Google felt it appropriate to highlight some of Glass’ specs earlier this week, but there’s much more to the company’s wearable display than just the 5 megapixel camera and its 16GB of internal storage. In case you were hankering for a taste of what else makes Google Glass tick, Android developer (and Glass Explorer) Jay Lee spent some time tinkering with his preview unit and managed to figure out what kind of hardware it has under the hood.

Lee managed to confirm that Glass runs Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich (CEO Larry Page noted during Google’s most recent earnings call that Glass “obviously” runs on Android), and also determined that it has a Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 chipset. In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of developments in the mobile chipset market, the OMAP 4430 was used in devices like the original Motorola Droid RAZR and Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2.0 — solid devices during their prime, but the chipset that powered them is far from new.

Sadly, some of the particulars are still shrouded in mystery — Lee wasn’t able to figure out the processor’s clock speed (the 4430 CPU can be clocked between 1 and 1.2 GHz), and the device only reports that it has 682MB of RAM, but Lee suspects the total is actually 1GB. Still, that’s not too shabby a spec sheet for a device that essentially lives on your face, and some recent reports reveal that the ambitious headset may be surprisingly too simple to root to. Liam McLoughin, an intern for Google’s Chrome team, recently tweeted to note that gaining root access to the search giant’s curious head-mounted display seemed simple in theory, a development that prompted Lee to go digging in the first place.

Meanwhile, Cydia founder and administrator Jay Freeman revealed on Twitter that he too had made progress in gaining access to the device, and even posted a picture to show off how far he’d managed to go. At this point we’ve already seen some companies embrace the Glass platform (Path and the New York Times immediately spring to mind) and others like Evernote are known to be crafting experiences for Glass, but some moderately powerful hardware and seemingly easy rootability could make Glass an even bigger hit for Android tinkerers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Where is Twitter Music for Android? With today’s launch of Twitter’s new music discovery platform, the company has again made a move to sideline the install base of around half of the U.S.’s smartphone audience by failing to deliver a native application for users of non-Apple devices. It’s a strategy that still remains prevalent among tech companies today, both large and small. The companies’ reasons vary: for many smaller startups, there simply aren’t enough developers to build for iOS and Android simultaneously. Meanwhile for others, the iOS-first decision is more of a strategic play.

Twitter Music is now the second major new mobile application that Twitter has brought to Apple device owners first. The company previously launched its Vine video-sharing application as iOS-only in January, and it still remains exclusive to that platform today.

The interesting thing about Music’s launch – a move announced on ABC’s “Good Morning America” –  is that Twitter is attempting to reach a mainstream audience with the app. In the U.S., that audience is just as likely to be on Android as iOS – if not more so, in fact. Google’s Android platform now accounts for 51.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, while Apple’s iOS reaches 38.9 percent. (Source: comScore.) 

The Android platform is also now surging past iOS in terms of smartphone sales. This month, Kantar reported that in the first quarter of the year, Android’s percentage of U.S. smartphone sales was 51.2 percent to iOS’s 43.5 percent.

Then there’s the worldwide market to think of, which Android now dominates.

If there are simply more users on Android, and the platform is growing, does it not follow that app makers should start addressing that platform as more than an afterthought at some point?

Phone-First, Smartphone-Second?

Maybe not just yet.

Apple device owners tend to do more mobile web browsing, as has been widely known for awhile. But they’re also increasingly likely to stay with apps over time – reports have shown that iOS users are more loyal to the apps they download, for instance.

But perhaps most importantly is the fact that some number of Android owners aren’t downloading mobile applications at all. Google tacitly acknowledged this fact earlier this month, when it made a change to the way it measures Android version adoption on its Developers site. The company explained that, going forward, it would only show data reflecting those devices that had visited the Google Play Store.

Or in other words, there are enough Android devices out there which are not visiting the Google Play Store to affect the data that developers most care about – people who might download their apps.

This “Android engagement” conundrum has been discussed for many months now. A number of theories abound. Some believe there are quite a few Android owners who simply don’t use their phones like smartphones. IBM’s Black Friday 2012 data seems to back this up. These users are phone-first, and “smartphone” second.

