Google Edition Samsung Galaxy S4 And HTC One With Stock Android 4.2 Now Available In The Play Store, Shipping July 9th

The day is here, AOSP fans: you can go pick up a gloriously stock Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One in the Google Play Store now. The "Google Play Edition" phones went live this morning, right on time, and are now for sale next to the Nexus phones and tablets. The GS4 Google Edition can be had for $649, while the HTC One goes for slightly less at $599. Both are running the latest version of Android 4.2 shod of all skins and add-ons, with promised updates via Google itself. At the moment, the phones are only available to United States residents. Both are shipping out on July 9th, with free shipping as a nice bonus. Which one to get? You've probably already decided this for yourself, but here's a quick comparison of specs just in case you haven't. Both phones pack a gorgeous 1080p display: the GS4 uses a 5-inch Super AMOLED panel that's a bit brighter, but with color saturation that some don't appreciate, while the One has a slightly smaller 4.7-inch Super LCD that's a bit easier to read under direct sunlight. The HTC One wins for pure storage with a generous 32GB of space, but the GS4 gets 16GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot. Keep in mind that Google Play Store content (apps, movies, and music) can only be placed on internal storage on a non-rooted phone.

Both phones are powered by the quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset, but the GS4 is clocked slightly higher at 1.9Ghz to the One's 1.7Ghz. It won't make a huge difference for everyday operation, but speed demons will probably lean towards the GS4. Samsung's phone also has a bigger battery at 2600mAh versus the One's 2300mAh, with the added bonus of being removable and replaceable. Cameras are hard to compare on the two, since HTC uses a proprietary 4-"ultrapixel" sensor while the GS4 has a conventional 13.1MP rear shooter. Check our reviews of the Galaxy S4 and HTC One for some comparison shots, and keep in mind that you'll be shooting photos and videos with Android's stock camera. Both phones feature 3G and LTE bands that will work with AT&T or T-Mobile, and of course, the bootloader is easily unlockable for development or ROM tinkering.

But let's be honest here: both phones are pretty amazing, and either would serve and discerning gadget hound well. The biggest difference, and likely to be the deciding factor for many, is the design philosophy behind them. Samsung's is more conventional, with a plastic build that focuses on the screen above all else, while HTC goes for a more sturdy aluminum unibody build. Those who consider loudness and audio fidelity will probably lean towards the One with its front-facing stereo speakers, while those who want a lighter feel in the hand will go for the GS4. The One wins on pure price, but if you're spending six hundred bucks on an unlocked phone, I doubt you'll balk at $650. At the moment, the One is available only in silver, and the GS4 comes clad all in white - these are likely to remain the only color options.
And since you've made it this far, I'll point out that the Nexus 4 is still available at a much cheaper $299/$349 for 8GB and 16GB models. You lose the amazing screen, screaming performance, and access to LTE, but it's still a pretty great device considering the price.
The Google Edition Galaxy S4 and HTC One are likely to sell out very quickly. If you want one, run, don't walk to the Play Store.

Google Play Store - Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Edition
Google Play Store - HTC One Google Edition

src -http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/06/26/google-edition-samsung-galaxy-s4-and-htc-one-now-available-for-purchase-in-the-google-play-store/

T-Mobile drops $50 off the price of the Galaxy S 4 for one month

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by Jared Peters on Jun 13th 2013, 12:40am
tagged galaxy s 4, Note II, S III, Samsung, T-Mobile

If you’ve been itching to pick up a Galaxy S 4 on the nation’s new uncarrier, now’s an excellent time to be shopping around. For a month, T-Mobile is dropping the price of Samsung’s latest flagship to just $99 down with $20 payments over 20 months. This brings the total price of the phone down to $579. Alongside the S 4, T-Mobile is also dropping the down payments of the Note II to $169 and the Galaxy S III to $49, so there are some pretty great savings on other Samsung flagship devices as well.

