Android 4.4 KitKat now has a home on 5.3 percent of all Android devices, at least those that visit the Google Play store.
In its latest Android Developer Dashboard, Google revealed Google Play stats for all Android versions during the seven days that ended April 1. KitKat’s newest cut of the action doubles the 2.5 percentshare seen a month ago and shows continued growth from the 1.8 percent recorded at the beginning of February.
With the Gingerbread barely cooled on the Android 2.3 SDK, Google has now pushed another iteration to developers. In Android 2.3.3, it’s all about expanding support for near-field communications — that non-Packers NFC business we’ve been hearing so much about.
In Android 2.3.3, Google has added a full-featured NFC read and write API, which will work with “almost any standard NFC tag in use today.” They’re also providing developers with better control over how their apps react when an NFC tag comes into range.
Last but not least, similar to the Touchstone transfer wizardry shown off by HP on its new line of webOS hardware today, Android 2.3.3 has initial support for peer-to-peer connections with “other NFC devices.”
Google obviously wants to get some momentum behind Android’s NFC support, not least because the company is likely working on an NFC-driven payment system.
Let the proximity application awesomeness begin!
Xperia Play to land on all five major UK mobile networks. Three has become the final of the UK’s big five mobile network providers to announce it will offer the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play handset, formerly known as the PSP Phone.
Following in the footsteps of O2, Orange and T-mobile which announced their intentions for the Xperia Play in the past 24 hours after Vodafone broke cover to be the first network to confirm it would stock the upcoming gaming-centric handset, an official Three press release revealed: “Three has just announced it’s ranging the Sony Ericsson XPERIA play over on @ThreeUK.”
Speaking on the network’s adoption of the Xperia Play Three’s Head of Branded Devices, Sylvia Chind said: “At Three we’re eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA play. We believe this handset celebrates a further step change in the way in which consumers use data, merging mobile communications and entertainment.”
Palm HP announced a lot of really great stuff today! The TouchPad, Palm Pre 3 and Veer (which might be my favorite, because it is tiny and adorable like a puppy). And they’re the only products guaranteed to get webOS 3.0.
Funny thing is, HP is actually launching a product tomorrow: Verizon’s taking pre-orders for the Pre 2. You might be thinking to yourself, “Great, I can buy it now and get all of that cool webOS 3.0 stuff on my phone later!” Well, don’t be so sure. Palm literally doesn’t know if the Pre 2 is going to be updated to webOS 3.0 that’s running on the TouchPad and eventually on the Pre 3 and Veer. It might. Or it might not. But it’s a little disconcerting Palm doesn’t know.
And since Palm’s VP of Product Marketing Stephane Maes told us they’re not really going to push the Pre 2 very hard—meaning it was every bit the stopgap product we thought—I’d think reallllly hard about throwing down cash on it. Oh, and if you own a Pre or Pixi or their Plus variants? You’re not even getting the latest webOS shown off today. End of the road.
Hate to sound like a broken record of late, but consider waiting for the new stuff. It is all quite spiffy.
Following the recent preview of INQ’s Cloud Touch phone, more commonly known as the Facebook Phone, the company has officially confirmed the device. Of course, the device is really an Android-powered device with some Facebook-oriented widgets and shortcuts that make accessing the social network’s chat, contacts, events, notices, news feeds and more much easier. The phone is powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm chip and INQ is planning to get Android 2.3 on the device further down the road. An interesting feature of this phone will be the use of Spotify in place of the stock Android media player,
According to Businessweek, Nokia is expected to announce a partnership with Microsoft this week, which will put the Windows Phone 7 mobile OS on future Nokia devices. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop basically said this was going to happen in his memo, and from the looks of it he’s wasting no time making it happen.
Nokia also talked with Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the possiblility of putting Android on Nokia phones, but those dealings fell through. (Sidenote: GOD DAMMIT.) Both companies hope the partnership will help them get back into the game against the likes of smartphone hardware and software makers such as Apple, Google, Samsung and HTC. Businessweek expects Elop to make this announcement tomorrow. [Businessweek]
In many ways, the smartphone platform has evolved following the same kinds of steps we saw in the early days of the PC – lots of different software and hardware platforms, rapidly changing lead players, faster and faster platform update cadence, the slow emergence of obvious majority leaders. Anand and I have talked extensively about just how striking the similarities are between the PC evolution and the current mobile one, but one of the striking differences is just how much faster that evolution is happening in the mobile space. The reason is simple – nearly all the hard lessons have already been learned in the previous PC evolution, it’s just a matter of porting that knowledge to mobile under a different set of constraints.
2011 is going to be a year dominated by multi-core smartphone launches, but there always has to be a first. So just like that, we have our first example of said category of smartphone, the LG Optimus 2X, with Nvidia’s dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2 AP20H at its heart. The Optimus 2X (simply the 2X henceforth) hasn’t changed much since we saw it at CES – the hardware is aesthetically the same, and software at first glance is the same as well. We weren’t able to publish benchmarks at that time purely because LG hadn’t finalized the software build on that test hardware, but we definitely can do so now.
You’d think that after protracted debacle of the AT&T iPhone 4’s attenuation problems, Apple would have made absolutely certain to fix the issue completely before the Verizon version hit. But this iLounge video indicates otherwise. Antennagate 2.0? To be fair, this hasn’t been a widely reported issue either in reviews or by word of mouth. So let’s take this video—convincing demonstration though it is—with a grain of salt. Like you needed another reason to wait for iPhone 5 anyway.
