Over the past year Im sure there has been an arguement on whether to choose an Android phone or an iPhone pretty much every minute. Here is some new research from Blaze that concluded that webpages loaded faster on Android devices compared to iPhone.
Poor old Steve Jobs has always mentioned the speed of iOS, but in fact they need to step it up a gear.
Blaze ran over 43,000 tests and the research was very conclusive. Real phones were used, connecting to real websites and measured using custom-built agents designed to measure page load speed.
Will you now be more interested in getting an Android phone?
You can pre-order the Motorola Xoom now and pick it up Thursday, February 24, in Best Buy stores. The Xoom is one of the first tablets on the market to run Android 3.0 or Honeycomb.
Besides the Xoom itself, Best Buy also offers several accessories, including a $70 Bluetooth wireless keyboard, a $130 speaker dock, and a $40 portfolio-style case.
The brilliant social news application Pulse has released a few extra features that were a long time in coming. Pulse now features six popular social media sites as sources: Reddit, Digg, Vimeo, YouTube, Picplz and Flickr. The application is pulling content from these social sites via APIs instead of RSS feeds.
It seems as thought these additions really draw away from the fact that Pulse was a great way of finding quality independent news sources.
“We wanted to experiment with social news, photos and videos — hence, we picked these initial sources. All these services have really neat APIs, and it literally took Charles [new team member Charles Chen] two weeks to get this up and running,” says co-founder Akshay Kothari. “Many more to come — stay tuned!”
Sony launched the PSP2 today and also their new Playstation Suite. The Playstation Suite is a new cross device game platform that will help to bring Playstation 1 games to Android phones and tablets.
The Playstation Suite will launch by the end of the year. Android users will be able to buy a host of different titles “in an integrated fashion through the PS store”. All games will have come with a “PlayStation Certified” mark so users can be sure they are licensed and tested before being pushed out to the store.
TeamViewer developed recently the version 6 for their popular remote access software, they’ve included the mobile version as well and now the Android app is available to download.
TeamViewer is one of the most know applications we can use to access computers remotely, their free version is quite complete and with no complexity for installing nor using it. The mobile versions represent a great tool if we need some quick access to remote machines, that’s why they’ve developed the apps for iPhone, iPad and now Android (beta).
Here are some of the features:
Support your clients and colleagues spontaneously.
Access your office desktop with all of its documents and installed applications.
Remotely administer unattended computers (e.g. servers).
Free for non-commercial use: support family and friends or have remote access to your own computer.
DroidDraw it’s a free web app where we can design and build graphical user interfaces for an Android phone. DroidDraw also includes a standalone executable available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
The Google OS for mobile devices is the most used operating system in smart phones… yes, even more than iPhone OS. And the market share estimated for the next few years says that this tendency won’t change; so if you were thinking about mobile apps design you better start with Android.
DroidDraw also offers free tutorials to understand this free tool and some nice guidelines and tips.
Prey Project it’s pretty cool software created for users who want an effective way to locate their devices in case they get stolen. Prey can be installed in Windows, Linux, Mac or any device with Android OS, including smartphones.
Prey can notify users about the device location sending a signal over the Internet, or SMS in case of Android phones. The program runs as an agent in background and is completely silent. Here are some of the specs:
Open Source and completely free.
100% geolocation aware. Prey uses either the device’s GPS or the nearest WiFi hotspots to triangulate and grab a fix on its location.
Know your enemy. Take a picture of the thief with your laptop’s webcam so you know what he looks like and where he’s hiding.
No unauthorized Access. Fully lock down your PC, making it unusable unless a specific password is entered.
Wifi auto connect. If enabled, Prey will attempt to hook onto to the nearest open WiFi hotspot when no Internet connection is found.
Watch their movements. Grab a screenshot of the active session.
Scan your hardware. Get a complete list of your PC’s CPU, motherboard, RAM, and BIOS information.
Light as a feather. Prey has very few dependencies and doesn’t even leave a memory footprint until activated.
Keep your data safe. Hide your Outlook or Thunderbird data and optionally remove your stored passwords, so no one will be able to look into your stuff.
Full auto updater. Prey can check its current version and automatically fetch and update itself, so you don’t need to manually reinstall each time.
Nielsen Wire created a complete report about the current smartphone share. Where we can find some discernible results like: iPhone is the most desired device, but with other not so much expected saying that Android is the OS with the most expansion.
Some of the most important remarks we can find in this report:
Smartphones represent 25% of the US mobile market
The prediction says that by the end of 2011, smartphones will overtake feature phones.
Android represents the OS with the highest growth in the market.
In the last 6 months, Android took 27% of the new smartphone users; iPhone “only” had 23%.
iPhone users are the most loyal: 89% say that the their next device will be an iPhone as well.
Google is reaching an important milestone in their mobile battle roadmap: Introducing App Inventor for Android. With this tool we’ll be able to develop our own tools for Google’s mobile operating system.
The interesting part of this tool is that will not require great expertise for users to actual create their own apps with App Inventor.
Take a look to this simple video where we can create a “Pet the kitty” app:
App Inventor is currently working with invitations, and you need to subscribe to get one. We are expecting more news in the next few weeks.
Smartphones represent 25% of the US mobile market
Google is reaching an important milestone in their mobile battle roadmap: 
