It was at the beginning of February that the Dropbox team took the "simplify your life" motto to new levels by introducing an experimental build for Android users which had a number of excellent feature enhancements. The beta build was known as the 'Experimental Android Forum Build 2.0.9' and brought additional features to the already impressive Dropbox service by introducing automatic background uploading of photographs and videos as well as support for increased upload sizes and the ability to resume an upload after an interruption.
One of the advantages that Android has over iOS is that users have more control over their user-experience. If they are dissatisfied with the stock keyboard, launcher, music app etc., they can just head out to Android Market and download something that fits their needs. This may be perceived as Android being an OS that “doesn’t work out of the box”, but it’s more about giving users more choice.
As the days and week progress, it would seem that the ongoing legal animosity between Apple and Motorola will continue to grow and cause disruption not only to both companies but also to their customers. This time, it is the turn of German users of Apple’s iCloud and MobileMe push services to suffer, thanks to a patent lawsuit which is currently going through proceedings between the two companies.
The debate over whether iOS or Android is the best home for smartphone app developers is one that has been raging for some time, and one that shows no sign of abating.
It would seem that Apple are on a solo mission to single-handedly conquer and dominate every market that they choose to enter. I am pretty sure they could take any mediocre product, apply their own engineering magic, then slap an Apple logo on it and turn it into massively saleable item all around the world. Their unique attention to detail, design and marketing seems to ensure that every product they release achieves huge success time and time again.
This post could easily just be an embedded YouTube video alongside just one word - "WOW" - and that would probably suffice. That said, we like to offer a little more insight than that here at Redmond Pie so here goes.
Despite HP giving up on the HP TouchPad a long time ago, the Android development community continues to support it in the form of regular updates, stability upgrades and bug fixes to CyanogenMod - the premier custom ROM for the discontinued tablet. CyanogenMod 9 Alpha 2 is the latest version of the ROM and is, to be honest, a small upgrade over Alpha 1 but, understandably, a pretty big one over CyanogenMod 7 since they are both based on different versions of Android. If you’ve got a TouchPad handy and would like to try it out, check out our step-by-step guide after the jump.
Samsung Electronics Co. have released updated sales figures which show that their popular smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S II, has surpassed the twenty million units shipped mark in its first ten months of existence in the market. The world’s number two smartphone maker say that the figures represent both domestic and international markets, but only take into account the number of units which have been shipped to service providers and don't take into account SIM-free sales or individual customer purchases which means the figure could be significantly higher.
With most smartphones sporting a touch-based screen interface, we've seen an abundance of music creating apps over the last few years, and whilst many of them are just novelty imitations, some try very hard to be taken seriously as music-creators.
If you follow Redmond Pie, you’ll know that we regularly post updates to Android Market in the form of APK files you can install on your own. Google later pushes the update to devices automatically and despite heavy testing, it may just happen that your device doesn’t like the latest update. Stability issues, regular force-closes etc. etc.
