Google Now Has 1B Active Monthly Android Users

At its Google I/O developer event today, Google provided us with an update on current Android activations. Instead of announcing the usual cumulative numbers, however, Google’s senior VP for Android and Chrome, Sundar Pichai, announced that there are now over 1 billion 30-day active users on the Android platform.

Pichai also said that Android tablets now have hit 62 percent of the global Android market and that app installs increased by 236 percent year-over-year.

This is the first time Google has provided us with updated numbers since it announced Android 4.4 last year.

A year ago, Google said it had reached 900 million activations, and at that time, it was adding about 1.5 million new ones per month. By last September, the company surpassed the 1 billion mark for activated devices.

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Fotolia Now Lets Android Smartphone Photographers Sell Their Snaps

Stock photo merchant Fotolia has launched a new app called Fotalia Instant. The app, which is available on iOS and Android, allows entrepreneurial snappers to take and sell pictures through their smartphone, no fancy photo editing and uploading software required.

The service, which launched in October 2013, has just built up steam and users have sold 50,000 images sold. Fotalia is one of the few services to actively encourage smartphone photographers to upload their images using their apps.

A new Android app is available now for free, joining the iOS app for mobile devices.

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Google Blurs The Line Between Web And Native Apps On Android

Today at Google I/O, Chrome Director of Product Management Avni Shah introduced the new version of Chrome coming in the next Android update dubbed Android L.

As expected, we got a couple of feature updates. But it isn’t just a better version of Chrome. There is a clear and more profound message coming from Google. The company wants to blend native apps with web tabs. And the end of native apps as we know them could be closer than we might think.

In Android L, the redesigned app switcher looks a lot like Safari on iOS 7. It shows you your recent apps in a sort of card drawer. But it also shows native apps as well as active web tabs. Every web tab has the same value as an app. It’s huge.

Similarly, Google is expanding its App Indexing API to all Android apps. Before today, the company worked with selected companies. For example, when you search for a movie in Google, there could be a deep link in the search results that will open the IMDb app on this exact movie page. It’s a seamless transition from the web to a native app.

Knowing all this, imagine for a second what Android L will look like. You turn on your phone, search for something in Google using voice search on your home screen. It launches Chrome. You tap on the first search result, it launches a native app. You switch apps to read this article you found earlier in Chrome.

Back, and forth, and back, and forth between the web and native apps. After a while, you won’t even notice if you’re on the web or in a native app.

Why does this change make sense? Google has always been a web developer first. The company first became successful with its search engine. But even its following hit products were web apps, such as Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Drive (née Google Docs). Arguably, Google is still the king when it comes to developing web apps.

But even more important, Google still makes the vast majority of its revenue from web ads. The company wants people to spend more time on the web to see Google ads. It’s not going to change in the next quarter earnings. At least not yet.

So when it comes to both technology and business, Google’s future is in the web. Still. According to multiple HTML5 and web development advocates I talk with, Android could eventually become a low-level operating system with web apps on top of it. It will effectively be the end of native apps as we know them.

Multiple companies have tried this before — Palm with WebOS, Mozilla with Firefox OS. They all failed due to a combination of flaws — systems on a chip were not powerful enough, web runtimes were not efficient enough, web developers were not talented enough.

It mostly comes down to timing. Now, it would make sense for Google to slowly but surely switch to this new app model. Systems on a chip could potentially run full-fledged laptops now. Google has tirelessly worked on improving JavaScript and HTML rendering engines. And of course, there are thousands of talented web developers working for Google.

Promoting web apps is a long process and it could take years. But today is the first clear step in that direction.

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Android TV First Look Video And Hands On Impressions

Android TV is one of the myriad new things that Google announced this year at I/O, and the platform is very different from Google’s previous effort with Google TV, a project announced in 2010 and updated continually since but that still hasn’t managed to become a significant part of Google’s lineup.

Google is looking to change all that with Android TV. It’s a brand new platform, designed with simplicity and relevance in mind, with an interface that puts a strong emphasis on content first, and then offers up apps ordered based on your usage patterns and focuses finally on delivering top-quality Android games right to your big screen.

Content, apps and games; that’s it, and it’s a smart move by Google to pare down and focus on the core experiences that matter to TV watchers. Over and over, the company spoke to its new desire to provide the right interface for the right situation on the right device, and Android TV is a great example of that theory put into action, at least based on our early impressions.

It’s similar in many ways to what Amazon has done with the Fire TV, but Google’s interface is better-designed and less confusing, and it probably will have a better time incorporating content sources from third-party providers than will Amazon, thanks to its developer tools and the advantages devs have by building apps that work across Android wherever it happens to appear.

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Google Announces Android Auto, Promises Enabled Cars By The End Of 2014

Today in its sprawling keynote at its I/O event, Google announced Android Auto. The version of Android will be “completely voice enabled” according to the company, and will help users navigate, communicate and listen to music in their cars. The system will be “contextually aware,” Google says, and will allow for hands-free access, an important feature of an experience that involves a driver.

Google also announced that Android Auto’s SDK, which will feature APIs for audio and messaging, will be released “soon.” Twenty-five car manufacturers have promised to build Android-Auto powered cars. That’s a large chunk of the global car ecosystem. The first cars with Android Auto will “roll off the lots” before the end of 2014, according to Google.

Google is working at the start with Spotify and Songza, among others, on the Android Auto music interface:

The navigation experience in Google Maps will contain what you expect it to — live traffic, turn-by-turn directions, and voice controls:

Regarding communication, messages that are incoming show up as heads-up notifications. Users can tap a button on the steering wheel to reply. Again, the idea here is to keep drivers’ eyes on the road.

