Tag Archives: android

Motorola Mobility wins injunction against Apple in Germany

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On Friday morning, FOSS Patents reported that the Mannheim Regional Court in Germany ruled in favor of Motorola Mobility in one of the patent infringement cases brought by the company against Apple. It’s a significant ruling that represents a major victory for the company Google is in the process of buying.

The ruling includes an injunction that is “preliminarily enforceable” against Apple Sales International, Apple’s Ireland-based EU wholesale subsidiary. The injunction covers a wide range of products, including all iPhones as well as 3G-enabled iPads, since it deals with European patent 1010336 (B1), which describes a “method for performing countdown function during a mobile-originated transfer for a packet radio system.”

It’s a significant ruling, because although Motorola previously secured a similar injunction against Apple in Germany, that one was based on a default judgment, meaning that Apple never presented a defense in the case. For Friday’s ruling, the court ruled after both sides had the opportunity to present their full arguments.

Apple will no doubt appeal this ruling to the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court, seeking a stay of the injunction. If it fails in that effort, the Mannheim Regional Court has attached a €100 million ($134 million) bond (much lower than the $2.7 billion Apple was seeking) to the decision, which Motorola would be liable to pay in the event the injunction against Apple is enforced and a later appeal overturns the injunction awarded on Friday.

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Google Releases Personalized Magazine App, Google Currents — And We’re Launch Partners!

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In an effort to keep up with the entrance of popular magazine-style web readers like the ever popular (and Phil Schiller approved) Flipboard, Google has just released their new app, Currents, for both iOS Android. And our sites Cult of Mac and Cult of Android are both launch partners!

Offering a personalized, magazine-style reading experience on mobile devices that is automatically resized and recromulated depending on the size of the device screen you’re viewing it on, the big advantage of Currents over the likes of Flipboard or Zite is that Currents uses Google’s massive index of the web to bring you trending content in your interests groups.

Here’s how Google describes Google Currents:

Publisher editions – Publishers such as Forbes, TechCrunch, Saveur, Popular Science, Good, 500px, Fast Company and more have produced hundreds of editions including in-depth articles, videos, fine photography, slideshows, live-maps, and social streams.

Google trending editions – Google Currents uses Google search technology to hourly build a set of editions tracking the five most recent trending stories in categories such as world, entertainment, sports, science, and more. Each story is presented through a fresh edition of articles, videos, and pictures,

Your favorite blogs and feeds – Instantly, turn your Google Reader subscriptions, or any of your favorite blogs/feeds into a beautiful edition with a magazine feel.

Each edition is available for high speed offline reading, and provides quick-touch sharing. Google Propeller self-adapts to differently sized phones and tablets, with your subscriptions synchronized across devices. Google Currents – a reading experience not to be missed.

Google Currents can also handle rich media and other different types of online content (although obviously no Flash).

We’ve been using Google Currents all morning, and we’re loving what we’re seeing so far. It’s not as flashy as Flipboard, but I actually prefer that. Anyway, give it a shot, and make sure to subscribe to Cult of Android and Cult of Mac once you’ve downloaded the app! We’d be much obliged (and let’s face it: it beats our mobile site).

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Google Currents Flipboard killer launches today on iOS and Android

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As we reported over on the sister blog, Google just launched Currents, their Flipboard/Pulse style reader for iPhone and iPad (and I guess Android too).  Head over for the details.  (Yes, 9to5Mac is a launch partner so look for us on the App!)

Google Currents is now available for download in Android Market and the Apple App Store for US users.

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Twitter Releases New iPhone App

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Today, Twitter announced a new design for the popular micro-blogging site that will start rolling out over the next couple of weeks, which they hope will make it easier than ever to connect with other users and discover great new content.

If you go to Twitter.com, you won’t see the sexy new interface for a while yet, but as part of their push to update all officially supported Twitter platforms to the new paradigm, Twitter has pushed out a totally overhauled version of the Twitter for iPhone app.

Twitter for iPhone 4.0 is a free download, and by all accounts, it’s even faster and more pleasant to use than ever before.

The main addition to the new Twitter app is four new buttons that act as hubs for the way you interact with Twitter. The official description lays out the methodology of the hubs:

Home is where you start from: a personal collection of Tweets from the sources you care about. The Tweet details show rich information such as replies, retweets and embedded images.

Connect is the place to see who followed or mentioned you, retweeted or favorited one of your Tweets. It’s where you keep the conversation flowing.

Discover is where you can tap into the stories and trends people are talking about in your world. You can also find friends, browse interests, and explore hashtags here.

Me puts you and your interests front and center. From here you can exchange Direct Messages with your followers.

The new app looks great, but the changes haven’t yet come to the iPad version, so unless you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you won’t see any changes.

What do you think of the new Twitter app? Let us know.

