Imagine this with Bing inside. It’s easy if you try.
If I were a spit takin’ man, I’d do a spit take right now. Motorola, stalwart of freedom, will work with Chinese carriers to add Bing to Chinese Android-based phones, ousting Google Search and Maps from the scene. Now this isn’t meanness on Motorola’s part although Reuters notes that this move could have something to do with that whole Great Chinese Google Hacking Incident a few weeks ago.
Considering most Google interaction in Android comes in the form of widgets – Motorola has their own syncing system and UI, for example, called MotoBLUR which stores your information in the could for easy uploading to any MotoBLUR phone (think of the way the Sidekick used to do it and how great that went for them) – and apps. Because Android is ostensibly open, you can take the source and put whatever you want on it. To wit: AT&T stuck Yahoo onto the new Backflip.
So while this all may seem fairly political, it probably isn’t. Search is search and Android is Android, in the end, and when and if Google decides to get vindictive with Android adopters – cutting out major functionality if you fail to use Google apps, for example, then things will really get hairy.
I can’t think of too many use cases for this, but they did it: A team of researchers from the University of Tokyo (Japan’s MIT if you will) has developed a technology that makes it possible to “physically” convey emotions from cell phone to cell phone. The key elements of the technology are a sensor and a Peltier device that’s attached to the back of the phones.
When you start sweating and become emotionally agitated during a phone call, a sensor built into your cell phone detects changes in the electrical resistance of the skin of your hand (which holds the handset). This data is sent to the handset of the person you are currently talking with, along with the usual phone signal. Then, a Peltier device attached to the back of the handset of that person starts heating up, making him or her really understand you are angry, excited or surprised.
The researchers say there’s a time lag of just two seconds to convey the change in emotion. The Peltier device is able to heat up to 9C above room temperature, but it can also cool down to 3.6C below room temperature. In that case, you know the person you are talking with is either emotionally neutral or getting calmer again.
My apologies for the silly picture – there were no official pictures available.
Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
Just yesterday we were saying that Casio’s built-to-be-beaten G’zOne Brigade would be launching today — and sure enough, it just went live on Verizon’s web site.
As a rugged phone, it’s flagship feature is that it’s.. well, a rugged phone. These things usually don’t pack much functionality beyond that. This one, however, sneaks a full QWERTY keyboard into its clamshell body, along with push to talk, visual voice mail, and a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash.
Alas, durability doesn’t come cheap; the G’zOne will set you back $299 on a 2-year contract, though they’ll knock that down to $249 if you buy it online.
Sure, Opera Mini may (or may not) already be the most popular mobile browser in the world — but why stop there? Following up on the Android release of Opera Mobile 4 just over a year ago, Opera has just launched Opera Mini 5 for Android into public beta.
The jump from version 4 to version 5 is pretty huge, introducing a handful of features that Opera says “makes your mobile browsing experience as close as it can be to your desktop experience.”
The biggest change here is probably the introduction of tabbed browsing — a must, given that just about every default smartphone browser supports it out of the box at this point.
Some of the other big new features:
Speed Dial: Gives you one-touch access to 9 of your favorite sites.
Password Manager
Opera Link: Syncs your bookmarks (and Speed Dial) between your handset and your desktop (be it that you’re running Opera on your desktop, that is)
Is Opera Mini 5 a worthy contender to the default Android browser? I’d say so. Opera Mini’s primary selling point is that they pipe everything through a data compression proxy before sending it to your handset. For those days when 3G just isn’t as fast as it should be, it’ll save you time; for those of us not on unlimited data plans, it’ll save some money. Alas, the current Beta doesn’t support multi-touch, which may very well be a deal-killer for some
Still: throw in Opera Mini 5’s seemingly rock solid build quality and its pretty dang decent UI, and I’d say it’s worth giving it a serious test session at the very least. Look for it in the Android App Market.
You know the good feeling you get when you think about how your computer is running Folding@home all the time, or that you’ve been careful to clip six-pack rings all your life? Well, soon you might have one more warm fuzzy feeling, if this project underway at Intel Labs Berkeley comes through. They’re designing portable air-quality sensors that monitor and sample the air around you throughout the day and allow it to be shared and analyzed later.
The current sensors are a little bigger than a phone, but one “long-term” plan is to use mobiles as sampling points; just write an app, add a sensor to the phone (could be an accessory), and let people do their thing. It could upload quality, temperature, and GPS location in real-time. Sounds good to me, I just hope it doesn’t kill my battery.
Take a break from reading our hard-hitting news coverage and take a look at these cute little things. Perfect stocking stuffer (I know, a little early) for your favorite app developer and/or iPhone fanatic. What with these things, those Android pillows, and all the other tech knickknacks I’ve been seeing, it seems that pretty soon they’re going to need a whole online store just to hold all of them.