But Android’s install base and app-engagement patterns are far from being the only reasons for this ongoing trend of iOS-first on mobile. Ash Rust, a co-founder at the Y Combinator-backed VoIP and messaging startup SendHub, says his team made the iOS-first decision for other reasons.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where many of these young companies like SendHub are based, a large number of the industry folks carry iPhones. “Up until recently, I rarely saw anything except iPhones in people’s hands,” says Rust. “That’s from our own team, other companies we’re friendly with, and friends and family,” he explains. “iOS was the best choice because we could readily get quick feedback from people we knew.”

That’s a problem that even a company the size of Facebook faces. It finally went so far as putting up posters begging employees to test Facebook on Android.

Rust also points out that iOS offers developers more revenue, too. The most recent data from app store analytics firm App Annie shows this to still be the case – as of last quarter, iOS apps earned developers nearly three times more revenue than those on Android. That’s a hard number for developers to ignore.

Lacking In-House Talent

Elsewhere in San Francisco, Ajay Kamat, founder of an iPhone app called Wedding Party, agrees that his region heavily favors iPhone. “When we started, most people on our team were iOS users, so we understood the platform well as consumers,” he says. “There are simply more developers with iOS experience in the community,” Kamat adds, noting that developers with Android experience are “very hard to come by.”

At Ness, another West Coast-based, mobile-first (and currently mobile-only) startup, the company is even putting Android development not second but third – behind a mobile-optimized website. Co-founder and CEO Corey Reese admits that part of the reason for this is that the company doesn’t have a full-time Android developer on staff – well, at least, not yet.

“I will say that amongst our engineering team, there’s a lot of interest in learning Android and experimenting with it – perhaps even more broadly than iOS when iOS was picking up steam,” he says. “A couple of years down the road, Android as a developer environment is going to be in a pretty strong place,” Reese predicts.

At 955 Dreams, makers of the popular Band of the Day iOS app, and more recently, event finder Applauze, the company’s iOS focus has also been, in part, because of their comfort and familiarity with developing on the iOS platform. “For us as a company, we’re still learning the core tenets of Android development and design. You can’t force these things,” proclaims CEO Kiran Bellubbi.

But he agrees that Android’s moment is coming, noting that it wasn’t until recently that the startup felt Android could offer its users a good experience. “Until Ice Cream Sandwich was released we couldn’t really use Android devices to do the kind of things that we needed to build Band of the Day or Applauze from an interaction design and execution point of view,” Bellubbi explains.

“Since Ice Cream Sandwich, the rate of improvement in the OS and in the associated devices has been fantastic and all serious developers will soon be considering both ecosystems at launch – if they are not doing it today, they will in the next year. This is inevitable,” he adds.

Big Names Initially Bypass Android

A number of high-profile apps have also made iOS their first home for new releases or major updates. In fact, that may have been to their advantage at times. For example, some believe that Instagram’s popularity, which led to its $1 billion acquisition by Facebook, had to do with its exclusive nature at first – you could only use Instagram on iPhone, that is. Today, nearly half of its 100 million users are on Android, however, which hints that everyone’s iOS-first strategy may have some faults; clearly, there is demand for quality apps among Android users.

Mobile magazine Flipboard was another big-name brand to start on iOS, first targeting iPad for its magazine-like form factor. But when it came time to move to smartphones, the company chose to extend its Apple user base with an iPhone app, instead of addressing both top mobile platforms at the same time.

“iOS and Android each have different strengths which lend themselves to different things,” explains Flipboard co-founder Evan Doll of his company’s decision. “iOS devices are more predictable in terms of screen sizes and capabilities, which is helpful when you’re building new functionality. As these different platforms and their capabilities evolve, I expect there will be firsts for all of them,” he adds.

Yahoo has also focused on iOS more heavily with recent app launches, debuting the revamped flickr for iOS first, and today’s gorgeous Weather app is again iOS-only. Greg Kumparak, who reviewed the app for TechCrunch, suspects that with Weather, there may even be technical hurdles to delivering that same experience on Android. “There are just a few little things I haven’t seen done on Android before,” he notes, referring to several technical touches he spotted in the app.

