Follow me on twitter: cuthut.com technobuffalo: technobuffalo.com In this ‘Versus’ battle we put the Motorola Droid (Android 2.0) against the blackberry Storm 2.
In December I wrote about Thwapr, a video-sharing service for mobile videos. Instead of building apps for smartphones, Thwapr chose to make its videos auto-playable on as many phones — smart or dumb — as possible without any software downloads, including apps.
This week, Thwapr has added one-click Facebook and Twitter sharing to video clips hosted at Thwapr, as well as a “Thwap It” button to share over its own social network. The catch is: There’s no catch. You needn’t sign up with Thwapr to share or receive a clip. So it’s just like YouTube.
CTO Eric Hoffert gave me a demo over the phone. As you can see on this test page, all you need to do is click the Facebook or Twitter button to send a tagged link and comment to your own network. The Thwapit button lets you send a message to someone else’s mobile phone, with a link to a video that will automatically play on more than 200 models of phone.
The most serendipitous part of the service, Hoffert says, is that many recipients aren’t aware their phone can play video clips until they click. Says Hoffert: “On a BlackBerry 8330 or a Droid on Verizon, Thwapr serves streaming video in RTSP format. On a more modestly powered Motorola Razr feature phone on Sprint, it serves a downloadable 3GP video file delivered via HTTP. Thwapr knows the pixel resolution of your phone’s screen and whether or not it’s a touchscreen. We resize the video to fit.”
The latest upgrade improves video quality as well. “If you shoot video on a BlackBerry,” Hoffert says, “it’ll play on some other phones with higher resolution than BlackBerry supports. On Android, we’ve just doubled our video quality. It looks great.”
Thwapr was founded in 2007 with funding of $3 million from angel investors . The company is headquartered in New York City and has 15 employees.
Companies: Thwapr
Want newer results when you search Google from your smartphone? Want more or fewer pictures in your results page? Google’s recently begun showing Search Options to a number of smartphone users.
Like its desktop counterpart, Search Options lets you restrict search results to recent time frames, tweak how many non-text results crop up, and perform specialty searches, in this case for forum posts and review sites. There aren’t as many options as on a full-sized browser, and the Options menu is similarly tucked away, on the right-hand side in this version.
Still, the reviews search seems useful for browsing what’s gotten good notice around you, when combined with mobile location, at least. Search Options should show up on iPhone, Android, and Palm WebOS phones; Windows Mobile and BlackBerry users might have to wait a bit.
Originally posted 2009-10-12 18:25:08. Republished by Old Post Promoter
The Google Earth app for the Nexus One Android smartphone is now available for download. The app won’t work on every Android phone, but the Droid version is coming soon. Eventually all phones that run Android 2.1 will be able to use the app.
Previously Apple’s iPhone was the only phone with a Google Earth app. The Google LatLong blog post announcing this new version argues that the Nexus One is a better fit for Google Earth’s 3D interface thanks to its 1 GHz processor and 800 x 480-pixel display. Google says this is the “fastest mobile version of Google Earth yet.”
The Nexus One app has some features the iPhone version doesn’t, notably the road overlay. Google Earth is a lot more fun to use when you can actually use clearly defined roads to navigate. One of the most lauded general features of the Nexus One is voice recognition; the Google Earth app takes advantage of that. For example, you can say “Eiffel Tower” and it will take you there.
Regardless of which device you have, you can pick up the app by visiting http://m.google.com/earth.
Tags: android, droid, Google, google earth, iphone, nexus one
SmartScreen is a killer would-be iPhone add-on (it’s not would-be if you’re jailbroken), Microsoft cries foul, claiming Google Chrome Frame makes IE less secure, and Gmail’s mobile site for iPhone and Android gets a couple of small updates.
Originally posted 2009-09-24 22:50:18. Republished by Old Post Promoter
Smartphones can do some amazing things these days, and the Android Market has quickly become a sandbox for some clever developers, as well as Google Inc. itself.
We’ve already touched on some popular Android apps for Twitter, some for news, and some great multiplayer games, but not all apps have a specific purpose. Some are just interesting, amazing, or too cute not to keep in your back pocket as a conversation starter.
Utility be darned, here are seven free android apps that are just plain cool.
