iLuvAndroid – Feeding your Android Addiction with news, reviews and guides

The Google Android development team announced that development of Android 2.0, codenamed Eclair, is far in development than first thought. In fact it will be released in November making its debut on Motorola’s Droid handset.

Not long ago Google pushed out the Android 1.6 aka Donut to handsets offering various improvements to performance along with some nice additional features such as a more visual indicator of processes using your battery, a power widget enabling you to toggle WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, Data Sync and Brightness, an improved camera, Speech Synthesis, Global Search and more. Look forward to a more indepth overview of what Donut brings to the table soon here on iLuvAndroid.

As soon as Donut was pushed over-the-air (OTA), many people started asking about the next firmware update, Eclair. This would be a major revision of the Android Platform, unifying many features that were previously only found on licensed handsets from HTC. Here’s a rundown of what to expect.

Contacts and accounts

• Multiple accounts can be added to a device for email and contact synchronization, including Exchange accounts. (Handset manufacturers can choose whether to include Exchange support in their devices.)
• Developers can create sync adapters that provide synchronization with additional data sources.
• Quick Contact for Android provides instant access to a contact’s information and communication modes. For example, a user can tap a contact photo and select to call, SMS, or email the person. Other applications such as Email, Messaging, and Calendar can also reveal the Quick Contact widget when you touch a contact photo or status icon.

Email

• Exchange support.
• Combined inbox to browse email from multiple accounts in one page.

Messaging

• Search functionality for all saved SMS and MMS messages.
• Auto delete the oldest messages in a conversation when a defined limit is reached.

Camera

• Built-in flash support
• Digital zoom
• Scene mode
• White balance
• Color effect
• Macro focus

Android virtual keyboard

• An improved keyboard layout to makes it easier to hit the correct characters and improve typing speed.
• The framework’s multi-touch support ensures that key presses aren’t missed while typing rapidly with two fingers.
• A smarter dictionary learns from word usage and automatically includes contact names as suggestions.

Browser

• Refreshed UI with actionable browser URL bar enables users to directly tap the address bar for instant searches and navigation.
• Bookmarks with web page thumbnails.
• Support for double-tap zoom.
• Support for HTML5:
  • Database API support, for client-side databases using SQL.
  • Application cache support, for offline applications.
  • Geolocation API support, to provide location information about the device.
  • <video> tag support in fullscreen mode.

Calendar

• Agenda view provides infinite scrolling.
• Events indicate the attending status for each invitee.
• Invite new guests to events.
• Sync support for contacts from multiple data sources including Exchange. Handset manufacturers can choose whether or not to include Exchange support in their devices.
• New way to hover on a person to see more info and select communication mode (for example, phone, SMS, email).

Media Framework

Revamped graphics architecture for improved performance that enables better hardware acceleration.

Bluetooth

• Bluetooth 2.1
• New BT profiles: Object Push Profile (OPP) and Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP)

To help visualise what exactly all these changes mean and look like, check out the video below.

iLuvAndroid will be covering Eclair in more depth over the next few days, include the very exciting Google Navigation – Google’s answer to Satellite Navigation.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Something went rather wrong not long ago to iLuvAndroid where the bandwidth limit was breeched and thus the site was down for a good number of days. Thus far the issue has been resolved and hopefully won’t appear again so again I apologise for the downtime and look to get this place bang up to date!

The world of Android has been moving at a rapid pace with news of Android 2.0 aka Eclair making its debut in November with Motorola’s Droid handset. Keep an eye here as I fill you in and offer some opinions about where Android might be going.

Popularity: 66% [?]

With Opera Mini making strides in the Mobile Browser Market, people have been asking why there hasn’t been a Mozilla FireFox version available just yet for the dynamic Android platform. However recent news has filtered in as to why exactly development hasn’t been smooth sailing.

“Until recently, Android was Java, but they released Android NDK which uses C/C++ and that is what we program in, so we are now looking at developing Firefox for Android,” said Jay Sullivan, vice president of Mobile for Mozilla.

Previously everything had to be done in Java which was within a VM (Virtual Machine). Now that a more powerful and universal language like C/C++ is available to use, we should expect other programs to follow suit. It’s exciting news as I’m sure Mozilla are aiming to become the market leader in the mobile webspace, they even dropped a bombshell to those who wait:

“Mozilla Firefox will be the first mobile browser to support add-ons,” boasted Sullivan, pointing to the fact that nearly 2 billion Firefox add-ons have been downloaded to date, and they’ve spawned successful companies such as StumbleUpon. He expects similar traction for Firefox on the mobile. “We have been spending a lot of time on making sure that JavaScript and our engine work really fast on ARM processors,” Sullivan said. “That has taken some time.”

