Android Girls

Samsung Bigfoot & Spico Android smartphones with OS 2.0 “Donut”?

Two new Android smartphones have been tipped, both by Samsung and expected to launch in Q3 2009.

The Samsung Spico (left) and Samsung Bigfoot (right) will both have 3-inch WQVGA touchscreens, while the Bigfoot adds a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and T-Mobile USA 3G support; each will apparently run Android OS 2.0 “Donut”, the follow-up to Cupcake.



Both devices will have roughly identical specifications, with triband HSDPA (T-Mobile USA-friendly only the case of the Bigfoot), WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 and GPS, as well as a 3-megapixel autofocus camera, accelerometer, digital compass and 100MB of onboard storage.

There’s also a microSD slot and USB 2.0 connection. The Samsung Spico will apparently get a TouchWiz GUI rather than the more familiar Android interface, as in the gallery screenshot below.



The Samsung Bigfoot certainly resembles the device labeled as the T-Mobile G1 v.2 in the carrier’s leaked roadmap from earlier this month. Donut, meanwhile, will bring with it WVGA display support, among other things, but may not be a retrospective update to existing Android handsets.

iPhone, Android Developers Tap Skyhook For Location Data

Location positioning company Skyhook Wireless has a database of more than 100 million access points that enable pinpoint location accuracy, but developers using the company's technology have come up with thousands of applications, many of which Skyhook executives wouldn't have thought of in their wildest dreams.

The more than 2,500 applications -- most for the iPhone -- range from games and social networking activities to location-based weather reports and restaurant locators.

"The most striking thing about the applications is there is no dominant application," said CEO Ted Morgan in an interview. "There's just no single category that dominates, and we get at least 50 applications a day."


Realizing that standard GPS was slow and not accurate enough for most consumers, particularly in urban areas, Morgan's Boston-based company began compiling a database of the world's Wi-Fi access points. The company triangulates Wi-Fi access points with standard GPS technology and cell phone towers. The result is a location-based technology that delivers extremely accurate and fast results for consumers with cell phones. Skyhook's database typically receives 250 million location requests every day.

The applications range widely. Some are utilitarian such as Cellfire Mobile, which digs out retailers' coupons and discounts near a consumer. Android application Shopsavvy scans bar codes for good shopping deals.

Yelp finds and reviews restaurants, and OpenTable assists users in making table reservations. SitorSquat is a wiki that details the location and conditions of more than 50,000 international bathrooms.

Fast drivers will welcome Trapster, which alerts them when they approach police speed traps. There's also an application that tracks ski resorts and gives real-time snow conditions.

On the personal side, Morgan, a recreational runner, uses RunKeeper to keep track of his runs. And Skyhook's director of marketing, Kate Imbach, predicts the social networking overtones of the applications will take off in the future. She likes Foursquare, which locates restaurants and finds other users in the neighborhood.

Skyhook has a partnership with Apple. Developers are also creating applications for Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Android phones using Skyhook's database, but the company doesn't have a partnership with Google. Typically a developer will download a software developer's kit from Skyhook's Web site and build an application within a month.

Samsung I7500 phone: Hands On Video

Korean mobile phone maker Samsung announced not too long ago its first handset running under Google's Android operating system, the i7500, which should be launched with O2 later during the ongoing year, while also being expected to head towards T-Mobile's lineup under the name of Samsung Houdini, and which has now surfaced in a new video on the web.

The specifications of the phone should already be familiar to some of you, for it comes with quad-band GSM, tri-band 7.2Mbps HSDPA (900/1700/2100MHz) connectivity, as well as with a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen display that can offer a 320 x 480 pixel resolution, not to mention the WiFi capabilities, GPS receiver, or the 5-megapixel photo snapper.

Other capabilities of the handset include 8GB of internal memory, which is coupled with a microSD memory card slot that can offer users the possibility to add up to 32GB of storage space. What the Samsung i7500 adds new in comparison to the other Android-based mobile phones on the market is a standard 3.5mm jack.

The same as the other two Android phones available at the moment, namely HTC Dream and HTC Magic, the new Samsung device comes with a wide range of Google apps and services enabled, such as Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar, and Google Talk, as well as My Location, Google Latitude or Street View.

Take a look at the video below to learn a few more things about the handset, but bear in mind that the device, though it looks quite nice and performs well enough, does not feature the software in its final state. There shouldn't be too long before the actual device is spotted on the shelves, as O2 announced recently that it planned on launching the Samsung i7500 as soon as June, which means that even more detailed info on the phone should become available at that time, so stay tuned to learn the news.

Android Girl

Wikitude - Augmented reality on Android

Augmented reality, where real life is annotated with information, has long been the stuff of science fiction, like flying cars and the paperless office. But suddenly, an augmented reality applications is available on Android, Google's cell phone platform.

A small Austrian-based business specializing in software for smartphones, Mobilizy is working on a project called Wikitude AR Travel Guide, which is an augmented reality application for Google Android-based phones. I don't have a lot of information beyond the video at the bottom of this post. My guess is that even though it's available, the application is probably not fully mature and robust.

How it works, no doubt, is that the cell phone's GPS pinpoints the phone's location, then an internal compass tells the phone which direction the phone is pointed. Using that data, whichever of the 350,000 "points of interest" in the global database are visible are identified on-screen.

But I'm certain that augmented reality will one day go mainstream. Imagine a world that is indexed and searchable, and where you can point your cell phone at anything and get the Wikipedia entry on it.

It's also likely that there will be a social element to all this. Like the Wikipedia itself, people will contribute the identification of real-world objects by snapping pictures of them and feeding them into a database somewhere, no doubt owned by Google.