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Shunned by Apple, T-Mobile turns to Nokia and Windows

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With Apple deciding not to include support for T-Mobile’s bands in the US, T-Mobile has turned into an Android wasteland with over 90% of the smartphones sold on the network running on Google’s OS. Looking for some diversification (besides the over million legacy iPhones), T-Mobile looks to be one of the first in the US to roll out one of the new Nokia Windows Phone 7 devices which they plan to announce on Dec 14th, a little late for the holidays.




Apple on track for record quarter thanks to strong iPhone debut

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Analysts are making bold predictions about Apple’s performance during its current quarter, saying the company has had its “best November ever.” That’s according to Ticonderoga’s Brian White; Canaccord’s T. Michael Walkley also crowed about Apple’s recent sales success, albeit with a caveat.

White issues a monthly “Apple Barometer” to help investors gauge its success, using data gathered from supply chain sources to anticipate Apple’s sell-through numbers. The barometer was up 17 percent during November versus the previous month, whereas normally it tends to gain around only 2 percent per month. Even though White says October wasn’t as strong as usual for Apple, the gain for November was still very strong and due mostly to amazing sales on Apple’s part for the month.

Over at Canaccord, Walkley didn’t have all good news for Apple watchers. In a note Tuesday, he said the firm expects Amazon’s Kindle Fire to take away as much as 20 percent of Apple’s tablet unit share between the third and fourth quarters of 2011. That’s not necessarily that bad for Apple, however, since the iPad is still projected by Walkley to sell more units than it did in the third quarter of 2011, with Amazon’s device just adding to the global tablet shipment forecast total. Plus, Apple seems to anticipate that more Kindle Fire sales should lead to more iPad sales down the road.

The iPhone, however, is unquestionably a success for Apple, prompting Walkley to bump his sales estimate of Apple’s smartphone from 29 million up to 30.5 million for the quarter, which is huge compared to the 17.1 million Apple sold last quarter. The iPhone’s sales success should see it gain back significant market share from Android competitors, according to Walkley.

Apple always has a strong holiday quarter, but with the late introduction of the iPhone 4S this year, and the continued success of the iPad 2, we definitely should see some entirely unprecedented numbers this time around.

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Why Android Will Always Be Laggier Than iOS

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One of the things that really stands out using an iPhone is just how smooth it feels compared to using Android. Where as Android is laggy, with a measurable interim between when you touch the screen and when the OS responds, iOS almost seems to anticipate what you want to do before your finger touches the display.

How has Apple managed this incredible feat? A better question might be: “How has Google managed to screw up Android’s multitouch so much?” According to Andrew Munn — a software engineering student and ex-Google intern — Android is so messed up that Google might never be able to match an iPhone or iPad’s performance. Ouch!

Before we begin, here’s some background. In the past, it has been said that Android’s UI is laggy compared to iOS because the UI elements weren’t hardware accelerated until Honeycomb. In other words, every time you swipe the screen on an Android phone, the CPU needs to draw every single pixel over again, and that’s not something CPUs are very good at.

That argument makes sense, except if it were true, Android would have stopped measurably lagging in touch responsiveness compared to iOS when Android 3.0 Honeycomb was released. Except guess what? Android devices are still laggy even after Honeycomb is installed on them.

Most modern Android phones have specs that are equivalent or even better than the iPhone’s (for example, most Android phones ship with 1GB of RAM, compared to the iPhone 4S’s 512MB); the problem isn’t hardware. So what’s the issue?

Here’s why Android can’t render its touch UI without lagging, according to Munn. In iOS, UI rendering processes occur with dedicated threads in real-time priority, halting other processes and focusing all attention on rendering the UI. . In other words, every time you touch your finger to your iPhone’s display, the OS literally goes crazy: “Someone’s touching us! Someone’s touching us! Stop everything else you’re doing, someone’s touching us!”

In Android, though, UI rendering processes occur along with the main thread with normal priority. In other words, it treats rendering the UI the same way as it would, say, downloading a podcast in the background, checking for SMSes, or anything else. Hence, a choppy UI.

Here’s Munn explaining what this all means, and why Google was stupid enough to design Android this way.

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

- UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
- UI rendering has normal priority

Even with a Galaxy Nexus, or the quad-core EeePad Transformer Prime, there is no way to guarantee a smooth frame rate if these two design constraints remain true. It’s telling that it takes the power of a Galaxy Nexus to approach the smoothness of a three year old iPhone. So why did the Android team design the rendering framework like this?

Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.

So why hasn’t Google just changed the UI framework? Well, it’s a daunting task that would involve every app on Android Market to be rewritten to support the new framework. That’s at least a year away, and may never happen.

In other words, for Google to ever fully deal with Android’s lag problems, it needs to basically hit the reset button and destroy its app ecosystem. iOS, on the other hand, was built from the ground up to support multitouch smartphones; hell, Apple was the supreme visionary of it. It’s important to get things right.

