Sunday, September 12, 2010

Android 2.x now on 70 percent of all active Android phones

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/12/android-2-x-now-on-70-percent-of-all-active-androids/

Time to get down and boogie if you think the Android fragmentation issue is overblown. Google has dropped its latest platform version stats and Android 2.2, aka Froyo, has managed to corner a healthy 28.7 percent of all active Googlephones (those that accessed the Market within the two weeks leading up to September 1), rapidly closing the gap on version 2.1 and nearly matching in number the handsets still stuck on the Cupcake or Donut diet. When you consider that back in May those pesky 1.5 and 1.6 versions were on a whopping 62 percent of Android mobiles, you'll probably agree that phone makers seem to be getting their act together in terms of delivering Google's latest wares in a timely fashion. Who'd have thought it, the more practice they have, the better they're getting at their jobs!

Continue reading Android 2.x now on 70 percent of all active Android phones

Android 2.x now on 70 percent of all active Android phones originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 07:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CUPP Hybrid PC makes dynamic duo out of ARM and x86, dubious new 'Computicator' class of device

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/12/cupp-hybrid-pc-makes-dynamic-duo-out-of-arm-and-x86-dubious-new/

There's a quiet war going on for the thin-and-light laptop space between ARM and x86 architectures. Intel and AMD are winning handily right now, thanks to their ability to run Windows, but there's still that small hope within the industry that a Good Enough Linux build will come along one day and rescue these power-sipping ARM platforms from obscurity. Well, CUPP Computing would like you to have it both ways. The company's Hybrid PC, which is in a early prototype stage right now (a rather ugly stage, unfortunately, as seen above), runs an ARM A8 OMAP 3430 processor with 512MB of RAM right up next to a Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB of RAM, with both platforms sharing the 320GB HDD, 16-inch LCD, keyboard, touchpad, HDMI out, and USB plugs. A simple alt+tab command switches between the systems on the fly. It's pretty flashy, although the real use case for a device like this would more likely be to use the ARM setup as a low powered mode and then boot into Windows when necessary. Of course, Dell does exactly that at "Latitude ON" in its Latitude Z and Latitude E series, but we won't begrudge CUPP having a go at its own spin on the concept -- although if they try and push this "Computicator" classification on us it might come to blows. Check out a few video demos after the break.

Continue reading CUPP Hybrid PC makes dynamic duo out of ARM and x86, dubious new 'Computicator' class of device

CUPP Hybrid PC makes dynamic duo out of ARM and x86, dubious new 'Computicator' class of device originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:47:00 EDT. Please see! our terms for use of feeds.

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How to Cloudify Your Apple Life. Without Apple's Help. [Apple]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5634524/how-to-cloudify-your-apple-life-without-apples-help

How to Cloudify Your Apple Life. Without Apple's Help.The Apple internet revolution we needed didn't happen. We wanted a unified service that would let us store all our media and personal information in the ether. But we didn't get it. So forget the fruit stand; we're going rogue.

The dream is a single service that invisibly shuttles data to and from our phones and computers; streams an infinite jukebox of music and videos to every device we own; stores every photo and video we snap in the cloud. It's email, texts and voicemails, easily accessed from anywhere or anything. In short, seamless ubiquity of all the things we care about. Apple's still a long way from getting there. But you can cloudify your life right now and get pretty close to the dream with just a little bit of legwork.

How to Cloudify Your Apple Life. Without Apple's Help.

Store everything you care about online

Dropbox is the wet dream of online storage and sync. New users get 2GB of free storage—which you can pump to 10GB by getting your friends to sign up. Dropbox syncs data across multiple computers and devices, and makes it easy to share files with just a couple of clicks. (It's easy to setup, say, a personal music sharing service between you and a few friends). The file syncing speed and ease-of-use puts iDisk to shame, frankly. Better still, it has mobile apps for all iOS devices and Android, with a BlackBerry app on the way, so you can access files from your smartphone.

How to Cloudify Your Apple Life. Without Apple's Help.Because of the way it syncs files, there's also a ton of clever ways to use Dropbox, like starting torrents from any computer. Personally, I use it as a replacement for a Docs folder—by saving all of my text files in Dropbox, I can pick up wherever I left from any computer, and never again worry about a computer crash taking out my critical docs. (And with Elements, edit them from my iPhone or iPad too.)

If you're just looking for raw online storage, Windows Live SkyDrive drops 25GB in your lap for free.

How to Cloudify Your Apple Life. Without Apple's Help.

Dump all your photos and videos in the cloud

Flickr is the best way to go for online photo and video storage and sharing. It's got the most massive community, some of the most extensive tools, and with the recent redesign, looks fresher than ever. Thanks to the huge community, Flickr plugins and apps abound for basically every platform and device, from dedicated upload(e)r apps to iPhoto bolt-ons, and an excellent mobile app for iPhone that can now upload multiple photos in the background. Flickr's massiveness also means it's more likely than most to be integrated into other service and devices, like Apple TV, Facebook and other stuff. Free accounts come with 100MB of storage a month, and a pro account with unlimited storage is just $25 a year.

How to Cloudify Your Apple Life. Without Apple's Help.

Write and edit notes anywhere

While Dropbox + Elements satisfies most of my requirements for writing anywhere, it's hard to deny the appeal of Simplenote, which stores plain text notes online, easily accessible from desktops or iPhone/iPad with free apps. Everything is synced quickly and seamlessly. It's great. (It's got a better interface Evernote, though you can go that route as well.) Check out Lifehacker's definitive guide to getting it set up everywhere you could possibly wanna capture text.