It remains to be seen how clean Android in your car will be, but the promise of voice-controlled Spotify in the car I’m in is compelling.

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Blek Comes To Android, And I Get Stuck On Level 23

Earlier this year, iOS game Blek drew critical cheers and enthusiastic reviews from gamers. Android fans who watched from the sidelines but haven’t yet actually Blekked can now try out the puzzler for themselves. The game uses a curious drawing mechanic as its only moving part basically, allowing the player to sketch a line with their finger that then becomes an animated in-game element whose purpose is to destroy colored circles.

The game is charming, well-designed and challenging while keeping things casual, and it includes a good soundtrack with cool sound effects. I actually hadn’t ever played it on iOS, despite its popularity and media attention, mostly because until my vacation last week I haven’t had time to play much of anything. Luckily, the Android version has let me have a second crack at Blek, especially thanks to the fact that I’ve been using Android devices consistently over the last little while in order to give Android Wear a thorough testing.

Let me say that, based on my experience of around an hour or so of play time, Blek is great and I love it. But let me also say that I hate it and it is terrible. That second opinion is strictly a knee-jerk reaction based on the fact that I can’t get past level 23 despite having cruised along with only minor hiccups until now.

Blek is $2.99, and for that price you get the opportunity to beat level 23 and shame me deeply for my inability to do so.

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Xiaomi, China’s Fast-Growing Android Phone Maker, Posts 271% Sales Bump In The First Half

The fast-growing Chinese Android devices startup Xiaomi has put out a new set of sales figures for the first half of the year, revealing exactly how fast it’s now selling phones. Xiaomi shifted 26.11 million handsets in 1H14, an increase of 271% from a year earlier — and more than its total phone sales for the full-year 2013 (18.7 million).

Xiaomi has previously stated it’s aiming to sell 60 million handsets this year. Its phone sales in 2012 were 7.19 million, underlining how fast this business is blowing up.

The company also said today its phone sales revenue for the first half of 2014 was 33 billion Yuan Renminbi ($5.3 billion), up 149% year-on-year.

The startup was founded four years ago by Lei Jun, an angel investor and serial entrepreneur who also founded companies such as Amazon-acquired Joyo.cn and YY.

Smartphone market research put out by Kantar WorldPanel ComTech at the end of May noted that Xiaomi had outsold Samsung in China for the second time in April, with its budget RedMI device the top selling smartphone in the country. The largest proportion (41%) of consumers buying Xiaomi’s handset were first time smartphone buyers, but almost a quarter (23%) were Samsung switchers.

Xiaomi’s initial target demographic has been young users, with a focus on selling handsets to teens via social media sites helping to deliver viral levels of growth.

As part of its strategy to scale up very fast, the company is now moving overseas quickly — with a big global push planned for this year, expanding its availability to 14 regions in total: China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, and Mexico.

Xiaomi’s current flagship handset is called the Mi 3, which has a quad-core 2.3GHz processor and a full HD display — and costs circa $330 unlocked. It also sells the lower cost popular Redmi, targeting the mid-range, which costs circa $130 – yet still packs a 1.5GHz quad-core chip and 720p HD display. The devices run Xiaomi’s own Android firmware, called MIUI.

The relatively low price of Xiaomi’s handsets (vs the specs they pack) helps explain why it’s handsets are selling like hot cakes.

However thin hardware margins mean the business needs an alternative strategy to monetize these sales. Xiaomi is pegging that future monetization on building services revenue off of a swelling hardware fan-base. So selling lots and lots of phones to scale up is crucial.

It also launched an iPad competitor back in May, extending its device portfolio to tablets.

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LokLok’s New Messaging App Lets You Draw On Your Friend’s Lock Screen

Another experimentation in mobile messaging arrives today, this time from a company innovating on the Android platform first. Yes, Android.

LokLok, as this latest app is called, replaces the Android phone’s lock screen with a “synchronized whiteboard” that allows you to leave notes and drawings directly on your friends’ lock screens. That means, unlike traditional messaging apps, you don’t have to unlock your phone and launch an app to chat with your friends. You just take out your phone and start drawing.

The idea comes out of Kwamecorp, a technology and creative consultancy and startup incubator behind a number of other projects, including FairPhone OS, Bond and Impossible.

LokLok, the company explains, began as a small experiment.

“I was curious to see if I could use the screen as the communication channel itself,” says LokLok CEO Guillermo Landin, also a UX director for Kwamecorp, via email. Around six months ago, he created a prototype of the app using widgets and HTML5. He then put together a small team around the project, which has been, until today, in private beta testing on the Android app store.

Landin tells us the reviews have been fairly positive so far during this pre-launch period. But what seems to be intriguing users the most is the fact that this interesting and unique new app is something that’s not just launching on Android first, but is the kind of thing that would only be possible on Android.

Because of the way Apple restricts apps from replacing the core pieces and functions within its mobile operating system, an iPhone app today could never allow users to draw on each others’ lock screens.

That being said, Landin has some plans to address the iOS market in the future, just in a different way. He says an iOS version is already in the works, but the team doesn’t have a release date for it yet.

Because of its current inability to work cross-platform, LokLok will remain, for now, a clever toy.

You can doodle on the screen, doodle over photos, share privately with individuals or groups, or post your messages across social media. A handful of basic drawing tools are also offered, including different brushes, a color-picker and more.