[via Redmond Pie]

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Apple Store vs. Android Store [Photo]

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On Friday, Google opened a new Android store with Androidland in Melbourne, a place to hawk Android tablets and phones made by various manufacturers. So how’s it stand up against the Apple Store? Let’s see! (click to enlarge)

Apple Store (left) — Brightly lit, thronged with customers, tastefully designed with the finest materials and well-staffed with bright, enthusiastic employees at the top of their field who are constantly moving to help people with questions.

Androidland (right) — Dark and dimly lit, with a design more evocative of an early 90s Chuck E. Cheese arcade pit than a high-end retail store. Staffed by two disengaged lunkheads, who expertly manage not only to ignore the only customer on the floor, but to be at least fifty feet away from him.

Amazing.

Don’t miss Apple Store vs. Microsoft Store. It’s just as funny.

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Would You Buy an Android Tablet So Your Kids Leave Your iPad Alone?

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Toys R Us won’t even start selling the Nabi Kids Tablet until next week, but it’s already sold out in pre-orders.

Billed as the first full-featured Android platform made especially for kids, the 7-inch $200 tablet  comes loaded with about $150 in games and uses “kid-friendly” software. (Apparently they haven’t seen how adroit the tykes are with grown-up versions.)

The device, designed by FUHU and manufactured by Foxconn, is being marketed to parents who want their kids to stop messing around with their iPads.

“The problem is you’re not really comfortable with them playing with a $600 device,” Jim Mitchell, CEO of FUHU told 7×7. “You get it back from them and the screen is smudged, they may have deleted some of your files, and so on. One of my colleague’s son, who was maybe three or four, somehow ordered $250 worth of smurf toys on his iPad one night.”

The smudge factor plus low price of the tablet may draw parents in, but like many toys for children, the must-have appeal comes from the cool extras that kids will hound you for until you give in.

“We won’t make huge money on the tablet itself,” Mitchell says. “It’s the accessories that go with it that will be profitable for us.” These include cute add-ons for the rubber bumper case like a Hello Kitty or Kung Fu Panda head.

The Nabi Tablet also comes equipped with “Mommy Mode,” so that once your kids are in bed you can do whatever one does with an Android tablet that you wouldn’t want your kids to do.

Would you consider buying your kid a starter Android tablet?

Via 7×7

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Hands on with Touch: Is a solid product enough at this stage?

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Messaging apps. The words could just make you sigh at this point. From Facebook to WhatsApp to Apple, everyone has something to offer in this space. So can a new entry at this point possibly stand a chance? Touch, a new app available for iOS, and also BlackBerry and Android devices, is sure hoping so.

Cross-platform: check.

Touch, has one thing going for it right away (besides a great bargain on a good domain name, touch.com) in that it’s immediately available for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. No “Android version coming soon” or “BlackBerry? Why bother?” for them, and that’s a very good thing in terms of encouraging user adoption. That’s mostly because it isn’t entirely new; it was PingChat, but has been rebranded as Touch, along with the introduction of its new “experience” sharing features. But long-standing leaders in the space like WhatsApp Messenger also have cross-platform access covered, and also boast a lot of momentum, so it alone won’t guarantee success.

Group messaging: check.

Another thing Touch has covered is group messaging. You can add people to group chats, see participants at a glance via profile pics, and leave group chats whenever you wish just by swiping to delete the message thread in your main list view. It all works well, and as advertised (though Touch’s servers are having some sporadic trouble at launch, so there’s been a few issues with messages getting through) but you won’t find too much that isn’t available in Facebook Messenger here.

 

With one-on-one messages, you’ll get “Sent/Delivered/Read/” receipts, just like you would on BlackBerry Messenger. You can’t, however, turn off read receipts like you can on iMessage if you’d rather not let someone know whether you have or haven’t check out what they said.

Photo sharing: check.

Touch’s major changes revolve around “experience sharing.” Essentially, this is photo sharing, wherein you choose a picture from an existing album or take a new one, upload it to Touch and select friends to share with. You also choose a name for the experience, and then friends you share it with can comment. It also reports whether or not your friends have viewed what you share. In this way, Touch sort of competes with Path, or with Instagram, but with a much more private audience, since you handpick individuals to share with.

A capable product in a crowded market

Touch is a good app; it’s cleanly designed, easy to use and strips away unnecessary features and frills to make conversation the real focal point of the experience. But it’s also in a tough spot; I found it hard to find anyone I know using it, despite its having taken over PingChat’s reported 12 million users. Plus, for photo sharing, Path’s gorgeous version 2.0 has it beat in almost every way, besides the ability to be more selective with who sees your photos, and a landscape mode for browsing and composing.

There are some things that work in Touch’s favor, however, including the ability to limit sharing but in a better way than most dedicated private messaging solutions provide. Also, there’s an HTML5 version in the works, which could open up Touch’s cross-platform appeal to a very broad audience, since it’ll allow desktop and all tablet users to participate, too.

Touch has a lot of polish and a lot of promise, and beats the user experience of WhatsApp in my opinion, judging by my trials on Android and iPhone devices. But its staying power will depend on whether or not it can convince more users to jump on board; tough to do at this stage in the group messaging competition.

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