This will certainly be an interesting addition, however talk of performance  issues and security still need to be debated. No estimate as to when the browser will come about, even in a beta stage but as soon as news breaks, it will be reported upon.

Popularity: 55% [?]

We have two new guides added to iLuvAndroid.com! A new guide called How To use the Recovery Image, which details the fantastically powerful Recovery Image which has a multitude of options available to you, such as creating a Nandroid Backup, Nandroid Restore, a script to repair your EXT Partition, fix permissions and to manually select which file you want to flash! Perfect if you want to try out different themes.

The second guide, How to install Cyanogen’s Legal ROM (4.1.99/4.1.999) helps you through the steps to move from previous versions of Cyanogen’s ROM. Cyanogen’s 4.1.999 is the first 100% optimised Donut build and is also 100% legal to use, not using any propriety code from HTC and not bundling the Google Experience applications such as Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube and the Android Market.

This however doesn’t mean that such applications will not be available for you to use as some clever work allows you to retain the Google Experience.

Look forward to more guides coming soon!

Popularity: 26% [?]

If you are one of the many that enjoy installing and using the variety of applications available on the Android Market, then you would have noticed that managing such a large number of them at a time can be quite slow and cumbersome using the default methods. AppManager Full is designed to make installing, backing up and un-installing applications at a glance a breeze.

Interface & Userability

App Manager is a joy to use with a very clean and clear interface. All of your applications are listed in alphabetical order of which you simply scroll through vertically to find the application you want to edit.

Along the bottom is the main menu where large icons showcase the Apps, Widgets, List View and the More button; which once pressed, an additional menu glides into view giving you the option to Backup, Install or to go to the Settings menu. Everything is well contained and self explanatory with the icons large enough to be finger friendly.

Features

Upon doing a long-press on the application in question, a sub-menu appears giving you the option to Launch, read additional Details, Search on the Market, Backup to SD and to Uninstall. Launch is self-explanatory while the Details button sends you to the default Android page illustrating the version number, size of the application and the ability to clear the cache.

The feature to backup individual or batch programs is a welcome one as is the application restore feature, taking out the long and often dull process of installing applications individually. On the SD Card the applications are saved under the folder “backups/apps” for easy retrieval either from App Manager itself or via your computer.

Uninstalling applications is as short and sweet as possible as a simple long-press on the app in question brings the sub-menu and the Uninstall option.

Thoughts

A clean and efficient way of managing your applications installed on your Android device, with a very clear user interface. It works perfectly with Donut builds (tested). Being a paid application there is competition from the Free versions available however, but if you are willing to pay for such a tool, you cannot go far wrong with this.

Cryket link to App Manager Full costing $2.95.

App Manager Pro

Rating: Recommended

[View with PicLens]

Popularity: 100% [?]

Quite some time ago, the European Union decided that they wanted a more accurate GPS system and one that didn’t rely on US only satellites. After much discussion the Galileo project was born which would consist of European satellites orbiting the world and providing a much more accurate form of GPS of within a few feet.

Last week a precursor to the Galileo project was successfully launched, called EGNOS (The European Geostationary Navigation Overly Service). It consists of three satellites, four control centres and about 40 positioning stations which combines with data from existing US GPS satellites to provide information which is accurate to six feet. This is compared to around 60 feet for the US GPS signal alone and thus is much more accurate.

Many of the major brands already have EGNOS support and should see marked improvements in terms of accuracy and subsequent GPS systems should have support for it too.

Popularity: 25% [?]

The Samsung Behold II has changed for its second iteration by now joining the Android ranks. In the USA, the Behold II will be available on T-Mobile and features a 3.2″ AMOLED touchscreen, a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and video recording capabilities, LED Flash, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 and a microSD slot with support of up to 16GB.

Samsung have been pushing their custom interface called TouchWiz, and the Behold will be no different with it being adapted on Android. The TouchWiz interface is based on a 3D rotating cube system where each face of the cube represents an individual shortcut for example to your media player, web browser and YouTube.

No word as of yet in terms of pricing and availability, however it has been rumoured to be ready “in time for the holidays”.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Today Adobe has officially confirmed that Flash will be supported for mobile devices in early 2010. As part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe is set to bring the rich media format to mobile devices to address the issue of Flash on multiple devices along with support for hardware acceleration. This is exciting news as native flash support for mobile devices has been limited due to the closed source nature that Adobe has implemented. However Adobe has noticed the trend in mobile use and thus the Open Screen Project was born. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15% [?]