Keane Ingram – Android blog

An interesting idea from Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, has been announced. Ubuntu for Android will allow owners of multi-core Android phones to use both Android and Ubuntu on the same device. By docking the phone at a workstation you can run the Ubuntu operating system, and when you’re using it out and about it will run Android. Both operating systems will have access to the same data.

The potential for this is enormous, and should drive mobile technology improvements as well as giving Android a big boost over competitors such as iOS and Windows 8. I will be very interested to see if this comes to fruition, it would definitely persuade me when choosing a handset to see if it was compatible with this.

Version 2.0 of the popular media player VideoLAN VLC is now available as a release candidate (download link is for Windows 32-bit) which offers new features including improved playback and a new interface. However, the most interesting part of the changelog is the mention of ports for Android and iOS devices. It will be interesting to see how the media player works on Android devices.

A beta version of Google’s Chrome browser is now available for download for Android phones and tablets, albeit only those running the latest version of Android, v4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich.

Chrome can be downloaded from the Android Market if you have an ICS device. It offers the following features:

• Faster browsing with accelerated page loading
• New tabs for browsing multiple pages
• Sync Chrome between your phone and desktop browser
• An ‘Incognito’ mode for private browsing.

I look forward to trying out the new browser once my phone receives the ICS update.

The latest bundle of games from Humble Bundle is now available – and this one is aimed at Android owners! All four of the games in the bundle work on Android phones, as well as also working on Windows, Linux and Mac computers. All of the games are DRM free and best of all is that you can pay what you want!

The four games included in the bundle are:

• Anomaly
• EDGE
• Osmos
• World of Goo

World of Goo will only be included if you beat the average price paid so far, which is currently $5.91. The RRP of the four games is $60 it’s well worth getting the bundle! World of Goo is a great game which I own on several different platforms (it was in a previous Humble Bundle), and Osmos has had excellent reviews as well. I look forward to getting the time to play these games!

A court in the Netherlands has rejected Apple’s calls for a ban on the product, clearing the way for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to be sold in the country. Today’s ruling by the Court of the Hague gives Samsung a minor victory, although there are still many other patent battles being fought around the world. One day, perhaps, these major IT companies will stop spending their money on legal bills and spend it on research instead?

The classic game Another World will soon have it’s 20th Anniversary Edition released on Android devices. The game, which is currently available on iOS devices, is being developed and published by DotEmu along with original developer Eric Chahi, and will feature HD graphics and remastered sound.

I look forward to getting a chance to play this on my phone – hopefully it will be optimised for the Xperia Play too.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Asus have announced details of a new Android tablet. The Asus Eee Pad MeMO ME370T will have a 7″ screen with a resolution of 1280×800. It will also have a dual-core 1.2GHz CPU and run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Most importantly, Asus claim it will be sold for $250.

If the selling price is true, then this will hopefully give some impetus to the Android tablet market, and hopefully provide some much-needed competition for the Kindle Fire.

According to an interview given by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the next six months will see Google begin marketing ‘a tablet of the highest quality’. Presumably this will be along the same lines as the Nexus range of phones – not manufactured by Google but being the standard for each new release of Android.

Google has already tried something similar with the Motorola Xoom, which was the first tablet to be released with vanilla Honeycomb (Android 3.0) on it, which didn’t work out particularly well – it will be interesting to see how Google fight back against the success of the iPad and Kindle Fire.

Since T-Mobile and Orange merged to become Everything Everywhere, there have been plans to allow users of either network to roam on the other for free. This has been in place for 2G voice and SMS services since October last year, but now sharing of 3G signals has started.

I received a text message earlier from T-Mobile to let me know about this starting. All that was required was to reboot my phone.

As indicated in my text message, further information about this is available from the T-Mobile website.

This weekend saw the ten billionth download from the Android Market. The news was announced on Google’s Official Blog. As you can see from the graph below, the rate of app downloads has increased rapidly – it took 22 months to reach the first billion downloads, but it only took one month to go from 9 billion to ten billion!

To celebrate, Google are offering ten days of special offers, with what looks like 10 premium apps available each day for 10p.

Today’s apps include SwiftKey X, Endomondo Pro and Minecraft. The apps will change daily, presumably going by American time.