Guru returns with new thoughts.
Show Notes
- Special Feature – Hurricanes and Power Outages
- Biolite Camp Stove – charge your cell phone using twigs, pellets, or other things that burn. Make a cup of tea at the same time
- Crank-charging your cell phone would take hours and you’d likely get rather tired long before you saw a complete charge.
- Solar charging will take 8-10 hours on average for a full charge
- External USB battery packs/extra batteries are the most reliable emergency charging option.
- Assuming you have extra batteries/USB battery packs, how do you survive days of power outages?
- In Other News…as if Hurricanes weren’t enough
- ARM taking over everywhere, with companies looking to build ARM based servers based on the new 64-bit ARM designs.
- Power Amplifier Tech hopes to increase battery efficiency. Current amplifiers waste about 65% of energy. A new startup called Eta Devices is developing a chip for LTE base stations to be rolled out in 2013, with energy usage cut in half. It may takes years, if successful, for this to make its way to phones.
- Apple offers to pay $1 to Motorola for every iPhone sold to license standard essential patents for wireless communications. Meanwhile, wanted $30 for design elements like rubber banding.
- The US Department of Defense looking to move away from Blackberries in favor of Android and iPhones.
- Third-party finally concludes what Google concluded this summer…Gmail has beaten Hotmail as top worldwide email provider.
- Platform News
- New platform numbers: 1.5/1.6 nearly dead, 12% on Froyo, 54% on Gingerbread, 26% on ICS, 2.7% on Jellybean.
- IDC reports that after 4 years, 75% of handsets sold ran Android in Q3 2012.
- Google may offer physical Google wallet card that could mimic any credit/debit card, as well as transit passes.
- Chromium OS ported to Nexus 7…is there anything they won’t port to this thing?
- Android Central’s Alex Dobie points out why 4.2 is something you could live without…multi-user support(only useful for tablets), gesture typing(Swype or new Swiftkey Flow), Photo Sphere/Gallery(most manufacturers do their own camera and gallery apps), Google Now(in the market).
- Android 4.2 includes security scanner for sideloaded apps and to advise of apps sending out texts.
- Cyanogenmod to add expandable desktop feature to hide navigation/status bars. Adds File Manager and responds to calls of bloat.
- 700,000 apps in Googe Play, nearly matching iTunes.
- Apps News
- Version 1.0 of Gnucash for Android lands in the market. (Play Link)
- Amazon launches Cloud Drive Photos app, allows uploading, viewing and sharing of photos to/from Amazon Cloud Drive. Does not offer automatic upload features. (Play Link)
- Google Now adds new features…pedometer to track miles, hotel check-ins, package delivery, stock tickers, flight confirmations…is Tripit dead?
- Pocket updated – faster, more responsive, and optimized for new Nexus devices. (Play Link)
- Chrome updated for stability and new Nexus devices. (Play Link)
- ADWLauncher returns from the ‘dead’, almost completely rewritten. (Play Link)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:03:12 — 43.4MB)