Similar to a number of other messaging apps on the market, LokLok’s messages are also “ephemeral”; the app only retains the latest image from each group on the server, so when users clear their screens, the messages are gone forever.

LokLok is a free download here on Google Play.

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Firechat Enables Cross-Platform, Off-The-Grid Chat Between iOS And Android

Open Garden’s Firechat was one of the first — if not the first — application to make use of Apple’s new multi-peer mesh networking capabilities. This enabled its users to anonymously chat with each other, even when there was no Internet connection available. Because Android doesn’t offer this feature, Open Garden then used its own networking tech to enable this same feature on Google’s operating system a few weeks later, but at the time, there was no way for Android and iOS phones to talk to each other.

With today’s update to Firechat — which the team decided to brand Firechat <3 — that’s changing. Android and iOS users can now chat on the same off-the-grid mesh network. This will make Firechat, which has seen some pretty nice growth since its launch, significantly more interesting.

The obvious question here is how the team managed to create a bridge between its own Android mesh network and Apple’s multi-peer technology. Sadly, that’s exactly what the team doesn’t want to talk about, except for saying that the service uses peer-to-peer Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth personal area network. Open Garden has developed quite a bit of in-house knowledge about mesh networking over the last two years, so if anybody could build this, it was probably this team.

Open Garden’s sales and marketing vice president Christophe Daligault was able to share that the team is working on an SDK that will soon bring its Firechat and Open Garden technology for third-party apps.

The idea here would be to give third-party apps a third on-ramp to the Internet in addition to Wi-Fi and the cellular network. So even when there is no network available, users may be able to either get online through other Open Garden users or connect to other users off-the-grid. It’s unclear how exactly the company will charge for this service, but Daligault tells me it will likely price the events that come through the SDK.

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Microsoft Presses Ahead With Office For Android

Prepare another entry into your File Of No Surprise: Microsoft is moving ahead with its efforts to bring the highly lucrative Office franchise to Android tablets.

According to The Verge, Microsoft is currently prepping a private beta of the new software. A sign-up page has been mostly taken offline since the news broke.

A full Office suite for Android tablets is roughly as surprising as San Francisco morning fog. Microsoft confirmed that it was building the native suite earlier this year, and rumor followed that the Android apps would beat a touch-first build of Office for Windows out of the gate.

To see Microsoft begin to ramp up testing is hardly surprising.

Office for iPad has been a material success for Microsoft. Despite some market doubt that the apps were too late to make an impact, or that users wouldn’t use them due to Office 365-related restrictions, Microsoft’s latest sally into iOS has gone well. Android may be no different.

The mystery that I can’t unravel is why touch Office for Windows tablets is so damned late.

The above is merely another plank in the current Microsoft effort to have its corporate focus be both mobile-first, and cloud-first. Office, of course, is now heavily based on OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service. What will be interesting to gauge is market response to Office for Android, measuring if it can match the prior response to the iOS suite. Microsoft saw 27 million downloads of its iOS Office apps in 46 days.

Microsoft declined to comment.

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Facebook Tests Android L-Style Lock Screen Notifications

A new update for the test group of Facebook for Android users briefly enabled lockscreen notifications, at least for new message activity, before a later update today seems to have disabled the feature. The notifications looked very similar to the lock screen notifications Google showed off at I/O this year, one of the new upcoming features of Android L, the next major update for Google’s mobile OS. Facebook has confirmed to TechCrunch the update went out to a “small group of beta testers.”

The update doesn’t require Android L to be installed to work, however, as I encountered the new feature using an HTC One M8 running Android 4.4.2 with Sense 6. It features a Settings expander with viewing options, and tapping on the notification itself will take you to the Facebook app directly, after you unlock your device. As indicated on the notification itself, swiping will dismiss the notification and keep the device locked. Multiple notifications from multiple message senders stack visually one on top of the other.

I was only able to see message notifications because of the type of activity on my FB account during the test, but other FB activity was also included in the new test feature. Facebook often tests new features on Android, but they don’t always necessarily make it to a shipping release. Presumably once Android L becomes production software, it won’t be required, but Facebook could still gain a user attention advantage by delivering lock screen notifications regardless of what version of Android handset owners have installed on their devices.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab S Review: Beautiful Screens Make These Tablets Magic For Movies

Samsung has never made a tablet that truly got my blood pumping, but that might’ve just changed. I bought an original Galaxy Tab when it was first released, only to find the experience frustrating and return it a few days later because of a dropped Wi-Fi issue. Now, Samsung has a new line of tablets called the Galaxy Tab S, and though there have been many different Samsung slates between then and now, these represent the biggest changes to date, and put an entirely new face on Samsung’s flagship tablet devices.

10.5? or 8.4? 2560×1600 display
Wi-Fi 802.11ac
1.9GHz Quad Core/1.3GHz Quad Core Octacore processor with 3GB RAM
16GB storage, expandable up to 128GB via microSD
MSRP: $399.99 for 8.4, $499.99 for 10.2
Product info page

Pros:

Amazing display
Size and weight

Cons:

Design choices aren’t for everyone
Weirdly I miss the S Pen

Samsung has produced a tablet that’s deserving of lots of praise with the Tab S when it comes to design – and an almost equal amount of scorn. These slates look an awful lot like every other device Samsung has put out this year and late in 2013, including the Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S5, with a metal-look band surrounding the entire device, and a faux-leather back panel that feels nice in the hand. The size and weight are amazing, as these are incredibly thin and light devices given their impressive screens and internals, but they also clearly aren’t designed to appeal to my particular demographic.