If you’ve lost your passion for Android’s bare bones built-in photo gallery, check out the Floating Image app that will breathe new life into your snaps, as well as pull in some great shots from around the web.
There’s not a whole lot of utility here, but it’s a really sharp looking way to show off your photos or discover some pretty ones from Flickr. You can even score a new home screen background by long-pressing any of the images that float by.
This one is all about the animation, and this video demo shows it off well.
Google SkyMap is an armchair astronomer’s dream come true. Using data from Google Sky and your GPS coordinates, the SkyMap app becomes a handheld window unto the heavens. As you move your phone across the night sky, you can see real-time information on the stars, celestial objects, and constellations as you pass them. You can also disengage the compass view and float freely through the galaxy with your finger, browsing the celestial map or searching for objects at will.
We’ve certainly covered the release of Google Goggles before, but it’s hard to over-stress just how cool this project is. In essence, it’s a visual Google search which utilizes your handset’s camera. Simply view your surroundings through Google Goggles to get an augmented view of the stores and landmarks in your area, or snap a photo of a product or some text to get relevant search results.
In testing, Goggles didn’t recognize the Nike swoosh (one of the simplest and most well-known U.S. logos), but it did know where I was without GPS, and identified a complex logo for Coca-Cola, the American flag, and my DVD of High School Musical 2 [Extended Edition], promptly directing me to Amazon.com where I could purchase a second copy.
Google is also hoping to implement text translation into Goggles, which is not available yet, but is expected in future updates.
Talk To Me is an impressive app that can translate your input text or speech between over 40 different languages, and in most cases, speak the translations back to you. The interface is really dead-simple: An input for text, a drop-down list to choose your languages, and a big green button to activate the speech recognition.
You can even set it as a home screen widget. Simply tap the button, speak a phrase, and the app will speak it back to you in Spanish, German, French, and many other languages that use Roman characters. Support for many Asian languages is included, but currently only provides textual translations.
The speed and ease of translation has a pretty big cool factor, but this is one app on the list that may also be very useful for tourists or those studying a new language.
If you’re out with friends and still on the fence about which flick to catch and where, gather ’round the old Nexus One and fire up the new MovieFone app, which is a great way to get film details without ever touching a mobile browser.
The app, developed by AOL Mobile, gives you all the data from moviefone.com in convenient Android form, including synopses, coming attractions, theater listings based on your location, and perhaps best of all, full trailer videos built right in.
If you simply must get your nerd on, the Android Lightsaber app, which is officially sanctioned by LucasArts, brings the power of the Force (or a Force-like substance) into the palm of your hand. Choose between five different Star Wars characters, each with their own unique saber color, then tap the screen to unleash your weapon.
Swing your handset for the classic wooshing and buzzing sounds. Your lightsaber will flash and crackle as you spar with invisible foes. Perhaps the best part is the 1-click epic music that you can switch on in the midst of your imaginary battle.
BubbleBeats is brand new in the Market and injects some much-needed creativity into Android’s music library. The concept is difficult to explain, but it essentially creates a visual landscape for your music collection by way of multicolored, animated bubbles.
Each bubble represents a song that you add to the canvas. Resize and group your bubbles however you want — perhaps a gathering of red rock songs on the left, some blue blues bubbles on the right — and float around your custom bubble-scape, playing your favorite tunes at will simply by tapping their corresponding bubbles.
This one’s certainly not for everyone. Finding and arranging music on this sort of interface can be difficult. But it’s a unique way to visualize your collection, and experiment with a new approach to the playlist. Check out the developer’s video below to see what I mean.
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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, robnroll
Tags: android, Android apps, apps, droid, Fun, G1, games, Google, google goggles, Mobile 2.0, nexus one
Android: Google’s already got Goggles for visual search, and Google Shopper’s mobile site can run bar-code scans. Google Shopper, then, is a free app that combines some those features together in one package for those who love to find a deal.
Unlike Goggles, which aims to provide a greater search by image functionality, Shopper only wants you to take pictures of “cover art”—books, CDs, DVDs, and other items with consistent images and iconography. It can also perform bar-code scans when it doesn’t quite get the picture, and if neither of those are working, you can simply type in the name of the product, or just say it for Google’s hard-working voice-to-text translator.