If you want to take advantage of these deals, you have until July 13th. You’ve got a month, go grab a new phone.

source: T-Mobile

At Google I/O, Glass and Android Get All the Love, if Not All the Money

Google remade its annual developer conference, I/O, to focus even more on programmers this year, eschewing the usual barrage of consumer product announcements. So what did this audience of hard-core software geeks want to hear about?
Ways to talk to Google hardware, judging by audience size at various panels, town hall meetings and tutorials. Developers mobbed sessions related to Android, Google’s mobile operating system, which sometimes runs atop Google handsets. They even jammed up a talk titled “Writing Custom Views for Android,” involving software methods with names like “onInterceptTouchEvent” and held in one of the largest rooms on offer; dozens of developers sat along the walls, unable to find proper seats. A Q&A session with Android developers was liveblogged on at least two separate websites.
Ditto for Google Glass. Programmers could not get enough of the wearable heads-up-display, filling up sessions like “Developing for Glass” and “Fireside Chat with the Glass Team.” But all that gawking won’t necessarily translate into action: Glass isn’t available to the public yet, and it’s reportedly going to cost close to $1,500 when it goes on sale by the end of this year. That contrasts sharply with Android, a free operating system installed on many of the cheapest smartphones. It was hard to tell how many people in the Glass meetings were just satisfying their curiosity about the sci-fi-feeling platform.
Still, Google has detailed official and unofficial ways to write Glass software and made hardware units available to developers under an “Glass Explorers” pilot program. At I/O, it showed off apps from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Evernote. It was enough to make the case, however tenuous, that Google is making waves with its hardware present (Android) and hardware future (Glass).
Compared with all the enthusiasm around Glass and Android, sessions on Google+, YouTube and Google advertising tended to look underwhelming — pick a chair, (almost) any chair.
It’s interesting that a company that made its name on web services and web apps seems to be attracting developers primarily to its hardware-related products. But kudos to Google for seeing this shift to native apps coming — and for managing to keep both camps inside one conference center.
via  Ryan Tate (http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/glass-and-android-win-io/).

The First Jolla Smartphone: Quirky, $500, and Android-Friendly

When a band of engineers fled Nokia in 2012 to develop a MeeGo-derived OS called Sailfish, they needed a vehicle to carry the software. And this is it: the first Jolla phone, which is as quirky as the OS it runs.

Featuring a 4.5-inch display, dual-core processor, 8-megapixel camera, 4G, 16GB of onboard storage, and a microSD slot, its most obvious physical feature is the contrasting removable back cover. The phone recognizes which cover is attached and changes its colored theming to match, but the subtly different shaping of the two parts is what actually makes it interesting from a design perspective. (Check the picture above close-up to see what we mean.)

Jolla claims the handset will be "compliant" with Android apps, though the phone runs its own Sailfish OS. That's based on MeeGo, which originally powered the Nokia N9, and it's not clear how well the Android integration will work—how many apps will be supported, and how well they'll work, for instance—let alone where the apps will be downloaded from. But, hey, let's give 'em chance to prove themselves.

Initially launching in a handful of European countries, Jolla will roll out the handset more widely in the near future. It looks set to cost around $500. [Jolla via Verge]

via

Jamie Condliffe (http://gizmodo.com/the-first-jolla-smartphone-quirky-500-and-android-f-508840357)

E-business answers

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Track Snipers with Android (Android Phones Pinpoint Snipers)

 The military has high-tech equipment to track sniper fire, using microphones carried by soldiers or stationary ones mounted at strategic points. Now that technology is getting shrunk down so that it can be used in the hands of civilian bodyguards sporting Android phones.

A team of computer engineers from Vanderbilt University, led by Akos Ledeczi, has developed an inexpensive piece of hardware and related software to turn an Android smartphone into a sniper finder. The Vanderbilt team described the new system at the 12th Association for Computing Machinery/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks in Philadelphia earlier this month. NEWS: ‘Smart’ Armor Learns More With Every Bullet

They built a sensor module that is about the size of a deck of cards. When a shot is fired, the sensor picks up the sounds and logs the exact time. The sensor then sends the data to a smartphone via a Bluetooth connection. If any other smartphones in the local wireless network have similar modules, the location of the gunshot can be pinpointed by the timing of the sounds’ arrival. It’s a similar idea to the ShotSpotter, a system used in Seattle to track locations of shooting incidents.
There are two versions of the system. One uses a single microphone per module, but requires at least six separate phones to accurately calculate the location of the shooter. The second setup has four microphones in each (slightly larger) sensor module, but needs only two separate phones to locate the sniper.
The sensors make use of a distinctive feature of gunshots: they produce two bangs. One is from the muzzle of the gun, as the gases propelling the bullet expand and create a shock wave. That sound wave goes out in all directions, and it is shaped like a sphere.
Bullets make a second sound. As they are usually moving at supersonic speeds, it is a small sonic boom. The sound wave is conical, with the bullet at the point of the cone.
Timing when the two sounds arrive at the microphone can give a good idea of where the shot came from, and when that data is taken from separate locations, it allows for triangulating the sniper’s position.
Using the sonic boom form the bullet allows the microphones to “hear” the shots over longer ranges. Janos Sallai, a research scientist on Ledeczi’s team, told Discovery News that at larger distances, the spherical wave from the muzzle is distorted by obstacles on the ground. That’s one reason people have a difficult time figuring out where sounds like gunshots are coming from.