There’s a gold tint on that metallic border I mentioned, and the back in both white pearl and “titanium bronze” look has a strange silken sheen to it that’s a little flashy for my tastes. Both types of cover, including the full front-and-back Book Cover and the lightweight front cover come in similar shiny finishes, delivering an appearance overall that would be quite at home with bedazzled garments but that could never be called austere or simple, both adjectives I like to be able to use when describing my electronics.

The snaps included in the back of the Tab S to affix the covers do work wonderfully and keep things ultra secure, however, and the finishes are such that the tablets don’t feel like they’re going to easily slip out of your grasp. The side facing speakers naturally project sound forward when you’re hold thing the devices with two hands to watch movies, too. Button placement on the 10.2 puts the sleep/wake switch at the top left, which is not ideal, but otherwise these are ergonomically pleasing and well-built, questionable aesthetics aside.

The Tab S devices both perform very well, considering how much power they have to put out to make sure those displays are looking their best. The processor provides ample muscle to power HD video, including video captured in 2560 x 1440 resolution at 30 fps. There’s a sample video included on the tablet that shows just how awesome stuff looks at this resolution on this screen, and some cameras will capture at that resolution (though the Tab’s built-in 8 megapixel camera doesn’t).

In general browsing and other OS performance I found the Tab S to be mostly solid, but there were some times where the homescreen stuttered when paging through. Running apps in split screen proved no problem, however, which is one of Samsung’s key tablet signature features. Photos from the 8 megapixel camera aren’t amazing, but they’re more than tolerable if the Tab S is the only camera you have on you. If you’re using a 10.2-inch device as a camera you have other problems to worry about.

Some of the highlight features on this tablet include the split-screen app multitasking, which again works as advertised, and Samsung SideSync feature. SideSync is pretty great, letting you see your screen exactly as it appears on your Galaxy S5, Note 3, S4 and S5, and letting you send and receive voice calls on the Tab S from your S5. Pairing is a cinch, and it worked well during my tests, making for a useful tool if your phone is downstairs or across the room.

Another feature new to the Galaxy Tab S is the Adaptive Display, which is designed to make the most of the SuperAMOLED screen included in the tablets. The screen really is the highlight here, and the adaptive mode works like it does on some modern TVs, changing things like color rendering and contrast depending on what kind of content you’re viewing. In practice, it really does seem to help with the experience of watching movies, playing games and more.

The fingerprint scanner from the GS5 makes an appearance in these tablets, and works as it did in that smartphone, which is to say well and reliably, but with a little bit of futzing required to get the positioning right when you’re performing a swipe. On a tablet, it honestly doesn’t seem all that appealing as a feature, but the payment authorization through PayPal is still here and still impressive.

Founded 1969     Overview Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, is engaged in consumer electronics, information technology and mobile communications, and device solutions businesses worldwide. It develops, manufactures, and sells various consumer products, including mobile phones, tablets, televisions, Blu-rays, DVD players, home theaters, and digital cameras and camcorders; home appliances, such as … Website http://www.samsung.com/us Full profile for Samsung Electronics

As just mentioned, the display is the star here. Samsung has indeed nailed the tablet screen  – both look terrific, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell that the 8.4-inch model actually has a higher pixel density, as both defy your ability to distinguish individual pixels. In fact, these are top contenders for best screens in the industry, and that’s really going to help when Samsung starts offering up content sources that are better-than-HD quality.

Some Netflix content is already optimized for super high-resolution TVs, so it’s logical that they could eventually make that available to other platforms too. But for photos and other types of content, it’s going to make a difference right away.

These screens are so good that with the 10.2-inch device, it starts to feel like you’re not compromising by using a tablet to watch a video over, say, a TV or home theatre setup. It’s really that good, and if you’re looking for essentially a portable movie machine, Samsung’s devices are a safe bet.

The Tab S line packs a better battery than previous devices, and gets some power savings thanks to the SuperOLED display using true blacks instead of backlit dark tones. But this is an area where these tablets still lag considerably behind iOS devices, especially when in standby. They’ll do a fairly decent job still, however, and should give you plenty of viewing time on a long haul flight, so it’s not as much of a concern as it has been in the past. They do take a long time to charge, however, so be ready for that.

The Tab S line is a solid showing by Samsung, but their real value can be summed up in one line: these are the tablets to watch movies on. They really do the best when they’re playing back any kind of media, and the rest of their features and software feels like a gloss on top of that. Truth be told, that’s likely what most tablet users are in the market for – especially those who don’t need the power and productivity of a notebook. I still find that the Android tablet ecosystem lags behind that of Apple and its iPad, but Samsung has put a lot of work in since the first Galaxy tablet devices, and it really shows.

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LG G Watch Review: This Early Android Wear Watch Could Use A Bit More Time To Bake

LG is one of the first to market with an Android Wear smartwatch. Their hardware runs on Google’s smartwatch platform, which is pretty locked down in terms of what kind of customizations Google allows OEM to make. But there’s still plenty of room to shine – and fall short – when it comes to hardware design. LG’s watch seems to have missed the mark in some key areas, possibly by virtue of being rushed, but in others it leaps ahead of the competition.