These little flourishes matter to those who take design seriously, like 995 Dreams or Wedding Party, for instance. “iOS makes it simple to do certain types of transitions and animations compared to Android,” Kamat tells us.

As for Twitter? While the company won’t reveal its Android strategy beyond saying the platform will be addressed “in time,” it’s likely suffering from all the same issues affecting other startups, too: adoption and engagement trends among Android users; a need for more developers; technical and design challenges; and more.

Android has come a long way since its debut. It’s a solid and promising platform for running apps. It’s in the hands of a lot of people. It’s growing. Now it’s time for the companies who build apps to catch up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Remember that hefty leak from a few weeks back that pointed to a dramatic redesign for Google’s Play Store Android app? Well, in case you were still unconvinced, Google has confirmed that just such a facelift has been in the works, and that the new 4.0 version of the Play Store app will start rolling out to devices running Android 2.2 and newer some time today.

It would seem that Google’s big goal with this new redesign was to bring the Play Store in line with other prominent Android features — ever since its last major facelift, the Google Play Android app has been swathed in blacks and greys, with color highlights corresponding to different content types breaking up the visual monotony. At the time the shift in design made sense — Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich featured a colder, darker aesthetic than previous versions of Android and also relied on light blue UI flourishes. Services like Google Now and apps like Google Search have gone in a drastically divergent direction these past few months though, and the now the Play Store doesn’t look like the odd one out.

Much like what you’d see in Google Now, individual apps, songs, and books now live in discrete cards, and there’s a much greater focus on big, eye-catching images. Those dreary colors have been given the axe too in favor of a much lighter design that helps make all that content stand out even more. According to Google Play group product manager Michael Silinski, Google has also sought to improve the process of discovering Play Store content by lumping books, tunes, and apps into themed groups. Interestingly, that zeal for a better Play Store experience isn’t limited to the front-end: some 60,000 apps of dubious quality were removed from the Google Play Store back in February, which points to (among other things) a more concerned effort by Google to emphasize quality over sheer Play Store size.

Sadly, the update hasn’t hit any of the Android geegaws floating around my office, so this early demo video of the 4.0 release (courtesy of Droid-Life) will have to hold you over until then.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Is it because Android is the most popular smartphone platform in the world right now, or is it because it’s just fundamentally easier to attack? In any case, Google’s mobile juggernaut Android continues to be the world’s biggest magnet for mobile malware. According to a report out today from security specialists F-Secure, Android accounted for 79% of all malware in 2012, up from 66.7% in 2011 and just 11.25% in 2010. On the other side of the spectrum, Apple’s iOS, the world’s second-most popular platform for smartphones in terms of new purchases, remains one of the least compromised, with 0.7% of malware on its platform.

Symbian, whose market share is in rapid decline and is being left for dead by its former parent Nokia, is down to 19% of all malware, compared to 62.5% two years ago. F-Secure predicts that it will go the way of the dodo bird and become extinct in 2013, as users replace their Nokia handsets with Android devices. Meanwhile, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and J2ME each accounted for less than 1% of threat families in circulation in the year.

Breaking down progress over the past year, Android’s malware record appears to have seen a particularly bad spike in Q4 2012. F-Secure notes that in the fourth quarter it accounted for a full 96% of attacks. In fact, according to its records, all other platforms except for Symbian (at 4%) didn’t appear to have any malware threat families received at all.

Holding these up to Q4 market analysis, these figures are not proportionate to market shares for current sales, but they are somewhat more reflective of what devices are in circulation today. In that sense, the shift between Symbian falling and Android rising is due to the fact that Android has been the biggest benefactor of Symbian’s decline.

“Malware in general has a parasitic relationship with its host,” writes Sean Sullivan, security advisor at F-Secure Labs. “As old Symbian handsets continue to be replaced by those with other operating systems, especially Android, Symbian malware dies off and will probably go extinct in 2013.”