Tired of all that boring ol’ two finger pinching-and-zooming and swiping on the iPhone? Ready for some fancy new gestures to be thrown into the mix? Wish granted. Soon. Maybe.
Last night, Apple released a new beta of iPhone OS 3.2 to developers. As is par for the course at this point, people almost instantly began tearing through the OS looking for secrets hidden within – and it looks like they just found one.
Tucked deep within the file system is a set of gesture recognizers, defining which fancy finger tricks that iPhone OS can recognize. In this latest build, it seems that two new gestures have made the list: “3tap” and “LongPress”. While no one has nailed out any way to make use of either just yet, we’re pretty sure we can deduce what they are from the names: three finger tapping, and long-hold presses.
Neither of these are really brand new; long-hold presses are already used by Apple to rearrange apps on the homescreen, and developers could have been detecting three-finger taps manually from the beginning. Their presence as official gestures, however, indicates that Apple might be looking to make them more easily accessible to developers and more widely used throughout the OS.
I’m having a hard time thinking of ways that a three-finger press could be used in an intuitive way where alternatives wouldn’t work just as well. Any ideas? Let us know in the comments below.
Update: As Mike points out in the comments, “3tap” could also mean 3 taps in quick succession. For example, 2 quick taps on a map could be zoom, while 3 quick taps could be super zoom. What say you?
Handset manufacturers are usually pretty good about holding their tongue about specific release dates until the launch date is a sure thing, so it’s not too often that we see delays in the mobile world. What’s even more rare than a delay, however, is something shipping way earlier than expected.
And yet, that seems to be exactly the case with the HTC Legend.
No one was expecting this thing to launch until April, but a handful of forumgoers over at Dutch gadget blog Tweakers.net are reporting that their lovely new aluminum uni-bodied handsets arrived fresh from the factory early this morning. Alas, there’s still no official word as to whether or not this thing is ever coming stateside (though unofficial word points to “Yes.”) [Via Engadget]
Don’t get mad at me—I wanted to go to GDC, but The Man said no. So now we’re relying on CNET to bring us word of Epic Games’ efforts to bring the Unreal Engine to the iPhone. You may not have even played Unreal for several years, but plenty of big games are based on the engine. Mass Effect and BioShock are based on versions of the engine, as is EA’s upcoming Medal of Honor. Just think: playing Unreal on your iPhone. It’s almost… unreal.
The engine is written entirely for the PC, and it goes from PC to Mac to iPhone. It’s quite a bit of work to port over, yes. Just think: on the PC, the engine can count on multi-core processors to drive the whole show. One core for this, one core for that. The iPhone 3GS, fast as it is (by smartphone standards), cannot compare with the likes of the Intel Core i7. Breaking news, I know.
It does seem that the hardest part is getting all those high-resolution textures down to iPhone size. Epic uses something called DXT to compress the textures, a technology that Apple doesn’t support on the iPhone. So Epic has to both shrink the textures beforehand and then drop the quality by quite a bit. Will you really care when you’re playing the latest FPS on your iPhone at a steady 30 frames per second? I doubt it.
This is the Unreal Engine 3.0 we’re talking about, remember, not some 1999 technology nonsense.
WAAAAY back in November, Casio and Verizon showed off the G’zOne Brigade, an ultra-durable clamshell phone with a surprise QWERTY keyboard packed inside. “Push to talk!” they said. “It’s weatherproof!” they said. And then the radio went silent; nearly four months later, not so much as a release date had been mentioned.
Well, it looks like the release might sneak up on us, with a shelf date as early as tomorrow. We just got a flurry of tips indicating as much, all of which came in within a few minutes of each other. When the tips avalanche like that, it usually indicates that the store employees themselves just found out and felt like spreading the news.
We’ll work on digging up a bit more confirmation as to whether or not this thing is shipping tomorrow (drop us a line at tips@mobilecrunch.com if you know), so don’t go breaking your current, non-rugged phone in the mean time.
You know what weirds me right the hell out? Companies doing their own unboxing videos. That’s our job. I realize they’re probably proud of their work and are just itching to show it off, but a new handset getting its first video unboxing by the company that made it is like a dad taking his own daughter to prom. Wrong? Not technically. Kind of awkward? Absolutely.
Oh well. Sony Ericsson decided to debox their ultra-pretty Android phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, themselves. Go ahead and watch it after the jump — I won’t be too hurt.
A bundle of screenshots just hit the net showing off the latest Direct3D-based mobile games running on a WinPho7 device, adn they look pretty hot. We knew that the Tegra chipset in the Zune HD and likely in several upcoming WinPho handsets (Tegra 2, to be precise) is capable of some nice 3D, but these are better than anything I’ve seen yet. The game shown is The Harvest, a dungeon crawler which, if indicative of the general quality of WinPho7 games, portends good times to be had.