1.65-inch IPS 280×280 displayQualcomm Snapdragon 400 1.2GHz processor512 MB RAM, 4GB storageAvailable in Black and GoldMSRP: $229Product info page

Pros

Longer battery lifeEasier to personalize

Cons

Screen has banding issuesHarder to read in direct sun

LG’s G Watch is my favorite Android Wear device in terms of design thus far. Of course, there are only two commercially available, so that’s not necessarily saying much, but LG really has done a good job here. The basic rectangle offers little in the way of flair, but it’s the perfect vehicle for an operating system that is likewise designed around offering up the bare essentials, instead of reaching for unnecessary extras.

The screen is the star in the design, which means that Android Wear is front and center. That’s exactly the scaffolding that Google’s new smartwatch OS needs to show off its potential benefit to consumers – the entire concept of the OS is to provide users with something that feels organic, and that recedes out of mind when not needed or in use. The G Watch translates that experience into hardware, especially with the black version I tested. It takes things almost too far by leaving off a physical button, however – I had to read the paper instruction manual to figure out how to power it on (plug it into its charging cradle).

The industrial design is spare but not devoid of care or attention. It’s comfortable, and constructed out of a durable stainless steel body that’s light on the wrist. And the 22 mm rubber strap it ships with is comfortable and easy to fasten and size, but easily swappable with a standard strap of your choosing, allowing owners to put their own stamp on the overall look and feel of the device.

Android Wear is Android Wear, regardless of where it appears, and in testing the G Watch side-by-side with the Samsung Gear Live over the past week, it’s clear that Google has provided little to no wiggle room for OEMs using the platform. As such, what I have to say about the software experience on the G Watch mostly applies to the Gear Live and vice versa, and likely to any and all Android Wear watches to come for the foreseeable future.

With that caveat out of the way, Android Wear is actually mostly a joy to use, and the closest anyone’s come yet to getting the smartwatch experience right. Google has focused on the essentials, delivering all notifications from your Android smartphone or tablet through the watch without any change required on behalf of developers. You can also launch any app from which you receive notifications right from the watch. With some added work, you can reply to messages from various apps, launch on-watch navigation from nav apps and do much more, as Google has demonstrated with its own software first.

For the bulk of my time with Android Wear, that’s about all I could do, and that was surprisingly enough. It allowed me to keep abreast of what was going on in my digital world without dipping in to the point of distraction, and made the act of browsing and keeping current with notifications much easier and less intrusive.

Over the past day or so, third-party apps like Duolingo, Glympse and Allthecooks have introduced Android Wear support, and these add a lot of value when used correctly. Duolingo’s flashcards are arguably only a bit more convenient than using your phone, but Allthecooks’ recipe directions, which proceed step-by-step on the wrist, feel like a natural implementation for use in the kitchen.

Finally, LG has done the best work in terms of creating original watchfaces for Android Wear, which is significant as that’s what you’ll be looking at on your wrist most of the time.

Founded 1947     Overview LG Electronics is a South Korean multinational company that produces electronic and telecommunications products. It is a member of the [LG Group](/company/lg) and is based in Yeouido-dong, Seoul. LG Electronics was launched in 1958 as [GoldStar](/company/goldstar), which produced Korea's first radios, TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, and air conditioners in the 1960s. It was renamed to LG Electronics … Website http://www.lg.com/ Full profile for LG

The LG G Watch uses an IPS display for its screen, which LG says was a choice made to help with battery life. And the display works well and looks good, especially indoors and out of direct light, but unfortunately after many days of use I noticed a banding issue on the screen which is especially evident in dark settings when the device is in its dimmed, passive mode. Two large rectangles are clearly visible as ghosted impressions along the top.

The display is also less brilliant than that of the Samsung Gear Live, which might be a good thing to some, since it’s probably actually truer to real life colors than is Samsung’s device. LG’s is, in my opinion, the weaker of the two overall when it comes to the screen, however, partly due to the banding issues, partly due to it being slightly harder to read in direct sunlight, and in my opinion Samsung’s exaggerated colors work better to make pictures and graphics pop on the smaller screen.

LG’s watch is the Android Wear device to get if battery is your main concern. The Gear Live lasts around a day under normal usage circumstances, while the LG can often manage to extend most of the way through a second. Both devices are best served by being put in their charging docks overnight, however, so this isn’t as much of a concern if you’re making a decision between the two.

The charger for the G Watch uses a magnetic connection to keep it in place, and has a replaceable sticky pad on the bottom to allow you to stick it anywhere. Of the two Android Wear watches, this charger is the better design in terms of easy use.

As a first crack, the LG G Watch brings a lot to the table for Android Wear, including staid design that lets the platform shine. Overall, though, it also suffers from a number of issues likely related to it being first out the gate (Samsung has the advantage of having built multiple devices using almost exactly the same hardware before the Gear Live). The LG G Watch will serve Android Wear fans well enough, but prospective buyers should think long and hard about whether the design choices LG has made warrant paying $30 over what the competition charges and potentially running into the issues described above.

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Android Auto First Look Video With Google Automotive Chief Andrew Brenner

Google is about to make your smartphone the powerhouse behind your in-car infotainment system, with Android Auto, a new feature it’s introducing to Android devices that replaces your built-in car navigation and media system with a version of Android designed specifically for vehicular display systems.

The effort is very much reminiscent of Apple’s CarPlay, with an interface that highlights things people use on their devices when they’re in their cars specifically, including navigation, music playback, and voice-based interaction for search, composing messages and more.

As you can see in the video, the idea behind the design of the system was to build something resembling Google Now for a central jumping off point, and then making sure that there are plenty of contextual smarts built into search so that it can understand even the most informal queries, and also anticipate your next requests without you even asking.