In terms of what forms malware is taking, F-Secure says that 66% of detections were trojans (malware masked as something else). F-Secure believes that Google’s increased security prompts, which it introduced with the 4.2 variant (Jellybean), should help bring that number down. However, if you look at Google’s most recent stats on distribution, released this week, Android 4.2 is only at 1.6% — meaning that this make take some time to come to pass. (For the record, Gingerbread 2.3.3 and upwards remains the most popular in terms of distribution, at 44%, with Ice Cream Sandwich at number-two with 28%).

Another major problem continues to be dodgy SMS messages: F-Secure notes some 21 of the 96 Android threat variants come from premium SMS that encourages downloads and sometimes end up as repeat problems by way of subscription services to which users unwittingly become subscribed. Then, users don’t know about this until the charge comes up on their bill — if they bother to scrutinize that bill, that is.

Interestingly, F-Secure also notes that those releasing malware have become more sophisticated in their reasons for infiltrating devices. Specifically, there’s been a significant shift in terms of malware attacks becoming financially motivated over the last several years, with financial gains now well outweighing those attacks that have been made in the past. Why the shift? It may be because malicious hackers were still learning the ropes for how to infiltrate devices back in the day.

Or it could be something else: The rise in financial motivations also speaks to the fact that we as a population are using our devices for significantly more transactional services — and that makes them increasing targets for attacks aimed specifically at that fact. This is something that will eventually have to be squared with all the many ambitions and developments in the market today to turn our handsets into our default wallets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile video app Vyclone launched last summer on iOS to enable users to easily create collaborative videos from certain events and locations. It works like this: Users shoot video with the Vyclone app and upload those videos to the cloud. Once that’s done, the app looks for other videos shot nearby and stitches them together automatically, creating elaborate and interesting projects from multiple points of view.

The ideal use case for the technology — and the one which the founders started with — is for enabling users to create videos at concerts and other live events, which take advantage of multiple angles and perspectives. For that reason, artists like Madonna, No Doubt, Jason Mraz, The Jonas Brothers, and Cody Simpson have leveraged Vyclone’s technology to help them create interesting videos shot by their fans.

Now, though, the company wants to make its tech available to even more users, with the rollout of a new Android app. The app will be available on devices running Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean versions of the mobile OS, and will have a few interesting features just for Android.

For instance, since there are a number of both mobile phones and tablets that run the OS, Vyclone will have specific layouts for each form factor. The app is also orientation-aware, and will have either one, two, or three columns, depending on the screen real estate and how it is being held. The Android app also will provide viewers with information about movies that they are watching, including conversations, contributors that participated, etc. By doing so, the Vyclone team will help users to find others that have collaborated on videos shot in similar locations, and connect with them.

Videos shot in the app are automatically uploaded to the cloud once the device hits a WiFi network, and mixed together with others that were shot in a similar location. The app defaults to 480p video, since different Android devices support different video capture quality.

On a phone call, Vyclone founders Joe Sumner and David King Lassman told me that they knew they needed to be on as many platforms as possible to make its video tools more ubiquitous. Getting on Android will go a long way toward supporting a whole bunch more smartphone users.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Adobe mobile Photoshop strategy has so far kept more heavyweight editing to tablets with Photoshop Touch, and left the iPhone with Photoshop Express. But today the company has officially released Photoshop Touch for iPhone and Android smartphones, which inherits virtually all of the functionality of the more powerful tablet app, with an interface tailored to the smaller screens.

Photoshop Touch for phones brings layers (which decrease to three if you’re editing at max resoltuion), the popular Scribble Selection feature which lets you use imprecise finger selection to pick out precise parts of a picture, and also carries over all the filters, paint strokes sharing and other components that make up Photoshop Touch. There’s also the unique Camera fill feature that allows a user to fill in a layer in their creations using their device’s camera. Projects from the phone version can be synced and edited using Photoshop on either tablets or the desktop, too, thanks to Adobe’s Creative Cloud service.

