Keane Ingram – Android blog

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.

It seems that work on porting CyanogenMod 7 (Gingerbread) to the Amazon Kindle Fire is progressing well. The latest update from the XDA Developers forum is that a developer has got CM7 running on the Kindle Fire. Although a lot of work is still required to make it usable, just getting CM7 to boot is great progress.

Here’s an image (not brilliant quality) of CM7 running on the Fire. I look forward to hearing about further progress.

The App Gap is the based on the idea that children are now learning from using apps, but that some children have easier access to smartphones and tablets than others. An article at Online Colleges discusses 15 facts about the App Gap and whether or not it is harmful to a child’s education.

A press release from Amazon has announced that the Kindle Fire has been Amazon’s best selling product across the whole site since it was launched 8 weeks ago. Also, purchases of all Kindle products (including E Ink readers and the Fire) were up four times over what was purchased during last year’s Black Friday.

The Kindle Fire launch has clearly been successful for Amazon – fingers crossed it makes its way to the UK soon.

Samsung’s latest US advert for their Galaxy S2 handset takes a bit of a swipe at iPhone zealots. It shows them queuing for the latest iPhone when some S2 users walk past showing off ‘the next big thing’.

It’s all very light-hearted, and ends with the suggestion that the next big thing has already arrived. It’s a shame we don’t get adverts like this in the UK…