Read ebooks on any screen you've got

One word: Kindle. Free apps for Mac, PC, Android and iPhone mean you can snag your Kindle books on pretty much anything, anytime you want. The apps sync where you left off, bookmarks and highlights. And it's the service that seems most likely to be left standing at the end of the great ebook war, so you can breathe (slightly) easier about the fact every new bestseller is wrapped up in DRM.

How to Cloudify Your Apple Life. Without Apple's Help.

Consume all the music and video you want

Sadly, Lala is dead, and Apple hasn't brought back it back as an iTunes that lives in the cloud. Worse, Spotify, the most obvious choice to entirely replace iTunes with a jukebox in the sky—complete with an iPhone app with offline caching—isn't available in the US. Lifehacker has a handy guide to streaming services. Any totally on-demand service is going to run you $5-$10 a month, but your best bets are Rhapsody or Rdio, which both have millions of songs available for unlimited streaming, and apps for PC, Mac, iPhone and Android. A huge perk of Rhapsody? The iPhone app has local caching for offline playback. If you're more flexible, there's always radio-style services like Pandora and Last.FM.

To stream music from your desktop to your phone, though, SubSonic is one of the better ways to go—a $5 app takes out most of the hassle. And, slightly more robust than iTunes' new(ish) native Home Sharing, MediaRover syncs iTunes libraries across multiple PCs and Macs, even backing up the shared, combined library to a NAS for access by all. (Oh, and it makes for easy access from your Xbox 360 or PS3.)

Video's slightly trickier. There's no way to get a complete catalog for any one service, but if you're going to drop money each month, Netflix is the best bet for a subscription that'll stream movies to most any screen in your house—iOS devices, Mac, PC, Xbox 360, Blu-ray players, TVs, you name it. It syncs where you last left off in a movie, so you start watching on your TV and pick up on an iPad. And hey! You can also get one of those shiny discs in the mail each month, if you want.

Stream video to an iPad or iPhone? AirVideo makes it easy, and supports multiple formats, like MKV and Divx.

Access your contacts, email, calendars, texts and voicemail anywhere

This might as well be called "the Google Section," since Google provides the easiest way to frictionlessly sync all of your critical info across multiple devices.

First, you'll wanna set up Gmail and calendar sync with your PC or Mac. Fortunately, syncing Google contacts with the Mac address book is easy—it's just a checkbox under Accounts in Preferences. Here's how to set it up in Outlook.


Google Sync for Mobile uses Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to sync mail, contacts and calendars from your Google account with full over-the-air push powers. The catch is that it becomes your master contact list, erasing the rest of them from the phone, so make sure they're all uploaded to your Google account. (On the plus side, Google Contacts sucks a lot less than it used to.)

You can sync additional calendars from other accounts by setting them as CalDAV accounts (which works for iCal, or any other app with CalDAV support as well). Same goes for email—just set them as a standard IMAP account, which keeps your email in sync across multiple devices. Oh, and if you just want push email notifications without going through this mess, the Google iPhone app will let you know when new emails arrive for a single account.

Google Voice, now open to everyone, is the magic that'll let you access your voicemails and text messages from any phone (with a decent browser) or desktop. And, now you can make free calls with your Google Voice number from Gmail (in addition to these 10 tricks from Lifehacker).

Sync your bookmarks to everything with a web browser

The free program Xmarks will sync your bookmarks across multiple browsers and computers—though you'll have to use iTunes to push them down to your iPhone. (There's also Firefox Sync for Mozilla diehards.)

Command your computer from anywhere

Vee. Enn. See. If you wanna control your computer from anywhere, accessing files, starting up torrents or whatever else you could possibly wanna do by remote controlling your home computer, VNC is the way to go. Just follow this handy how-to guide.

It takes way more effort than it should to perfectly live your life where everything's connected, but once everything's tied together, it's...comforting.

Illustration by our contributing illustrator Sam Spratt. Check out Sam's portfolio and become a fan of his Facebook Artist's Page.

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Jailbroken iPhone 3G and 3GS's Could Soon Have HDR Photos [HDR]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5635641/jailbroken-iphone-3g-and-3gss-could-soon-have-hdr-photos

Jailbroken iPhone 3G and 3GS's Could Soon Have HDR PhotosSpeaking of Cydia, if you want to get those ultra cool HDR photos on your iPhone 3G or 3GS, jailbreak them and be all patient like as you wait for Will Strafach's HDR tweak to arrive.

All you have to do is watch for the inevitable 4.1 jailbreak. When that comes, you *should* be able to implement what Strafach is talking about here on your older device. Fingers crossed. [Twitter via BGR]

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Toronto Firm Thinks It's Perfected Single-Lens 3D Technique [3d Cameras]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5635632/toronto-firm-thinks-its-perfected-one+lense-3d-technique

Toronto Firm Thinks It's Perfected Single-Lens 3D TechniqueConsumer trepidation aside, one of the other major issues standing in 3D's way on its march into the mainstream is high production costs. 3D typically means two lenses, but one company, ISee3D, may have perfected a way using just one.

In theory, ISee3D's technique is mind-numbingly simple in its execution. According to them, one need only cover up one half of the camera lens, which shifts the focal point, and then cover up the opposite side of the lens, shifting it again. Rapidly alternate between the two sides and voila, two images of the same subject from slightly different focal points and a 3D image. Sharp's glasses-free 3D parallax screens, deployed in the upcoming Nintendo 3DS, operate on a similar principle, thanks to their shifting images.

Of course, this is but one issue in a long list of issues presently plaguing 3D adoption. Shifting lenses aside, those glasses...they still just won't do.

Bonus trivia: ISee3D cut its teeth in the 3D camera space back in the 1990s, when it deployed a single lens 3D camera into the minimally invasive surgery space. [ISEE3D via DVICE]

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