic and interest I’ve seen in the site, I think I’m going to take this off the back burner and give it it’s own personal server.
I could always use some help with submissions!
For those of you who care, the new version of AndroidBoards will be running on Wordpress with a PhpBB forum back-end. I am going to export the current phpBB database, rebuild a new version and drop Wordpress on top of it all with user integration (hopefully!). This could take a bit more time than I expected, so if you see the site down for several days, I’ll probably be glad to accept some help getting it back up.
It’s been spotted. Check the video below to see a great step forward in Android. I’m stoked.
Video of the Keynote, given by Google vice president Vic Gondotra, is available on YouTube. The Android walkthrough by Google engineering director Steve Horowitz starts at 21:07.
Thats what the chief operating officer of the chipset division at wireless technology and solution firm Qualcomm had to say about Google Android’s purpose while speaking to the Register.
That was not all, he went on to state that Google wants to ensure that there is no equivalent of Microsoft Office in the mobile phone market. So it seems Google’s plan for Android is more than just offering an Linux based Open-Source operating system, making sure that Microsoft does not get a iron grip on the mobile market with it’s office products is very important.
Microsoft’s Office Suite in my opinion is the best that they have to offer, and as bad as they are that fact cannot be denied. Google Applications are very important for Google going forward with Android, i mean, thats one of the reasons they push for openness in the FCC Wireless Spectrum so Google Applications are no lomger restricted from being downloaded on to Android Devices.
Maybe it was a slip of the tongue, or simply naivity of the “ramifications” of having an open-source (Read: not locked down by AT&T) phone, but yesterday at CTIA, Ralph de la Vega of AT&T stated in regard to Android that “If it’s good for customers we’ll offer it like any other OS.”
Well, we all know that it is good for the customers, so lets see some follow through, AT&T!
Recent Comments