An insider recently said that Motorola is secretly planning a team of trained developers to create their own OS. They are reportedly doing this to lessen how much they depend on Android.
Though nothing is set in stone yet, Motorola (over the past nine months) has hired great software developers for Apple and Adobe. Motorola is looking to make this OS fully web based. Motorola has already began gathering different resources to form their cloud storage and security.
It will be interesting to see if Motorola actually goes through with this plan, since Android has been a large reason why the company has turned around it’s business of late. More news as it develops.
Every smartphone has a video camera, and with the growth of YouTube and Facebook, video is very popular. Consumers need an easy way to edit their footage and Muvee is hoping to be a key. In February, Muvee announced the availability of their new HD video editing tools for Android. They are demonstrating it at CTIA in hopes of signing up a manufacturer or carrier.
With their application users will be able to cut out selected parts of a video and join a number of clips as long as they are the same type of resolution. Users can even add a music track or record voice-overs. The ability to add logos and text overlays for easy branding makes it attractive to bloggers.
For now there are no plans to offer the Muvee HD video editing tools as a download. They would rather offer it as pre-loaded on devices.
Hit the break for the full press release from February.
If you are a customer of the independent Cellular South wireless carrier and are in the market for an Android powered tablet, there is good news for you today! Cell South has announced that it will be bringing the Honeycomb powered Motorola Xoom to it’s customers, with a bit of incentive in the form of a MiFi hotspot (if you sign up for broadband service for the MiFi).
See the full press release after the break. The Cell South version of the Xoom is going to be priced at $599.99, which is in line with Verizon’s sale price with two year contract. No word on exact launch date, all it says in the presser is “next month”. It will be interesting to see how many of you Cell South customers will snatch one of these bad boys up!
FULL PRESS RELEASE
It’s official, the XOOM has arrived at Cellular South and will be making its way into customer hands by early next month. Cellular South, the nation’s largest independent wireless provider announced the availability of the award-winning Motorola XOOM tablet today.
Featuring a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM, the 10.1-inch widescreen HD tablet gives Cellular South customers a new type of mobile computing experience with Wi-Fi or with the optional Novatel Mi-Fi hotspot for mobile broadband network compatibility. The XOOM was selected as “Best of Show” at this year’s CES and is the first device operating on Android 3.0 Honeycomb, designed especially for tablets. This new Android device builds on Cellular South’s already robust Android line-up, which includes the Samsung Galaxy S and five other advanced Android devices.
With the launch of The XOOM next month, Cellular South is making tablet ownership more exciting and affordable by pairing it with a free Novatel Mi-Fi 2200 hotspot with the purchase of a Mi-Fi data plan, which starts at $19.99 for 3 GB of data. The XOOM will be available at Cellular South for $599.99. Additional details about Cellular South’s XOOM offering can be found at www.cellularsouth.com/xoom
All those who have been waiting to get their itchy fingers on the kernel source code from HTC for the following devices need wait no more. As you can see above, HTC posted the kernels on their Developer Center site for download for;
HTC Incredible S – 2.6.35
T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide – Froyo MR – 2.6.32
HTC Wildfire – Froyo MR – 2.6.32
Grab a Red Bull and head on over to the source link below to begin your customizing weekend just a couple days early.
As of right now we are all browsing on our Android devices (if we choose to) using Skyfire 3.0. Well via a tweet just a few minutes ago, @Skyfire announces:
So lets all stay tuned to find out what these MAJOR updates will be. I checked the Skyfire site and there is mention of 3.2, instruction to go to the Android market and download, but it’s not yet showing up. So I wait patiently. I strictly use Skyfire as my default browser. It does so much as a mobile browser. Just check out the list of features below:
Flash Video
User Agent Switching
Facebook QuickView
Fireplace Feed Reader
Popular Pages
Related Ideas
Skyfire OneTouch Search
Facebook Like Button
Stick around and watch for more information on the latest updates to Skyfire for Android, that the popular browser is calling “MAJOR”.
The Sprint Nexus S 4G was made official yesterday and BGR was able to get some photos of it. You won’t notice much of a difference as compared to the T-Mobile Nexus S. The only difference is the WiMAX radio. It will also come with Gingerbread and NFS
Pre-orders for the Nexus S 4G started yesterday at Best Buy. The price will be $199 and it will be available in the spring.