Google will begin shipping its Android Auto solution later this year, beginning with a few select car and device manufacturers supporting the feature, and then expanding from there. It’s already looking pretty much road ready, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it hit the streets once they’ve had a chance to get more third-party developers on board.

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Security Researchers Uncover The Tools Governments Use To Spy On Our Phones

Edward Snowden, whistleblower of the decade, has made it consistently clear that he didn’t trust cellphones. While he never described the methods governments and other miscreants used to crack into our handsets, he maintained that eavesdroppers could hear us even if the phone seemed off and everything on our devices was open to a dedicated hacker. But he never said how it was done.

Now we know… at least partially. The app used is called RCS/Galileo by an Italian company, The Hacking Team. The app allows for full control of the data on the phone and allows users to activate the microphone on Android, iOS, and Blackberry devices. In short, this is what Snowden feared.

An intercepted Skype call

In two very detailed and independent posts, both Citizen Lab and Kaspersky have produced some very interesting documentation of the program and have even traced a piece of Hacking Team software to a Trojan horse that had been modified to look like an Arabic news reader. The teams traced the command and control servers and found multiples in over 40 countries with the majority appearing in the U.S., Ecuador, and Kazakhstan. The major exploits included access to the following phone features and apps:

Control of Wi-Fi, GPS, GPRS
Recording voice
E-mail, SMS, MMS
Listing files
Cookies
Visited URLs
Cached web pages
Address book
Call history
Notes
Calendar
Clipboard
List of apps
SIM change
Live microphone
Camera shots
Support chats, WhatsApp, Skype, Viber
Log keystrokes from all apps and screens via libinjection

It should be noted that the iOS version requires a jailbroken phone – therefore requiring physical access to the phone – but it was easier to reverse engineer than the Android version. The Android version didn’t require a rooted device but was obfuscated to hide the functionality. All an attacker needed to do for an Android attack was to download an infected app like Qatif Today, a news app. By spoofing a legitimate app source, the attackers were able to install the Hacking Teams applications on phones in Arabic-speaking countries including Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The proof that these tools are used by the NSA or other governments is still circumstantial – no one has admitted to using the apps to spy on citizens – but the power of the remote control app is clearly disconcerting. An iOS phone left in a hotel room could be easily attacked and compromised at any time and Android phones are especially susceptible.

“This type of exceptionally invasive toolkit, once a costly boutique capability deployed by intelligence communities and militaries, is now available to all but a handful of governments,” wrote the Citizen Lab Researchers. “An unstated assumption is that customers that can pay for these tools will use them correctly, and primarily for strictly overseen, legal purposes. As our research has shown, however, by dramatically lowering the entry cost on invasive and hard-to-trace monitoring, the equipment lowers the cost of targeting political threats.”

Citizen Lab has a full PDF of the manual used to train law-enforcement on use of the RCS program and, although they refused to make the entire document public they did publish some excerpts. Below we see one of the most jarring examples of the Hacking Teams tradecraft: the ability to inject malware into a seemingly innocuous app package and upload it with a single click. While tech-savvy users will claim that this sort of attack would never happen to them, it’s clear that now no one can know for sure.

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Microsoft Has Just Launched Its First Android Smartphone, The Nokia X2

Meet the Nokia X2, the first Android-based smartphone being made by Microsoft.

Yes, you read that right: Microsoft has just made a new Android-based handset.

It’s also still using the Nokia name at this point, despite previously saying it didn’t plan to trade on that name for long. (Evidently Microsoft’s marketing minions are still working on cooking up that “go forward” smartphone brand.)

The Nokia X2 is not the first Android device Microsoft owns, being as Redmond took over Nokia’s mobile making division in April – a move which brought the original Nokia X device under its wing. But some doubted whether Microsoft approved of Nokia’s Android experiment — and speculated that the line would be quickly culled by Redmond.

Nokia forked Android back in February to create a new smartphone platform, which it called the Nokia X Software Platform to slot in between — pricing-wise — its Series 40 based low-cost Asha devices and its Windows Phone powered Lumia smartphones.

At the time Nokia described the fork as a Lumia “feeder” — with then CEO Stephen Elop saying Nokia X devices would be a Trojan horse within Google’s ecosystem by introducing first time smartphone owners to Microsoft’s services rather than Mountain View’s.

Evidently Microsoft approves of this strategy after all — since it’s now building on that experiment with a follow-up device. Or at least it’s willing to give the fork a chance.

The Nokia X2 is priced at €99 before taxes and subsidies (a little up on the original Nokia X’s €89 price-tag), and has a slightly larger screen (4.3 inches vs 4 inches), along with a beefier processor (1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor vs 1GHz dual-core in the original device).

Otherwise it’s much the same fare, with the handset coming in a range of eye-popping colours and featuring Nokia’s blend of UI experiences — with a Windows Phone-esque tiles-based homescreen, combined with Nokia’s Fast Lane notifications screen, plus plentiful Microsoft (and Nokia) services preloaded, including Skype, Outlook, OneDrive, Mix Radio, Here Maps; and — of course — access to Android apps.

The X2 also supports dual-SIM — a popular feature in emerging markets where Microsoft will be hoping the Nokia X platform can better compete with other Android rivals than Windows Phone has been able to, thanks to those plentiful Android apps — and by reaching a lower price tag than entry-level Lumias can.

The Nokia X2 extends the original trio of devices on the platform which were the Nokia X, X+ and XL.

