The Productive Organizer

Archos looks to be on their way to become the brand to turn to for budget solutions.

However, it can be argue that their support or rather they do not provide adequate  upgrades for their existing devices to the latest operating system.

These are points of consideration you have to make when thinking of purchasing an Archos device.

For now a neak peak at these machines:

I criticize Android in the past about how their applications are poorly designed and we would have to wait till Gingerbread to see some form of challenge to the iOS.

In most argument the picture I used was this Music Synthesizer application

Today, I came across an Android Paid App called RD3 Groovebox that is in the same domain.

Min REQ : Android 2.1

Resolution: 480×320 (HVGA) or higher

Cost: 3.49 Euro or free trial app

This application looks very competent but looks short of options to what the iPAD Application can do. Nevertheless very impress by the UX from the developer!

Video Sample:

Mozilla have pride themselves by being very innovative in their development efforts for their desktop browser.

Their latest offering for the mobile space on Android is the Fennec.

Download Fennec by visiting Firefox.com/m/alpha on your Android device or Nokia N900.

The overall experience have been refreshing but this is not a browser that you can use everyday yet as its an alpha release and is really rough on the edges.

What I like about it is that it has brought all that we liked about Firefox over to the Android

• Firefox Sync synchronizes your Firefox history, bookmarks, passwords and tabs
• between your desktop and mobile
• Add-ons are available to customize the functionality and look of your Firefox
• Personalized Start page lets you pick up where you left off on your desktop
• Awesome Screen gets to know you and takes you to your favorite websites with minimal typing
• Pinch-to-zoom (Android), double-tab, or use the volume rocker (Nokia N900) to zoom in and out
• Tabbed browsing in thumbnail view lets you easily see and select the site you want
• Location-Aware Browsing gives you content and info relevant to your location
• Save to PDF, Find In Page, Forget Password, Send Page and Add Search Engine located in the Site Menu all help you manage your preferences and options for each site you’re on
• Context Menu lets you Open in New Tab and Share by long tapping and holding a link or image

Someone at Gizmodo France recently ran into this problem with their own Galaxy S, and rather than shrug the mishap off with a bit of frustration, they contacted Samsung, and received a strange response.

What did toubleshooters discover? Hooking a Galaxy S up to a computer via USB is just fine, unless the gadget is host to a file or files with an extension exceeding 15 characters. Wow. Who makes a file with a 16-character extension? Seesmic, apparently (Google Translate link). Deleting the culprit file fixed the odd bug.

How plausible is this? A lot of people uses Seesmic!

Take a look at the video to find out more.

Samsung Galaxy S i9000 – Crash "MTP application"
Uploaded by ITespresso-France. – Videos of the latest science discoveries and tech.

If you have an Android Device but yet are jealous of the very nice preview brought about by Palm Pre’s Cards switching, Visual Task Switcher could be the solution.

Basically it tries to emulate Palm Pre’s Cards Effect to preview latest background programs to enable fast app switching.

This will seriously improve your productivity I feel.

It is Available on the Android Market FREE (ADs Supported)

This is how it looks like. The software is alittle rough on the edges but is highly usable.

You have 2 hard button options to tie to: Home button press or Long Search press. For me I prefer the Long Search Press.

It looks like HTC Touch 2 is the flavor of the month as it became the latest high spec (sort of) phone that DOES NOT COME WITH CAMERA.

This would be good for people working in secure locations. No more do they have to secretly bring in their iPhone and Desire always hoping that they won’t get caught.

But the question is why doesn’t HTC come up with an Android one since Android is the popular choice currently?

Simple. They are doing this to clear HTC Touch2 stocks most likely. That is the ulterior motive.

I would really hope they come up with one non-camera android one but fret not!

We might have a solution. The folks from XDA Developers are attempting to port and create a functional Android ROM for HTC Touch2, bring us closer to a non-camera Android.

These specs looks like that of the HTC Magic and HTC Dream. Not fantastic but it means the custom rom needs to be very optimized.

Just to let you know that porting from a Windows Mobile to Android have been done before on the HTC HD2

[Check out the news on the Custom Android ROM >>]

Here you can clearly see that Super AMOLED of the Samsung Galaxy S clearly beat out the HTC Desire’s AMOLED. Even the X10’s TFT LCD is still much visible!

Things to consider when evaluating your next Android phone:

Now here is something interesting to think about. These companies like to complain about this piracy problem and took so much efforts to stamp them out. But are they doing enough?

Since 2007, when Android Debuted, many countries have yet access to paid apps. And only developers in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom and United States are able to developed and sell paid apps.

So what happens if you are a developer living in Singapore or Hong Kong? You need to find a partner in these places.

AndroidPublisher is one of them. What is the price for these service? Google Essentially will take 30% of your earnings, and on top of this Android Publisher will take 19% of your earnings. So essentially you make only 50% of what you came up with.

