Android

The Washington Post staked a claim in the Android world this week with the launch of their new app.

This is The WP‘s 6th app, and it’s free to download in the Android Market. Unfortunately the app also appears to be restricted to only certain platforms. I cannot see it from my Asus eee Transformer tablet, which means I cannot offer a first hand description of its features.

The Washington Post app offers a mix of content avaialble on the website both inside and outside the paywall. You can checl the weather forecasts, local and regional traffic reports, view photo galleries created by award-winning journalists, as well read breaking news reported by The Washington Post reporters.*

Android Market.

How would you like to go digital but not give up the joys of pen and paper? Then the Apen A3 just might be what you’re looking for.

The latest digital pen from Apen is designed to work with any Bluetooth equipped BlackBerry or Android. It writes just like a normal pen and will work on all the usual types of paper. But what sets it apart from regular pens are the sensors in the base unit and the battery powered transmitter in the pen.

The base unit uses a pair of sensors to triangulate the location of the pen.  It then sends the data to your BB or Android device while you are drawing or writing. So long as the sensors can see the tip of the pen, it will continue to send what you’re scribbling and you’ll see it on screen in near real-time. The sensors are fairly accurate – just so long as you don’t shift them around.

It’s available now from retailers in the US.

Android dominates the smartphone market with 40.1% of U.S. smartphone owners using Android-based smartphones, according to a new report from comScore that measured mobile subscriber market share during the three month average period ending June 2011. Android adoption rose up 5.4 percentage points from the previous three month period.

Apple’s iPhone held the No. 2 position, with 26.6% of smartphone owners owning an iPhone, up 1.1% from the prior reporting period. RIM held the No. 3 position with 23.4% share, followed by Microsoft at 5.8% and Symbian at 2%.

According to the report, 78.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in June 2011, up 8 percent from the preceding three month period.

The Philadelphia Media Network, which runs the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily, is trying to get ahead of the digital revolution by giving out Android devices with their papers on them to print newspaper subscribers.

The Sacramento Bee has more: “The pilot project slated to be launched in late August will distribute about 2,000 tablets to customers who buy subscriptions to The Philadelphia Inquirer or Philadelphia Daily News, according to Mark Block, spokesman for Philadelphia Media Network. The computers will come with four news apps, including two that offer replicas of the papers’ print editions. Customers will also get an Inquirer app with additional content and an app for philly.com, the website shared by both newspapers, Block said.”

Via Andrew Phelps.

TI has has announced that its OMAP4 CPU, its latest generation SoC platform, has been approved by Netflix for the 1080p HD streaming video. This appears to be the first time that a mobile platform has been approved.

“Netflix already has a rich heritage of streaming to PCs, Macs, game consoles, Internet-connected TVs,  iPhone and iPad, and many set-top-boxes, so we sought a semiconductor partner that could bring our service to the broader mobile environment smoothly and securely,” said Bill Holmes, Vice President Business Development, Netflix. “TI’s OMAP architecture and M-Shield security will set the stage for a high-performance, low-power, secure platform that will help Netflix members instantly watch unlimited TV shows and movies on Android devices.”

This is great news for Android owners. If you ‘re like me, you’ve been watching as support for Android was added 1 device at a time, waiting in agony for your phone to be added. even with the hackers working on adding less-than-authorized support, the delay has been frustrating. Hopefully this certification will mean that all (or at least most) phones running on a TI OMAPs CPU will soon be able to use the Netflix Android app.

Engadget was tipped to a leaked product listing yesterday. Samsung’s latest gadget showed up on Best Buy’s mobile shopping app, price and all ($270).

The Galaxy Player is Samsung’s newest PMP. It’s based on a 5″ (800×480), and it runs Android v2.2 with Wifi, 8GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, and a pair of cameras. This is by no means a smartphone, and that suggests that Samsung plans to go after the iPod Touch.

There’s no word on release date, though.

Zinio has just released its long delayed Android app. (How long has it been delayed, you ask? I recall reading about the app this time last year, and it had a ship date of summer 2010.)

This app provides access to more than 20,000 magazines that are available through Zinio, but it’s only been approved for certain devices. If you were hoping to run it on your generic Android tablet, you’re out of luck. The minimum OS requirement is Android v2.2, and it appears to have features tailored for Honeycomb.

If you download the app before June 15th, Zinio will give you 1 free issue from each of 24 different magazines, including: AFAR, BlackBook, Cosmopolitan, ELLE DECOR, ELLE, ESPN The Magazine, Esquire, Food Network Magazine, Harpers Bazaar , Harvard Business Review, Home Theater, Juxtapoz, Marie Claire, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Journal, Motor Trend, O, The Oprah Magazine, Outdoor Photographer, Outside, Popular Mechanics, Road & Track, Robb Report, Rolling Stone, Seventeen and Us Weekly.

You can find it on the Android Market.

The note taking specialists at Evernote have updated their free Android app. The new version is an all-around improvement on the old, but one particular improvement is worth noting:

1. Improved support for sync errors
2. Improved PIN lock
3. Improved support for the Nook
4. Bug fixes

I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to say NookColor, not Nook. This footnote should tell you something about the NookColor; Evernote has noticed a large enough group of customers using it that it was worth adding tweaks just for the one device. That’s a big deal.

Android Market

via Social Times

In the past few weeks Google added movie rentals to the Android Market, with prices starting $1.99 to rent a movie. This would be a great and convenient service which would have a lot of people excited, but unfortunately Google won’t let it work on rooted devices.

The Android Market help pages now state that if you are using a rooted device, movie rentals will not be available.

You’ll receive this “Error 49″ message if you attempt to play a movie on a rooted device. Rooted devices are currently unsupported due to requirements related to copyright protection.

Rooting an Android device is often the first step in getting the best performance from an Android device. Are you familiar with admin privileges on Windows OS? Rooting an Android device gives the user much the same level of control.

via Android Market

As an experiment, Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University in Houston, discovered that attackers could easily access data from his Android phone when he used some third-party apps on public Wi-Fi networks. The discovery included being able to tap into his Google Calendar and Twitter apps.

Researchers at the Institute of Media Informatics of Ulm University in Germany took the research a step further and tested different versions of the Android operating system against the various Google apps to see if updates would help get rid of the problem. What they found is that up until Android 2.3.3 Google’s Calendar and Contacts apps “transmit any request in the clear via http and are therefore vulnerable to the authToken attack.”

According the Ulm researchers, 99.7% of all Android smartphones are currently running an earlier version, which would put all of these users accessing these Google apps at risk of attack if accessing their apps on a public Wi-Fi network.

Via MacObserver.com.