Below is a Microsoft demo video of the X2:

Wondering what Nokia has been up to since handing off its mobile-making division to Microsoft? It’s also been dabbling with Android — releasing an alternative homescreen for Google’s software platform called Z Launcher just last week.

In mobile, (almost) all roads now lead to Mountain View. So finding ways to build atop Android is the order of the day for mobile players of all stripes.

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An Upper Limit For Apps? New Data Suggests Consumers Only Use Around Two Dozen Apps Per Month

There are now well over a million mobile applications in both Google Play and the iTunes App Store alike, and growth of those app marketplaces shows no sign of slowing down. However, according to new data from Nielsen out this morning, there may be an upper limit to how many apps people will interact with over the course of a month, and that number – just over a couple dozen – hasn’t grown much over the past few years.

That’s good news for the everyday must-haves, like Facebook and Google or the default email, messaging, maps or weather applications, for example. But it’s bad news for the young companies trying to establish a foothold and core group of dedicated, engaged and loyal users within the ever-expanding app universe.

According to Nielsen, U.S. iPhone and Android users over 18 have been increasing the time they spend using mobile applications, which is up 65 percent over just two years ago. In the last quarter of 2013, for example, users spent 30 hours, 15 minutes using apps per month. That’s a full half-day more than the 18 hours, 18 minutes they spent per month in Q4 2011, the new report notes.

What’s interesting is how little the number of apps used per month has changed over this same period of time, however. In Q4 2011, the average number of apps used per month was 23.2. The following year (Q4 2012) it grew to 26.5, and as of Q4 2013 it was just 26.8.

Says Nielsen, this appears to indicate that there may be an “upper limit” to how many apps users will engage with each month.

Of course, those apps being used may not always be the same ones every month, as evidenced by the onslaught of new gaming releases to choose from on any given day, for example. Users are often playing, then disposing of, old titles in favor of new ones on a regular basis.

And these days, the hit-driven nature of mobile gaming seems to be seeping over into other areas of the App Store as well, where trending, buzzed-about hits are not always of the “Flappy Bird” variety, but are sometimes just goofy apps we’ll all talk about for a few days, like Yo, then forget.

Nielsen found that social networking and search apps still dominate the time we spend in smartphone applications - even more so than games – accounting for nearly 11 hours per month as of Q4 2013.

Gaming and other entertainment (including video and audio) grew 71 percent year-over-year to account for 10 hours, 34 minutes.

All the other app categories also saw growth in time spent over the past year, but Photography apps really blew things away with a 34-minute or 131 percent per-person increase over the year prior.

Nielsen additionally examined how app usage and time spent varies by age, and found that older smartphone owners (ages 25-44) use more apps, averaging 29 per month, but younger users (13-24) spend the most time in them, with 37 hours, 6 minutes in apps per month.

That makes sense, given that younger users aren’t likely as tied down by other responsibilities with either their jobs or their families. They’re still working their way up the ladder at work, and fewer will have their own children to parent and worry over at their age.

That being said, notes Nielsen, even though older users may not have as much time to spend using apps per month, that usage is still quite significant. For instance, those aged 55+ today spend more than 21 hours across 22 apps per month. It’s this kind of trend that’s having an impact outside of the app universe as well, as apps have begun to eat into the time we would have spent on other leisure activities, like reading books or watching TV.

The question for mobile companies today is no longer just how to get installed, but how to become one of those some half-dozen apps that gets used monthly.

IMAGE BY Flickr USER Jan Persiel UNDER CC BY-SA 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

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Samsung Gear Live Review: Samsung’s Smartwatch First Mover Advantage Helps Its Android Wear Effort

Samsung is one of the first to market with an Android Wear smartwatch, and the company arguably has a head start since it’s been making its own smartwatches since last year. The Gear Live owes much to its predecessors, which have run both a modified version of Android and Samsung’s own Tizen, but it manages to feel like much more than an older sibling’s hand-me-downs.

1.63-inch Super AMOLED 320×320 display1.2GHz Processor512MB RAM with 4GB storageComes in black and wine redMSRP: $199Product info page

Pros

Great screenHeart rate monitor

Cons

Samsung hasn’t strained themselves with the Gear Live’s design – this is a very similar device to the Gear 2 on the outside, minus the camera at the top and the button at the bottom. It looks a lot like an original Galaxy Gear, in fact, but with a bezel that makes the screen seem a bit more like it’s protruding from your wrist and cleaner lines overall. The minor tweaks are for the better, however, and this is overall a better-looking device than any of Samsung’s older smartwatches.

The design is much more prone to strong negative reactions than that of the LG G watch, however, at least in my experience. While many were fine with its looks, a lot more said they definitely didn’t like it, vs. a mostly neutral or net positive reaction to the G Watch. You’re less able to add your own personal flair to the Gear Live, too – it uses a proprietary band connector meaning aftermarket options aren’t nearly as readily available.

That said, the wrist-hugging design is comfortable on the wrist, and though the clasp isn’t all that easy to affix to begin with, it’s secure once you’ve got it clipped in. Samsung also gets points for including a recessed hardware button on the right side of the display – it’s every bit as surreptitious as LG’s complete lack of any physical controls, but loads more convenient for power on/power down functions.

As mentioned in my review of the LG G Watch, all Android Wear devices are virtually identical in terms of their software experience so far, and that’s by design. The exception here is that Samsung offers some of its own apps for monitoring heart rate and activity (alongside the native Google-provided software for handling both).

The similarity of experience is a very good thing: users who learn Android Wear once will never have to go through a learning curve or adjustment period again when they upgrade or change devices, so long as Google sticks with this plan.