Clearly a lot of attention was paid to making sure that the functionality of Photoshop Touch was not lost in translation as the app was redesigned for smaller-screen devices, but I asked Photoshop Product Manager Stephen Nelson about whether or not we might see more differences introduced into the phone and tablet versions (which sell as standalone apps rather than as a single universal piece of software) down the road.

“One advantage of having them as separate apps is we do have the flexibility for the two products to diverge slightly,” he said. “And diverge in a way that’s appropriate for the context and the device. You’ll notice a few things that are different already about the phone version, just to fit a smaller screen, but I could see it continuing to evolve slightly differently on the phone compared to the tablet.”

Photoshop Touch is priced at $4.99 on the App Store and Google Play, and is available for iPhone 4S or later, 5th gen iPod touch or Android phones running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) or later. If you’re a photographer, mobile or otherwise, and want some powerful editing tools in your pocket, this is definitely a worthwhile upgrade from Photoshop Express.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

HTC is set to show off something at a special press event in NYC on February 19 (the day before Sony’s, it turns out), and it’s quite likely that the company will debut its rumored new flagship phone, the M7. And now new leaks from the generally dependable Evleaks suggest the company has a multi-device lineup planned to follow the M7 with retail availability in Spring.

The two phones detailed by Evleaks on UnwiredView suggest that HTC will follow-up the M7 with a device with slightly more moderate specs, akin to how the One S was designed to complement the One X last year. And there will also be a down-market device, called the G2, that will be 2013′s equivalent to the HTC Desire C.

The M4 will reportedly pack a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, with a 4.3-inch 720 p display, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage and a 13 megapixel rear camera. It’ll have a fairly limited 1500 mAh battery (but fewer pixels to push compared to the M7), and should run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

The HTC G2 (which is unrelated to the previous HTC phone of the same name) will have a 1.0GHz ARM Cortex processor with 512MB of RAM, a 3.5-inch HVGA (480 x 320) display, with a 5 megapixel rear camera and no front shooter, a 1400 mAh battery and Android Ice Cream Sandwich as its operating system.

Once again, HTC looks set to deliver a trio of solid Android handsets designed for various consumer budgets, but I am a little concerned that this won’t be different enough from the status quo to really excite consumers and propel sales to higher than HTC’s rather disappointing performance overall in 2012. That said, it’s still very early to be judging these phones considering they haven’t even been made official yet, so maybe there’s more to HTC’s 2013 lineup than what’s apparent from the spec sheets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You know, for all the changes HTC has made to its Sense interface for smartphones over the years, it generally looks the same as it did back in the old days. That may not be the case for much longer if a new batch of screenshots spotted on the xda-developer forums are to be believed — they claim to provide an even better look at HTC’s forthcoming Sense 5 interface, and (if real) they represent a big step forward for HTC’s custom UI.

Before we go any further, I just have to point out that the kicker here is where the images came from — according to a thread on the xda-developer forums, someone managed to flash a Sense 5-laden build of Android 4.1.2 onto a Verizon Droid DNA. And where did that ROM come from? Well, should you believe the original post, it came from a Sprint-branded HTC M7 (you know, the not-so-secret flagship that HTC hasn’t officially announced yet).

It sounds sketchy, I know, but the visual style seen in these images matches the one seen in a batch of leaked photos that purportedly depict the M7 itself. As always, I’d advise you to have your grains of salt at the ready.

First impressions? If all of this is legitimate, HTC really may be onto something. It’s a pretty drastic leap from the Sense overlays of yore, which have generally looked very similar (save for some recent, much-needed changes) for years now. There are plenty of little touches that seem to bring the overall Sense experience closer to the cold, digital aesthetic that Google had in mind for Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, and that’s just fine by me. Perhaps one of the biggest tweaks here is to Sense’s typography — the skin’s usual font has been replaced with a narrower typeface (Engadget referred to it as a sort of “Roboto condensed”) which helps things feel less cluttered.