ANALYSIS: How the Falling Meteor Packed a Sonic Punch
The microphones in a phone, he added, wouldn’t work. “Originally we were thinking of the phone mic, but the sampling rate wasn’t enough,” he said.
In addition, the noise cancellation that most phone makers build into them so that you can have a conversation in a crowded restaurant or outside, gets in the way.
Civilian bodyguards could use these sensors to protect dignitaries, with each member of a team equipped with a sensor module. If a shot were fired, the guards could track where it came from and help local police track down the shooter. Sallai added that the Secret Service has shown a lot of interest in this system and has even called for proposals.
Credit: Vanderbilt University

via  http://news.discovery.com (Apr 27, 2013 09:16 AM ET // by Jesse Emspak )

Appreciate Is A New Way To Find Quality Apps On Android

The Android marketplace, Google Play, may now be catching up with the Apple App Store in terms of sheer number of applications available, but finding the better-quality apps outside of the big names is still something of a challenge. Today, an app discovery service called Appreciate has launched on the Android app store to address this problem.

The company was founded two years ago by CEO Amir Maor and CTO Yaron Segalov, both who have previous experience in the mobile industry and with big data. As they developed the concept which has become today’s new Appreciate application, earlier prototypes released into the Android marketplace gained tens, and even hundreds of thousands of installs, indicating demand for the service they’ve been building
Maor notes that the first version of the app reached over half a million installs, even though it was more prototype than finished release. The private beta launched around a month ago has already gained 10,000 users. While backend of these apps has evolved over the years, the version of Appreciate launching today would be unrecognizable to any of the company’s previous users.
It’s not just the overall look-and-feel that’s changed, it’s the entire way the new app discovery service has been set up, the way it works, the navigation, the personalized recommendations it delivers, and more.
Like many startup founders, Maor cites a personal need as the inspiration for building Appreciate, originally. “As the number of apps grew, we found it harder to find good content for our mobile phones,” he says. “It started with just finding quality apps, and that improved over time. But then, even though we could find quality apps, it got harder to find those that were more suited to what we were interested in.”
Maor says that though it has become easy enough to find the Android app blockbusters, sifting through a narrower category, like chess games or arcade games (his personal favorite) is difficult.
With Appreciate, while the user interface is attractive, the power in this service is the algorithms on the backend. Appreciate not only understands which apps are quality apps – a metric it understands by analyzing a variety of specific signals – it also matches those apps to a user’s unique personal tastes.
Appreciate doesn’t determine an app’s “quality” based on ratings or reviews, however, which Maor explains can be less than reliable. Instead, its secret sauce looks for other indicators – like whether or not users have installed the app then rapidly uninstalled it, for example – a sure signal that it may have left something to be desired. Apps with a good install base across your social network may also be recommended, as are those other Appreciate users have indicated are good, too.

Appreciate works better for those who sign in using Facebook, however it already knows a little about users’ tastes from the apps installed on their own devices. Within the app, users are encouraged to follow other “experts” who are also interested in the same types of apps, which also gives Appreciate a social network feel, to some extent.
In addition to expert recommendations, users also get personalized feeds showing app recommendations, apps trending across favorite categories, friend notifications, and a personalized app search engine which shows results indicating which apps are used by friends.
For example, if Appreciate knows you love wildlife, a search for “birds” might return an app about actual birds, not the Angry kind.
Appreciate is available now in Google Play, and the plan is to bring the service to the iPhone in the future. However, Maor admits that he, like many developers today, doesn’t really understand Apple’s new clauses around its ban on app discovery service. “It won’t be just mimicking an app store,” he says. “We hope everything will work well and they’ll actually approve it.”
Time will tell.
Based in Israel, the ten-person company has several million in seed and Series A funding by Magma Ventures, and many undisclosed angel investors.

by Sarah Perez via  http://techcrunch.com