Another week
Show Notes
- In Other News
- White House agrees you should be able to unlock your cell phone.
- U.S Senator introduces bill to allow cell phone carrier unlocking.
- Platform News
- New distribution numbers, Jelly Bean is 16.5%, ICS is 28.6%, Gingerbread is 44.6, which means 4.0 and above now exceeed Gingerbread’s share of the platform.
- Google Play Turns 1.
- Well known Apple enthusiast Andy Ihnatko creates a buzz when he declares Android has finally gotten to the point where he switched from iOS. His reasons, after 5 years center around the idea… “If I don’t like something, I can change it.”
- “The iPhone is superior to a flagship Android phone at “easy to use on day one.” But it plateaus after a month. Android, I suggest, keeps getting easier to use as it continues to adjust to you and you keep learning new ways to get better performance.“
- Google enters license agreement with MPEG LA for the WebM video format
- Dropping Support for Older Versions of Android
- Gogo: Airborne Android Use up 400% in two years, 26% Android, with the rest being iOS.
- 16 Android Voice Actions to Make Android Your Own Personal Assistant
- Open an App
- Set an Alarm
- Note to Self
- Create a Calendar Event
- Send Email
- Send SMS
- Call
- Scan a barcode
- What’s This Song?
- Listen to a song
- Go to a website
- Map of a location
- Directions to
- Navigate to
- Post to Google Plus
- PocketCasts – Guru spends a week with it
- App News
- Chrome for Android experimenting with a SPDY proxy to optimize pages before delivering them to the customer. Several browsers do this, but there has been no evidence of significant speed increase. More technical details.
- Chrome updated, adds improved scrolling, pinch-zooming, faster pages due to a new version of the engine, background audio, expanded HTML5 support, and more.
- Now in Chrome Beta: password and autofill sync. (Play Link)
- Google shows off what it can do with Chrome sync by letting you use an Android phone running Chrome as a controller for a game running on a Chrome desktop browser.
- Accuweather app updated with new UI. (Play Link)
- TuneIn Radio now supports Google+ Signin feature.
- Vire Launcher shows off fancy effects but missing some core features. (Play Link)
- Adaptxt Keyboard allows for great customization and the common set of features such as word prediction, etc. (Play Link)
- Field Trip updated with new content, improved notifications, etc. (Play Link)
- Pushover updated with Dashclock and Pebble Watch support.
- Photoshop Touch for phones released. (Play Store)
- Poweramp updated with JellyBean Lockscreen Widget, and other features. (Play Link)
- Social Homescreen Launcher…launched in beta. (Play Link)
- DirecTV releases tablet app. Offers streaming in house, and some channels outside. Doesn’t work with the Nexus 7. (Play Link)
- RetroArch emulates many classic gaming consoles. (Play Link)
- Huffington Post redesigned, adds new design and offline reading. (Play Link)
- Twitter discontinues Tweetdeck for Android after effectively killing third-party apps.
- Twitter for Android updated, still lacks many things. (Play Link)
- Koush’s new Superuser app hits the Google Play store. Why a new superuser? The belief it should be open-source, AOSP buildable, handle multi-user and concurrent requests. Needs work, but does move superuser administration to open-source (Play Link)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:25 — 32.6MB)