Interestingly, the icons for the stock dialer, web browser, messaging, and camera apps all seem flatter and less skeuomorphic than the ones seen in earlier versions of Sense. The word that keeps popping into my head is “sparse” — the visual quiet of the phone app and the app launcher is a curious change, but one I hope pans out and pervades the rest of the company’s custom UI. Then again, your mileage may vary on that: I prefer Google’s minimalism, but Samsung sells a crazy number of TouchWizzed devices so someone clearly enjoys garish, overwrought interfaces.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chinese mobile maker Huawei has had a habit of firing handsets into the market with specs that are pretty tasty for the money. Today it’s continuing this Android underdog strategy: unveiling what on paper looks like a relatively high-end 3G smartphone but at a price that sits in the mid-range for Europe (€299/$398). Huawei’s previous quad-core handset — the Ascend D Quad XL – is around €80 more expensive.

The Huawei Ascend G615 is apparently heading for the German market — cropping up on this German Huawei website, which notes that it will be sold exclusively via online retailers Amazon, Conrad and cyberport. We’ve reached out to Huawei for more details on market availability and will update this story with any response.

According to German website BestBoyZ, the G615 will go on sale early next month — with other retailers offering it from March. Speaking to the site, Lars-Christian Weisswange, Vice President of Device Western Europe at Huawei Technologies, said (via Google Translate): ”Our goal is to make the power of quad-core processor, making even accessible to those who do not want the high price of the current high-end pay models or can. It is particularly pleasing that has now enabled us to such an extensive and demanding total package.”

While the Ascend G615 lacks 4G, it packs in a quad-core 1.4GHz chip, 16-core GPU, 1GB of ROM and a large 4.5 inch LCD 720p display. Pixel density is 330 ppi. The phone does not run the very latest version of Android — rather the last but one flavour: Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) — but, according to BestBoyZ, it will get an update to Jelly Bean in the future.

There’s not a whole lot to talk about design wise, but the slab form is reasonably slender without being skeletal — at 1.05cm thick. Weight is 145g. Under the hood is a 2,150mAh battery which is apparently good for 11 hours of talk time, or 360 hours on standby.

The Ascend G615 also includes an eight megapixel rear camera, which supports 1080p HD recording, plus a 1.3 MP lens on the front for video chatting and 720p recording.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CloudOn, the popular free productivity service that brings Microsoft Office to mobile devices, just launched version 3.0 of its mobile app. With this launch, CloudOn is bringing its service to the iPhone, iPad Mini and Nexus 7. This means CloudOn is now available on all of Apple’s mobile devices, as well as on Android tablets running Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich version 3.1 or higher, as well as Jelly Bean tablets running Android 4.1 or higher. A version for the new Kindle Fire HD 7 should also be available shortly.

Today’s launch isn’t just about support for new devices, though. The company is also introducing support for Microsoft SkyDrive in addition to the already available support for Dropbox, Box and Google Drive. Unlike other productivity services, CloudOn isn’t interested in running its own cloud storage service. Instead, as the company told me earlier this week, the team wants to focus on doing what it does best: redefine productivity around mobile. “With CloudOn on the iPhone, iPad mini and Nexus tablet, we’re one step closer to ubiquitous mobile productivity,” said CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar. “We continue to focus on our mission of reinventing productivity in mobile and social environments.”

To bring Microsoft Office to the smaller screen of the iPhone after mostly focusing on tablets until now, the team had to make a few changes to its interface. The Ribbon, for example, was tailored to the iPhone by simplifying it and by spacing the icons out a bit more in order to make selecting them easier. As the CloudOn team told me, the expectation is that phone users won’t use the tool so much to create documents anyway.

The tablet version also puts a stronger emphasis on the file manager concept than the phone version, which focuses more on recently used files. Indeed, the team found that while its users keep coming back to the app, the sessions – even on tablets – tend to be relatively short and mostly focus on consuming content and making small edits. Very few users currently use the tablet apps to create new documents, and CloudOn expects this number to be even smaller on the phone.

I had a chance to test the iPhone app for the last few days and it works just as advertised. The only real complaint I have is that it’s often very obvious that you are not looking at a native interface when you are reading and editing documents. CloudOn uses virtualized instances of Office to display documents, and that means you also don’t get native fonts, making the documents look a bit pixelated at times.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch