Tuesday, January 18, 2011

First NFC apps appear in the Nexus S Android Market

It doesn't mean much yet but in a few more weeks more and more apps will start appearing. Go ahead all you wonderfully smart people and buy your iPhone 4 on Verizon that has NO NFC chip... yes, buy devices that are outdated.

Amplify’d from www.mobileburn.com

First NFC apps appear in the Nexus S Android Market

Some of the first NFC capable appliations for Google's Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system are appearing on the market. The Android Market on the Google Nexus S now offers two: Enable Table NFC and Taglet NFC. Taglet is a Japanese language application for transferring data, while the English language Enable Table can be used to earn "welcome back" coupons at the end of a meal by tapping the phone onto the check holder's NFC tag. You can find these two apps by searching on "NFC" in the Android Market on compatible devices.

Read more at www.mobileburn.com
 

Monday, January 10, 2011

This will be interesting to see but wouldn't run out and buy. -- Best of Show CES 2011: The Motorola Atrix

Talk about an interesting concept and a great 1st gen. Way to step it up Motorola but honestly I wouldn't buy this from them. If you own a Motorola device right now you will understand why... they are crappy and apps run terribly on them. After discussing it indepth with a co-worker today a device like this may have peaked interest from a maker such as Apple but definitely not Motorola.



How crazy expensive do you think the dock will be? Will that really be useful?

Amplify’d from ces.crunchgear.com

Best of Show CES 2011: The Motorola Atrix
Best of Show CES 2011: The Motorola Atrix

We’re all back at home this morning and I’ve been mulling over best of show all weekend. While we could take our love of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Minis to its obvious conclusion, considering that the candies eventually and inevitably turn into a sloppy mess when you hold them in your hand too long, we decided against it. Instead, we’ve chosen the unique and decidedly game-changing Motorola Atrix.

First, let me state that it was slim pickings out there. The show was, at best, a placeholder. Many of the major company events were actual snores (if you watched our live stream, you’d have seen that LG whipped out a fridge and washer combo and talked about Six Sigma for a bit, always a crowd-pleaser) and the only exciting event was the Motorola launch of the Xoom Honeycomb tablet and an odd phone that shouldn’t have captured our imaginations but definitely did: the Atrix.

The Atrix is a dual-core Android phone with a twist. The phone itself is fairly unremarkable but when paired with a keyboard and HDTV or the Atrix “laptop dock” the device becomes a netbook. The phone becomes the processor and everything is driven from the Atrix’s on-board storage. Although you’re not going to be running “real” applications, the built-in Webtop interface allows access to most mobile apps and, barring that, you can always run Android apps on a larger screen, adding offline and online productivity. Add in some Citrix support and you’ve got a winner.

Why did this win? Well, it was innovative and it was obvious. Many have tried and failed to do the same thing including Palm and a company called Redfly. However, no one has succeeded. What Motorola did is offer two separate potential paths for accessing your phone in a larger format – either via HDMI or via a separate piece of hardware. This means you don’t actually have to invest in a special peripheral if you don’t want to and, once you realize you love the Atrix’s feature set, you can upgrade to the laptop dock. You don’t have to use the Atrix’s most important feature, which is what makes it especially compelling.

We could have named any of the “me-too” tablets at CES but even Motorola’s own Xoom isn’t “real” yet because Honeycomb isn’t available and the rest of the devices seemed rushed at best. I suspect MWC and CTIA will bring us more compelling devices. As for the “smart” TVs if you’ve followed the market at all you’ll agree that sticking a web interface into a TV is a horrible idea. If there’s one thing TV manufacturers aren’t good at it’s offering updates for their devices. A TV is a monolithic device and updates aren’t a good idea when you’re talking about a consumer base that ranges from my Grandma to Bill Gates. The less you offer in a TV the better and to stick company-branded whozits, widgets, and whatzits on the screen is the last thing you want. A side-loading set-top box for those who need one (see Google TV)? Excellent. A built-in web interface? Absolutely not – at least not yet.

So that leaves us with the Atrix. I suspect what Motorola is really doing here is offering a new method for phone expansion akin the the all-but-dead Modu. However, what they’ve really done is breathed life into the same-old-same-old tired cavalcade of devices that tired manufactures rolled out at CES. For that, at least, we thank them.

Read more at ces.crunchgear.com
 

Friday, January 7, 2011

ComScore: Android jumps ahead of iOS in total US smartphone subscribers

Knew this was going to happen! Screw you Apple... screw you!

Amplify’d from www.engadget.com

ComScore: Android jumps ahead of iOS in total US smartphone subscribers

We've seen plenty of data to show that Android is the hottest-selling smartphone OS among US buyers today, but now we have a stat point to show that it's doing pretty well in cumulative terms as well. According to ComScore's latest estimates, Android had 26 percent of all US smartphone subscribers in the quarter ending November 2010, bettering Apple's iPhone for the first time. The major victim of Android's ascendancy has actually been RIM's BlackBerry, whose lead at the top contracted by 4.1 percentage points (nearly 11 percent less than the share it had in the previous quarter). Guess those Verizon iPhones and dual-core BBs had better start arriving pretty soon.
Read more at www.engadget.com