Looking for Android on a budget? Lured in by the subsidized prices for today’s Android smartphones, but reluctant to sign up to a new, two-year agreement? Chinavision’s Robot promises the scratch that itch for you: at $179.10 it’s about the same cost as a regular Android phone, but you’re getting it SIM-free.
Over at The Red Ferret Journal they’ve reviewed the Robot, and as you might expect there are some compromises to hit that price-tag. For a start there’s no 3G – it’s GSM/EDGE only – and the OS is Android 1.5; the 2.8-inch touchscreen is resistive and runs at 320 x 240 resolution. Meanwhile the CPU is just 400MHz and the camera only 2-megapixels. The end result is a phone that isn’t exactly swift, but otherwise the review seems surprisingly positive.
In fact, the Robot feels well put together (even if the style is borrowed a little from the BlackBerry Storm) and the lack of 3G means you get around three days use out of a full charge. Considering something like the HTC Tattoo still runs to £179.99 ($270), the Chinavision Robot might not be such a bad deal.
TechTechies has posted an article detailing an interestingly powerful notepad, by a company who’s name is just as interestingly odd. The Neofonie WePad, despite its silly ass name, boasts a large 11.6″ 1366×786 display, a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N450 Pineview-M processor, and 16GB of NAND storage with the option of 32GB internal and 32GB SD for all of your porn multimedia needs. Hit the link for more detailed information and a specifications comparison with Apple’s iPad.
I’d be very interested in checking this notepad out, specifically to see how they modified the Android Home Launcher to suit that big display.
By some accounts, this week hasn’t been so great for Google.
The first bit of bad news concerns sales of Google’s Nexus One phone.
On Tuesday, the market analytics firm Flurry released a report saying initial sales of Google’s Nexus One phone have been slim compared to the Droid and the iPhone. The firm compared sales of those those phones over the first 74 days they were on the market. In a blog post, Flurry says it chose that time period because that’s how long it took the original iPhone to sell 1 million handsets when it was released in 2007.
By comparison, only 135,000 Nexus One phones were sold in that phone’s first 74 days. More from Flurry’s post:
As Google and Apple continue to battle for the mobile marketplace, Google Nexus One may go down as a grand, failed experiment or one that ultimately helped Google learn something that will prove important in years to come.
Google responded to that news by playing up the Android Market, the online store where people with Android phones — like the Nexus One and Droid — buy applications, according to Engadget.
Google issued a statement to CNN, saying:
We’re pleased with our sales volumes and with how well the Nexus One has been received by our customers. The Nexus One is one of a fast growing number of Android handsets which have been brought to market through the open Android ecosystem. Our partners are shipping more than 60,000 Android handsets each day compared with 30,000 just three months ago.
Not everyone says this news is so bad, though. Concern about the Nexus One’s slow start is “more than a little ridiculous,” writes Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:
Google is still a software company dabbling in hardware. And its mobile smart phone software is very, very good.
The other potentially troublesome story concerns Google’s search traffic.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine appears to be making slight inroads on Google, which still dominates that territory. A Nielsen report, issued Monday, found Microsoft searches in February made up 12.5 percent of the search market, compared to 10.9 percent in January. Meanwhile, Google still accounts for 65.2 percent of all U.S. searches.
The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital blog notes that the shift in the search market is “slow going”:
… Bing is clearly whittling away at both Google and Yahoo’s search market share. Of course, the flip side is that with Yahoo in decline, the search side of the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership isn’t showing all that much growth.
What do you think? Is Google, clearly one of the world’s dominant tech companies, in any trouble here?
Was its jump into the mobile phone hardware market misguided, or do you think Nexus One sales may still take off? We welcome your thoughts in the comments section below.
I’m sure those of your following the Android scene will have already heard that the SlingPlayer is coming to an Android device near you soon.
For those who don’t know about Sling, it’s basically a setup that allows you to stream television from your home to your mobile device.
Connect the SlingBox to your Sky box (or Freeview if you’re poor like me) and connect it to your broadband router and away you go. You now have access to your home TV – but on the move. It’s even clever enough to allow changing of channels remotely which is surely a God-send? Imagine if you had accidentally left your Freeview set to ITV2 and had to put up with a whole day’s worth of Trisha and Jeremy Kyle.
The app is supposedly going to be out sometime this summer so not too long to wait. It will work both over 3G and WiFi so you should be able to catch up with Neighbours or Home & Away wherever you are.
We do! QR codes are becoming more and more popular. Their typical use is directing traffic to a website. If you run a website and want people to be able to view it using their mobile devices (mainly iPhone and Android devices), add a QR code to your link and let people scan it. Most of the current “smart” phones have free (and paid) barcode or QR code scanning apps available for them. To take advantage of them you must post a QR image, like this! (It sounds like Windows Phone Series 7)
It’s actually very simple to setup, there are websites out there that have eveything you need to set one up. It takes less than a minute. We used Kaywa and their free QR-Code Generator, they allow you to set the code to link to a URL, MMS, Phone Number or Text message. Give it a shot and let us know how it goes.