Good Deal? Of course not, but you really have not much choices to sell.

If you are a user of Android phone in Singapore or Hong Kong how do you get these paid apps?

For one thing, many of these apps are sold through App Market. But there are numerous third party markets that lets developers publish their software to sell.

SlideME

Have an application that Google prevents you from stocking in the Android Market, leaving you and your app stranded? Are there users desperate to buy your application but they don’t have access to Google Checkout or the Android Market? Do you want to show off your app but feel limited by not having screenshots or video in the Android Market?

If so, then you’ve found the right place at SlideME, the Original Market for Android (We launched our portal and mobile client in April 2008). What we do for the developer is simple. We provide a way to market, deliver and download content to users that you wouldn’t have access to in your traditional channels.

From the moment you stock an application, we provide you a web page where you can add a description, screenshots and videos showing off your application. You can have a discussion with your users or they can review your application right on your page.

Your application also shows up in SAM, our mobile client for discovery and download of Android applications. You can include up to three screenshots and a YouTube video within the mobile catalog, giving potential users a good idea of what your app does. No more trying to cram that into a 325 character description with ascii art.

So give SlideME a shot and start interacting with your users, showing them what your application is all about.

Pirated Forums

These are sites where the hackers have manage to crack open the apps and users are able to get these paid apps for FREE.

Sounds very unethical but the fact of the matter is that many people still prefer to free load on other people’s hardwork and are un-willing to pay for them.

Such forums have exist for a long time and fact of the matter is that they act as advertisments to promote these Apps as well, believe it or not!

A lot of Android Fans are getting very very frustrated with this. Google are you listening?

So you have rooted your Android Device. What now? You probably got a device that is more streamline and less bloatware. But Android Police have provided a list of good applications that should make rooting an Android a Game Changing Experience.

I am not doing the review here but from a UX Experience perspective they are really well designed!

Titanium Backup

ROM Manager

ShootMe

Juice Defender

Root Explorer

Quick Boot

Wireless Tether

Shark for Root

[Read full article @ Android Police >>]

There are much news on the Android Market these few days. Readers would recall that my thoughts is that the Android market still have a lot of things to iron out.

In a certain sense, the iOS App Store, although overprotective and not always the best, creates a really good environment for

1. Developers to sell their product and gain revenue
2. Consumers to buy apps that are relevant to them
3. Easy for consumers to pay
4. Only apps that Apple Approves and of standard are listed

Google seem to realise that their Market concept is really not working well.

People would rather fight it out at iOS App Store than to be the leader in Android Market. A leader at Android Market earn far less than a small player in iOS App Store. That says a lot.

Piracy

Part of the reason why not as much developers engineer quality apps on the Android was probably due to not enough protection from piracy. There are many online forums where you can get paid apps (apk files) for FREE.

So what is the point of spending so much effort developing it only to see it ended up there?

Google overhaul their licensing concept to bring some form of Google DRM to the Market:

The service will allow application developers to implement a license status check in their apps – an app would query the licensing server and get back a response stating whether it had been purchased through the Market or not.

This simple and free service provides a secure mechanism to manage access to all Android Market paid applications targeting Android 1.5 or higher.

At run time, with the inclusion of a set of libraries provided by us, your application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users.

It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.

What if Google’s Server goes down or You are Offline? Will it still work?

Google is well aware of the problems that can occur when you don’t have a working connection or their servers are offline (which is unlikely but possible). This is why they will support both of these schemes:

To help you get started with a Policy, the LVL provides two fully complete Policy implementations that you can use without modification or adapt to your needs:

• ServerManagedPolicy is a flexible Policy that uses settings provided by the licensing server to manage response caching and access to the application while the device is offline (such as when the user is on on an airplane). For most applications, the use of ServerManagedPolicy is highly recommended.
• StrictPolicy is a restrictive Policy that does not cache any response data and allows the application access only when the server returns a licensed response.

Ok! So most of the productive apps no one will ever thought about using StrictPolicy. Can you imagine your To-Do List application or Notes application always have to be connected online?

It is likely you will use a combination of ServerManagedPolicy and StrictPolicy.

A Few More Bits

Here are some points to keep in mind as you implement licensing in your application:

• Only paid applications published through Market can use the service.
• An application can use the service only if the Android Market client is installed on its host device and the device is running Android 1.5 (API level 3) or higher.
• To complete a license check, the licensing server must be accessible over the network. You can implement license caching behaviors to manage access when there is no network connectivity.
• The security of your application’s licensing controls ultimately relies on the design of your implementation itself. The service provides the building blocks that let you securely check licensing, but the actual enforcement and handling of the license are factors in your control. By following the best practices in this document, you can help ensure that your implementation will be secure.
• Adding licensing to an application does not affect the way the application functions when run on a device that does not offer Android Market.
• Licensing is currently for paid apps only, since free apps are considered licensed for all users. If your application is already published as free, you won’t be able to upload a new version that uses licensing.