In slightly less-enthralling news, it seems that the Zune HD will be sticking with XNA 3.1. Hmm. So basically the Zune HD is being abandoned as far as game development — bad news for Zune owners, since it means less value for their device and suggests an upcoming Zune HD 2 or Super HD or HDX or whatever name they come up with. Zune HD 7 Series?
Do you love Android? Like, really love Android? So much so that those Android action figures just don’t seem like enough? Well, now there’s a way for you to show the world how much you really care about your favorite OS: by bringing it to bed with you.
Now, now, get your mind out of the gutter (There are no intentional innuendos anywhere in this post. Honest!). Etsy seller Craftsquatch has just started churning out the Android-themed throw pillows you see above for $19.99 a pop. If you want one of these, you may want to act fast for two reasons: A) it’s Etsy, so its handmade, thus inherently being limited edition and B) we’re guessing that, unlike the aforementioned Android toys, this use of the Android logo isn’t exactly licensed.
Samsung’s pretty proud of their Super AMOLED technology – and why shouldn’t they be? With next to no fanfare, they managed to knock out the readability issues that plagued AMOLED handsets any time they were within view of the sun. And if vastly improved readability wasn’t enough, they went and slimmed the whole thing down into a package considerably tighter than the competition’s not-so-sun friendly offerings.
Samsung’s compiled a nifty little video showing off all the reason why their Super AMOLED displays deserve their name.
Interestingly, they left out any sort of audio track. Come on, Samsung – this is 2010. We’ve been nursed by booming bass, and embraced by endless loops. If it doesn’t have a crazy techno soundtrack, how do you expect to keep our attention? Don’t worry, dear reader; I’ve got your back. Press play on the provided track below, then start the video.
Given that the HTC Touch Pro 2 saw upgrades to Windows Mobile 6.5 on just about every other carrier months ago, Sprint Touch Pro 2 owners might be feeling a wee bit rebuffed right now. On the brightside, chances are good that the upgrade is coming eventually, right?
Well, it looks like “eventually” might be sooner than later.
PPCGeeks forumgoer Platin465 scanned in the above table from a Sprint Small Business Catalog which indicates that the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade will be coming down the pipes some time in March.
Also worth noting: whoever made that table sucks terribly at making tables. Why the heck would you list “Windows Mobile 6.5″, “Android Market”, and “BlackBerry App World” as separate comparison items? No phone is ever going to have more than one. Just list what operating system they have and call it a day.
If you’ve been messing with the App World on your favorite BlackBerry device lately only to be plagued by some nasty glitch, you might want to check out the brand-spankin’-new App World update that just went live — it might have fixed it.
I say “might” here because, well, we’re not really sure whats changed. RIM didn’t release a changelog, and the only thing people have noticed so far is that it runs “smoother”, which may very well be a subconscious side effect of having just updated something.
We’ll update you if we get any positive confirmation about any changes – in the mean while, feel free to go dig through the new build and let us know if you find anything. It’s like an Easter egg hunt!
Good news, everyone! We’ve got another acronym for you to remember! Back at CES 2010, Palm announced that they’d be launching a “PDK” at some point in the future – and, well, it’s here, and it’s time to pay some attention to it.
You see, “PDK” stands for “Plug-in Development Kit” (as opposed to “SDK”, or Software Development Kit). Being that webOS is built on various web technologies, its been tough for them to get any boastable number of games into their app store — it’s tough to design a killer 3D game in HTML and Javascript, you know? That’s where the PDK comes in.
The PDK allows programmers to execute native C and C++ code in webOS apps. Ran through the geek translator, that means that game developers can make radically more intensive games in a programming language they’re long accustomed to working with. Even better, it helps folks who have already designed games on other platforms (coughiPhonecough) port their games over to webOS with considerably less effort, as they can use code they’ve already written. It’s still not a matter of pressing a button and flipping a switch, but it’s less mind-blowingly-difficult now.
Be sure to check out Palm’s FAQ on the topic here. It seems like Palm actually fielded questions from developers , like this gem:
Q: Does the webOS PDK amount to an admission that your original SDK was not robust enough to produce compelling applications?
Not at all! Palm remains fully committed to the web as a mobile development platform, and the App Catalog today features thousands of compelling applications built using the current webOS SDK. The webOS PDK complements the webOS SDK by allowing developers to use C and C++ code in their webOS apps when it makes sense for business reasons (like leveraging existing code) or technical reasons (like implementing functionality not currently achievable using web technology alone). 3D games are one category where the PDK is a great fit for both business and technical reasons.
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