HTC Hero spotted in the wild..

.. the next Android phone?

Not content to bring out one of the phones of 2009 in the HTC Magic, the Taiwanese company has been showing off the HTC Hero, its next Android offering.

After hinting at such a device in its leaked 2009 line-up, the Hero has finally surfaced in the real world, and looks like it's following the G1 and Magic lineage we're now used to, thanks to the inexplicable lip at the bottom.



But it has one thing the Magic and G1 don't have, and that's a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is something the world has been hankering after in an Android phone for ages (and something Samsung is bringing in a couple of months with the i7500).

It seems to borrowing the angular stylings of the HTC Diamond range from the blurry pics sent in (which you can see more of over at CodeAndroid), but has ditched the trackball we've grown to love on the previous two Android offerings.



This really does look like the real deal, and in many ways makes perfect evolutionary sense, especially as HTC has promised more Android handsets this year. If we were to have a guess, it would be that this phone is equipped with a more powerful processor and better camera, especially as HTC has told TechRadar that's going to be a big focus (excuse the pun) for the future.



Word is that we'll be seeing this little beauty in the next four or five months, which is certainly enough to get excited over, especially as the HTC Magic performed so well in a recent review.

Sending Cell Phones into the Cloud

New technology offloads processing from a mobile device to its cloud-based doppelganger.

Face in the cloud: CloneCloud allows processor-intensive applications, like this prototype face-recognition application, to be offloaded to remote servers.

The problem with mobile phones, says Allan Knies, associate director of Intel Research at Berkeley, is that everyone wants them to perform like a regular computer, despite their relatively paltry hardware. Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, thinks that he might have the solution to that problem: create a supercharged clone of your smart phone that lives in "the cloud" and let it do all the computational heavy lifting that your phone is too wimpy to handle.

CloneCloud, invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis, uses a smart phone's high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google's Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double. Details of the project will be revealed at the HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month.

It's a trick not unlike the way that many Web-based applications, such as Google Docs, run on remote servers. The difference is that because CloneCloud creates a perfect copy of the phone's software, it can take on literally any processor-intensive task that it calculates it can do faster than the phone itself, after weighing the amount of time and battery life required to transfer the required data.

The big benefit of CloneCloud is battery-life extension, which would naturally follow from lower utilization of the phone's CPU. Chun imagines that this could become a competitive advantage for vendors, like free voice mail or unlimited data plans.

But CloneCloud wouldn't just make smart phones more efficient: it could also make them more capable. A test application developed by Chun performs face recognition on photos. It required 100 seconds of processor time on a standard Android phone, but it finished in only one second when run by a clone of the phone running on a desktop computer. Because the software runs on a cloud-computing platform, it can be scaled in terms of the amount of both memory allocated and processing power, both of which increase performance on computationally intensive tasks.

Security could be an important potential application of CloneCloud. Ya-Yunn Su, a researcher at NEC Laboratories, in New Jersey, who previously developed a prototype system similar to CloneCloud, notes that "as smart phones become mini general-purpose computers, more of the problems we see in desktops, like viruses, will become smart-phone problems." Virus scans, which involve checking the entire file system of a device, are exactly the sort of process that Chun envisions CloneCloud accomplishing in the background, even while the smart phone is off.

On the other hand, like all cloud-based services, CloneCloud could create a whole new class of security vulnerabilities--the sort that arise when all of a user's private data is stored on publicly accessible servers. "Even after you address the technical issues, how can you get users to trust the cloud?" asks Su.

Maniatis, Chun's collaborator on CloneCloud, notes that the team is working on a number of different methods to secure CloneCloud. One approach, known as "private data disclosure detection" or "taint checking," examines all of the variables in a program that could be affected by inputs from outside sources, in order to detect whether these inputs contain data inserted for malicious purposes. Taint checking is extremely processor intensive, which means that CloneCloud could be a unique enabler for it on mobile devices. "We're using execution in the cloud to run e-mail applications in an environment where you can do this emulation without waiting for the heat death of the universe for your smart phone to finish," says Maniatis.

CloneCloud could be bedeviled by another issue that prevented earlier research into offloading computation from mobile devices from being commercialized: network latency and bandwidth limitations. "When they did research on this in the late '90s," says Chun, "their wireless connection was a modem, 28.8 kbps. You can imagine that sending data on this connection could take quite a long time." Smart phones now use much faster wireless technologies: Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, and, eventually, 4G and WiMax. But the speed of the phone's connection and the power consumption required to transmit data may still limit the kinds of tasks for which CloneCloud can be used.

Chun says that network latency can be masked: the phone could guess what the outcome of a particular process might be and proceed until told otherwise, for example. But it's clear that some applications, like games, would require connections faster than those currently available and might rapidly drain a phone's battery.

Ultimately, Chun envisions that the research behind CloneCloud will help intelligently shuffle tasks to the fastest, or most power-efficient, processor in a data center. This application is especially relevant at Intel, which makes everything from the energy-sipping Atom processors used in netbooks to powerful (and power-hungry) Nehalem processors used in Web servers. "There will be a family of heterogeneous devices, and you would like to move the computing job to the one that makes most sense; from that standpoint, it is a great idea," says Knies.

The same approach could someday allow a computing environment to be unshackled from any one particular device. "You could come home and sit down at a mobile Internet device and have it transfer content and calculations to your desktop PC," says Knies. "You could imagine what that would enable in terms of sharing information between devices in the home and the mobile device you have on you all the time."

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22571/

Samsung I7500 Android phone: Hands On Video Review

Looks sweet!