Root Tools is a new open source project aimed at making life easier for developers of apps that require root. The library already includes about half a dozen methods, including ways to remount, send shell commands, find busybox, and more.
“In the long run the goal of this project will be to make it easier for developers to create rooted apps by creating libraries that will help them do routine things without having to constantly re-write code.”
The project was started by Stericson, who you may know as the man behind MetaMorph, NinjaMorph and the Android version of Busybox. But Root Tools is not intended to be a one man show. Already, the project has commits by two others besides Stericson, and he has made clear that he intends Root Tools to be a community driven project.
If you can contribute to the project, or if you can use the tools in apps you’re developing, head over to the Root Tools project home to check it out.
We’ve been in touch with Motorola who claim yesterday’s rumor regarding the planned decline and termination of XOOM production by July 2011 is inaccurate. Here is the official response I received:
The Digitimes article is NOT accurate. Motorola Mobility is planning to manufacture and sell the Motorola XOOM beyond the second quarter.
Motorola declined further comment.
If that XOOM rumor has ANY legs I’m guessing it’s a matter of semantics. It’s very possible that someone in the supply chain saw decreasing and then disappearing production of the XOOM SKU in system inventory but this doesn’t prove anything. Motorola could have a new SKU for units shipping with 4G (current XOOMs require a free hardware upgrade) or that another type of refresh simply requires the SKU be slightly different.
Regardless of how those smaller details play out, Motorola wants to make it clear that XOOM sales are doing just fine and production will continue. Business as usual folks, nothing to see here… XOOM along!
Cricket, making an appearance at CTIA this year, announced a couple of devices they have in the works to be released “very soon” (Q2). The company introduced two handsets that look to be promising in the up and coming year for the company. First up to bat, the Huawei Ascend 2, a pretty descent successor to the original Ascend which we saw released last year. The device will tout an HVGA screen (same as the original Ascend) however, the company is looking to keep the price point along the same lines as the original model, coming in at $150.00. In addition, the device will sport an updated camera coming in at 5MP from the previous 3.2MP along with an 800 MHz CPU.
Next on the smartphone arsenal list is the Samsung Indulge, running on Cricket’s standard 3G bands, as the company currently does not have an LTE network. The Indulge also sports an HVGA screen and comes with a bit of a hefty price tag coming in at around $350 for a new 2 yr agreement. Keep heading back to Talk Android as we continue to dig for more info on release dates and confirmed official pricing for these handsets. And as always, let us know what you think of them in the comments below.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a browser nut. I struggled for years to choose browsers on the desktop and even though I’ve found the right one for me (Chrome) I still can’t resist checking the competition every once in a while. Unfortunately, my addiction has gone mobile.
That’s why I was excited to learn that Opera would be launching versions 11 and 6 of their Mobile and Mini Android offerings respectively. Starting with Mini, they’ve finally added true multi-level pinch-to-zoom. Before, performing a pinch-to-zoom gesture would net the desired result, but it wasn’t smooth and you could only zoom in and out once to pre-determined levels.
Now, you can get as close or as far away as you need to as you can in countless other browsers. Opera Mini has quickly become a great option for those on older phones or for people who need to do a bit of browsing on a slow network. Due to the nature of the application, there is no flash support and there probably never will be.
That’s where Opera Mobile 11 comes in. It’s the browser for those who have decent/better than decent phones who can take advantage of a fast 3G or 4G network. The one complaint many had, though, was its lack of Flash support when Adobe debuted the Flash 10.1 player for Mobile.
This week’s update adds just that, thankfully. They’ve also apparently flipped the switch on hardware acceleration in this version, but we honestly couldn’t tell. (Unless that contributed to the lack of checker-boarding that used to plague the app.) Things still didn’t look as smooth as they do on iOS devices, but it was still a VERY usable and desirable browsing experience. The only thing I’d like to see now is improvement in the browser vendor’s rendering engine, but that’s still a bit of a problem on desktops. It’s getting there, though.
Finally, they’ve introduced the Honeycomb-specific version of their browser. There isn’t much to the update: it puts the status bar on top and shuffles a couple of the UI elements around. Other than that, it’s a good looking browser that does some good looking browsing. Check out video of the mobile versions above and the tablet version below.
An insider recently said that Motorola is secretly planning a team of trained developers to create their own OS. They are reportedly doing this to lessen how much they depend on Android.