Watchouts Discovered In First 72 Hours of Foursquare Use:
Given my Gamer past and competitive nature, I was quite eager to get several check-ins down on my first day. My first Check-in was at The Pub, the location of the monthly New Media Cincinnati 2nd Saturday Meetups and I made several stops (aka- ‘drive bys’) on the way home following the event. Love racking up the points for first time visits. The next day gave me an opportunity to add some new venues to the location menu. Downside- you need to have the full address information for input. I tried to put in my favorite coffee spot, Luckman’s Coffee and there was absolutely no address anywhere on the front door or shopping center. Looks like we need a Super User to swing in and clean things up! Apparently, Foursquare assigns these tech savvy folks to keep the “neighborhood” blight-free. So here are some things I discovered in my first 72 hours:
I AM ADDICTED!
It it is a thrill to be Mayor.
I spend a lot of time at my church(3 Check-ins already)-looks like I’m praying, but actually I’m involved on quite a few volunteer projects and boards ( but yeah, I’m praying for you between meetings!)
Pushing info out to friends, Twitter, Facebook– make it reasonable, like sharing info on becoming mayor or unlocking a badge
Be careful who you add or accept as a friend- does said person really need to know your whereabouts?
DO NOT ADD YOUR HOME LOCATION-even if you call it ‘Heaven’, Foursquare will still pick up your ACTUAL location coordinates
Being on Foursquare shows you info that you may not really care to know about other people- for example, did I really need to know that Jon was out pubbing it until 3:00 a.m.? or that Liza is a Baptist, cus she checked into Hyde Park Baptist on Sunday morning? Even found out who rides the Express Bus from Anderson into downtown Cincinnati for the daily commute.
Haven’t uncovered any business specials yet; but I am digging the tips that others are leaving behind about each venue.
Warning: Don’t try to shop and Check-In/Add tips at the same time- you will inevitably run your cart into another human being and risk looking a bit “shiny toy”-obsessed! Listen to the vid below and answer the question in the comment section underneath.
Thanks!
I have really enjoyed my iPhone and mobile Safari but AT&T and Apple will not unlock an iPhone for any reason. I am moving to Ghana and there is no way that I will be roaming with an AT&T international plan. It seems that iPhones are not yet sold in Ghana so I would have to try to buy an unlocked one in Amsterdam in transit or buy something in Ghana.
I couldn’t resist the new Google Nexus One. It was almost tailor-made for solving my problem. MTN in Ghana has 900MHz UMTS, which is supported by the Nexus One. And, of course, the Nexus One is sold unlocked.
Initial key selling points:
Unlocked
Can be tethered (via rooting or PDANet)
Integration with Google Apps
Multitasking
Not tied to iTunes or any other desktop software
Android is a Java-like VM called Dalvik which runs on top of a core Linux OS and some C libraries like WebKit and SQLite. I was definitely concerned that the phone would be sluggish or klunky. It is neither. It is fast and it is slick.
My initial impression is that this phone has everything that I loved about the iPhone and either has built-in or add-on fixes for all the things that annoyed me.
Initial observations:
Phone “activation” is dead simple. You sign in with a Google Apps, regular Google or Exchange account (or a combo) and you’re done.
This thing seems faster than the iPhone 3Gs.
WiFi performance is great and Edge (I’m still on AT&T) seems the same as the “3G” (which often falls back to Edge) performance I have been getting in my little slice of Washington, DC.
The Voice app is like Visual Voicemail on steroids. Yeah, sometimes the transcripts are bad but then you fall back to the same behavior as Visual Voicemail. Incidentally, you don’t need a Google number for Voice to work. It sets itself up with your carrier to replace the voicemail system provided by your carrier and you can turn it off if you want to go back.
Gadgets are a cool way to embed applications like calendar, weather and news and search right in your home screens.
The Google Market store for apps is well done and it’s a nice touch that there is an Amazon music store app.
Listen is fantastic at pulling down podcasts over the air and caching them. It also can pull them down in real time and I can still surf the web at the same time. On iPhone this wasn’t possible because the media streaming component of Safari is modal. You can’t do anything else with Safari unless you kill the stream.
I love that the alarm clock has a cock crowing ringtone.
I have been seeing more and more Droid phones popping up around town. This feels like the future.
Looking for Android on a budget? Lured in by the subsidized prices for today’s Android smartphones, but reluctant to sign up to a new, two-year agreement? Chinavision’s Robot promises the scratch that itch for you: at $179.10 it’s about the same cost as a regular Android phone, but you’re getting it SIM-free.