In a test on a few objects this morning, Shopper was pretty impressive when it came to books and CDs. It was fast and efficient, too, over a (T-Mobile) 3G connection, bringing back results almost instantly. In the example pictured up top, the result was slightly askew—an audiobook CD instead of a paper book—but the results included the right product. Those results arrive in the form of a simple item-store-price list, though, and could be a bit more helpful. For our money, ShopSavvy offers a greater convenience, when it works, because it provides local prices, gives directions to get to the store with the better price, and has a more robust history and wishlist functionality.
Here’s the standard Google video demonstration of its latest mobile search offering:
Google Shopper is a free download for Android phones. If you’ve gotten surprisingly good or bad results from this app, or have another preferred mobile shopping tool, tell us about them in the comments.
iPhone/iPod touch: We’ve been fans of popular chat app Meebo for a while, so it’s great to hear they’ve released a version for the iPhone that competes with premium chat apps in the App Store but doesn’t cost a dime.
Meebo sports push notifications that activate automatically when the app is closed so you can keep in touch even when Meebo isn’t running, and it syncs between your iPhone and desktop app so you don’t miss a beat communicating with your contacts. It’s got all the features its web-based cousin has—like full chat history and integration with Facebook, AIM, and Yahoo.
Landscape mode and other little niceties like the ability to add Away messages make using Meebo on the iPhone a joy. It doesn’t have a whole bunch of useless features weighing it down so the learning curve on this app takes about 10 seconds.
If you’re not rocking an iPhone, Meebo hasn’t forgotten about you. The service already has apps for Android (and a mobile web site for other smartphones).
Now that instant messaging apps are finding their way off the desktop and onto mobile devices, what features would you like to see in future versions. Dream big in the comments.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system looks snazzy and up-to-date, but it will be at a disadvantage in the handset market because Microsoft plans to charge carriers to use it on its devices.
CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday that Microsoft won’t be leaving behind the old Windows Mobile licensing model, so
Business Insider estimated the numbers to see if the old model is worth sticking to. The conclusion: Probably not.
Competing platform Google Android is free if handset-makers and carriers want to use it, while the other two biggies — Apple’s iPhone OS and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS — are only put on phones made by Apple and RIM, respectively.
Android is well-poised to become the Windows of smartphones in the coming months and years — the ubiquitous, default platform installed on the great majority of devices.
Obviously, Microsoft wants the Windows of smartphones to be, well, Windows. But handset makers are going to be squeamish about taking $5, $10 or $20 out of the profits for each handset sold and giving it to Microsoft when it can provide its consumers with comparable features at higher profits by going with Android instead.
Sure, Microsoft could hike up the prices of Windows phones so the consumers pay the license fee, but would consumers go for that, especially when Android has a head start in building a large library of useful apps?
On the other hand, Microsoft has not had a lot of success with “free” in the past. If it can beat the competition in features then the cost is justified. For example, Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service charges an annual fee while Sony’s PlayStation Network does not, but there are enough extra perks that few people complain about it.
We just haven’t seen any evidence that Windows Phone 7 has the same edge over Android as Xbox Live does over the PlayStation Network.
Tags: android, microsoft, windows mobile, windows phone 7
General Mobile — maker of the DSTL1 dual-SIM Android phone — has always walked a fine line between KIRF and originality with its phones, and its latest batch is no different. Normally it’s easy to resist a device widely regarded as a knockoff (for most of us, anyhow), but in the case of the newest model here, General Mobile’s actually managed to answer a question HTC’s failed to so far: where the hell is the HD2 with Android? The so-called “Touch Stone” (deep breaths, Palm) rings true to many of the actual HD2’s specs, from the 5 megapixel camera to the 4.3-inch capacitive WVGA display, but this sucker adds an “optional” analog TV tuner (which won’t do countries with digital transitions any good) and Android 2.0 atop an ARM9-based PXA935 core. Sadly, this phone doesn’t quite exist yet — we were shown a dummy model today with the promise of retail toward the end of the year, at which point HTC and others will undoubtedly have phones like the Supersonic on the shelf. If you’ll excuse us, we need a cold shower, but you’ll find more shots of the Touch Stone along with the Cosmos (launching soon) and Cosmos 2 dummy (launching… well, eventually) in the gallery.
General Mobile’s Touch Stone: how can something so wrong be so right? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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