Ease of Purchase

iOS works successfully because as a user, I can not worry about payment first hand and enjoy using the App first. My cost will be factor into my credit card bill or in the case of iTunes Gift card, credits.

The Android market currently works on a charge per paid app install basis. Therefore, if we install a paid app, we will need to pay at the end of each single transaction using Google Checkout.

Google’s overhaul of this problem:

According to this new policy, the app install charges will be aggregated and sent along with the carrier bill for the month. A similar billing process has been present on the iPhone always. However, it is not carrier billing. The bill is added to your credit amount on a separate account and you are charged from there at the end of the month. The payment method offered on Android makes this optional. Therefore, if you are getting a paid app from the Market, you have the option of paying using Google Checkout out or using the carrier billing option. Apart from the iPhone, all T-Mobile customers have also been enjoying this billing style for a long time. In all probability, Google is trying to implement this as a standard payment method across all other networks.

I thought both options are not really good. Why not just match it to a Paypal account or a Credit Card account link to a Google Payment account?

If this is not done well, this will affect how developers are monetize and will affect developers’ willingness to develop for Android.

In Android Guys, it ran a story about a Developer’s problem with Google’s Payment:

Case in point.  This week, Zodttd, a developer who is known for developing game emulators on Apple devices released a Play Station 1 emu for Android, an exciting development for the community.  As soon as the word got out that the app was in the market, there was a flood of about 6000 people who went to purchase and download the app.  The only thing was, the Android Market would not let about 5,400 of the purchasers, this writer included, download the app at all.  The Market would let you buy the app, then it would hang up permanently on the “authorizing” purchase dialog.

When this happened, Zodttd got flooded with pleading emails from customers begging for help, some polite, a lot angry and some simply wanting their money back.  The problem for the dev was that he was in a virtual no-man’s land.  On his end, he had received no money to refund, but his customers were holding receipts in their hands.  He could not get help from Google right away, because there is no phone number to call for help.  In fact, there is no support department for this at all!  You can see the progression of the issue from start to finish through this post log at Google.

So, the perfect storm happened.  A dev who had decided to enter the arena of Android development creates a pretty nice app for the community, tries to get it sold in the Market, and gets jammed by a glitch in the system that makes it look like he has received a bunch of money, but actually hasn’t.  On top of that, he can get no immediate help to fix the problem, and is left to try to email Google as a whole rather than a support individual who could remedy the problem quickly.

Being one of the customers that was following the progress of this issue, I was dumbfounded by how long it took to get a resolution from Google, and as a result, how many sales the dev lost.  It really put on display the glaring issues the Market has.

Google should be working to make the Android development environment and sales structure something that is a joy for devs to work with, not vice versa.  Unless this happens, it is going to be a long, slow, uphill battle for the Market to gain serious steam, and to see the quality of apps that we are hoping for.  Come on Google, it is time to throw some serious work into this area.

Security

Google prided itself that anyone can run their application on an Android Device. They never had the problem of rejecting apps.

Is this a good thing? Perhaps not. They are just waiting for the perfect storm. And probably this is it:

A mobile security firm called Lookout just released a report at the Black Hat security conference in Vegas (where else?) that says that they discovered a malware program that is sending the private information of several million Android users to a mysterious location in China…all in return for some My Little Pony wallpaper.

The app in question came from Jackeey Wallpaper, and it was uploaded to the Android Market, where users can download it and use it to decorate their phones that run the Google Android operating system. It includes branded wallpapers from My Little Pony and Star Wars, to name just a couple.

It collects your browsing history, text messages, your phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and even your voicemail password. It sends the data to a web site, www.imnet.us. That site is evidently owned by someone in Shenzhen, China. The app has been downloaded anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times. The exact number isn’t known because the Android Market doesn’t offer precise data. The search through the data showed that Jackeey Wallpaper and another developer known as iceskysl@1sters! (which could possibly be the same developer, as they use similar code) were collecting personal data. The wallpaper app asks for “phone info,” but that isn’t necessarily a clear warning.

Roughly 47 percent of Android apps access some kind of third-party code, while 23 percent of iPhone apps do. The executives also found that many apps use third-party software programs to do things such as feed ads into an app. Often, developers unquestioningly use the software development kits of those third parties in their apps, even if they don’t know what they do.

Conclusion

My take on this is that Apple probably got it spot on. The problems that they might think will affect their customers have surely come to light at their competitor.

The case study of the difference in implementation of a Application Marketplace shows that being open and lax control isn’t really helpful in all situation.

Being Authoritative like Apple might not be really pleasing all round but they certainly provided a platform where they value add to their network much better than google