Android Mobiles

Earlier this week, Google’s Android team kicked off their Developer Labs World Tour. Starting this Tuesday in London, the mobile rock stars are traversing the globe, speaking with developers, and let them play with new hardware. It’s a great way to have your questions answered by the guys behind the platform. While it’s too late to register for any of the events now, we’re sure some great nuggets will trickle out.

By the way, those of you who were able to register for one of the events, chances are pretty good you’ll be getting a free Nexus One!  Reto Meier passed out around 70 of them at the first one in London.

Here’s the schedule as they swing through your neck of the woods:

• Feb. 4, 2010    Austin, Texas, USA      5pm-9pm
• Feb. 8, 2010    Seattle, Washington, USA        2pm-6pm
• Feb. 8, 2010    Waterloo, Ontario, Canada      2pm-6pm
• Feb. 9, 2010    Washington D.C., USA            2pm-6pm
• Feb. 10, 2010  Mountain View, California, USA           2pm-6pm
• Feb. 11, 2010  Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA          2pm-6pm
• Feb. 12, 2010  New York, New York, USA  2pm-6pm
• Feb. 2, 2010    London, UK    9am-1pm
• Feb. 8, 2010    Paris, France    2pm-6pm
• Feb. 10, 2010  Berlin, Germany           2pm-6pm
• Feb. 12, 2010  Zurich, Switzerland      2pm-6pm
• Feb. 13, 2010  Madrid, Spain 10am-2pm
• Feb. 28, 2010  Singapore (w/ CodeAndroid)   TBD
• March 3, 2010 Taipei, Taiwan 12:30-4:30pm

March 5, 2010 Hong Kong      1pm-5pm

We’ve received a couple of emails over the last week from a gaming studio called HyperDevbox who has alerted us to two games of theirs. Both of them, LoveCatch and the brand new ExZeus were written to take advantage of OpenGL and 3D gaming capabilities.  As you may already know, Android, in general, hasn’t been lavished with recognition for its games.  If companies like HyperDevbox are doing this with today’s Android phones, we can’t wait to see what the future holds.  These look just as good as anything else we’ve seen on a mobile device.

I asked them to give me an idea as to what they might charge for a game like ExZeus.  Their responses was that it should be around 350YEN for ExZeus arcade ($3.80 US).  As of today, that’s the same price that LoveCatch goes for.  They plan to publish it to not only the Android Market, but also the new SHOP4APPS from Motorola.  In fact, they’d like to have it listed in every market where the games could be delivered in a “secure” manner.

Both games will depend on the microSD card for app storage as it gets downloaded directly from their local server.  For instance, LoveCatch installs 22MB to your memory card.  HyperDevBox states that this should free up the local memory quite a bit, not exceeding 2MB worth of space!

Take a look at the videos for both games below!  Still pictures do not do either of these justice.

South Korean handset manufacturer OCOSMOS has released a new MIP (Mobile Internet Phone, or Multimedia Internet Phone depending who you talk to), that has the ability to make calls over VoIP when connected to WiFi. Of course, it runs the Android OS, has a 3.7 inch AMOLED touchscreen and comes with a 5 megapixel camera.  Rounding out the specs are T-DMB mobile TV, WiFi, GPS, twin stereo speakers, and an Omos interface.  Oh yeah, it also has a 1Ghz CPU – just like that Nexus One!

Check out the video demo of the handset below. Warning, the cheese factor from the announcer is at full bore!

It seems that Mozilla has begun work in earnest on building Firefox for the Android platform.  Citing sources from the German Firefox community, Softpedia says that Mozilla is working with developers to make a build available that will at least display webpages in February, with a usable Alpha coming months down the road from that.

This is great news for those Android users looking for the Firefox experience on the their handsets. With Mozilla announcing in late 2009 that they were considering moving towards the Android OS, it appears they are going make good on that statement.

It is safe to say however that we will not see something usable for most likely another 6 months if there are any development delays (and there always are).  Still, the idea that there is a Firefox Browser build in the pipes coming our way is exciting and something to look forward to!

If you want to track the progress of the Android flavor of Firefox, and you can read German, check out the Firefox forums by clicking here.