Android Wear does offer everything that users should need in a smartwatch, however, and nothing more. The crucial part will be keeping things clutter free: I enjoyed the relatively spare influx of notifications and activity possible on the wrist, but developers will be able to do a lot more with the Wear SDK, so simplicity might not last forever.

Existing watch apps from partners including Pinterest offer interesting functionality, however. And Google’s own turn-by-turn navigation on the wrist is pretty much perfect for walking or even biking (if you’re extra careful) places without continually taking your phone out of your pocket.

Samsung has proven with its most recent devices that if there’s one place it excels, it’s in display tech. The Super AMOLED screen on the Gear Live has all of the advantages of the big, bombastic versions it includes in its new Tab S line of Android tablets, but shrunk down and on your wrist.

Founded 1969     Overview Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, is engaged in consumer electronics, information technology and mobile communications, and device solutions businesses worldwide. It develops, manufactures, and sells various consumer products, including mobile phones, tablets, televisions, Blu-rays, DVD players, home theaters, and digital cameras and camcorders; home appliances, such as … Website http://www.samsung.com/us Full profile for Samsung Electronics

Those advantages include super contrast and deep blacks thanks to the absence of a backlight, decent daylight visibility and colors that really pop. Receiving photos on the Gear Live through Hangouts actually provided a pleasant enough experience that I was seldom tempted to reach into the pocket and pull out the connected phone, in fact.

Samsung’s screen is also more pixel-dense than LG’s, and it makes a difference. Text appears super crisp and legible, and overall Samsung is the clear winner when it comes to display quality.

The battery on the Gear Live is one of its least appealing features. Your watch will probably last you through any given day, but don’t expect it to go much further than that. Depending on how actively you’re using the device, you’ll probably need to hit the charger around the same time your head hits the pillow.

The price of wearables, at least for now, appears to be getting used to the fact that these devices require at least as much charging as our smartphones. Samsung’s charger is at least small and easy to hide on a nightstand, but it clips in with a ferocity that makes plugging in and unplugging

Samsung may not have had to do much to pivot its own existing smartwatch efforts into a launch day product for Android Wear, but that doesn’t mean the device it did ship feels half-baked. In fact, if anything it benefits from not having been as rushed as its competition, and for the time being at least, that earns Samsung bragging rights as the best available Android Wear device for most users.

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Google Shames Apple’s iOS For Adding What Android Did Years Ago

Apple’s Tim Cook insulted Google at WWDC earlier this month saying “Android dominates the market in malware”, and quoted an article calling the fragmented open operating system a “toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities.” Well Google punched back this morning at its I/O conference when Sundar Pichai put up a slide showing Android’s progress over the years, noting “If you look at what other platforms are getting now, widgets, custom keyboards, many of these things came to Android four, maybe five years ago.”

And the Google fanboys and fangirls went wild.

Pichai never said Apple, but he was clearly jabbing at the recent announcement that iOS 8 would include widgets and custom keyboards. And to play a little defense, Pichai then described how Google was fighting Android malware by forcing all security updates to be pushed through Google Play so hackers can’t send them straight to unsuspecting victims.

For years, the fight between Apple and Google on mobile has been about iOS’ beauty vs Android’s power. But now Apple is opens up more developer flexibility, and Android is getting the new “Material” design overhaul. As the two mobile operating systems converge, expect this fight to get even dirtier. “Android is for robots!” “iOS is for toddlers!”

And poor Windows Phone wishes someone would at least make fun of it.

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Google’s Principal Designer For Search And Maps Explains Material Design

Google’s design work was center stage at I/O this year, from the keynote through sessions and things being demoed on the show floor. The changes run across Google’s range of devices and platforms, and embrace a new set of design principals grouped under the central concept of ‘Material Design.’

I spoke to Jon Wiley, Principal Designer of Search and Maps and Google, about the process of changing the company’s design language across its platforms and products. Material Design doesn’t necessarily throw out Google’s existing design work, according to Wiley, but it does represent a comprehensive new way of thinking about software interaction in the context of modern devices.

“It’s definitely an evolution, although I do think at this point that we’ve also pushed it farther, and we’ve been working pretty hard on that,” Wiley explained. “We talked [during the keynote] about [how] material is the metaphor, and there were actually two metaphors that guided us in terms of thinking about how we could design specifically for high-density displays with touchscreens.”

Touchscreens, combined with high resolution screens with very high pixel-per-inch counts, have conspired to give device users very different expectations around what software should feel like in use. We no longer stare at crudely rendered green text on a black field, after all.

“That affords kind of a new dimension of interaction and interactivity – you’re physically interacting with software interfaces, and so I think that people have far greater expectations,” Wiley said. “They have all the expectations that they have with beautiful, functional, useful design in the physical world that we’ve had for a very long time, they’re bringing those expectations to the software that they’re interacting with because of the nature of the medium.”

“Mouse and keyboard dominated the input/output mechanism with computing devices for quite some time, and we’ve only had widely available touchscreens and high density displays for a few years,” he added. “We initially saw a lot of interface design that was ‘well, we’ll go take what we know, and we’ll jam it on these smaller screens, just kind of jam it on there.’ And we started [...] over a year ago, really thinking about if i’m someone who uses software and i’m coming to the table with all of these expectations about the physical interaction of things and how they behave, all of that is informed by some basic rules and underlying physics.”

That’s where Material Design comes in; the entire system is engineered to mimic real world analogs, without going all the way and becoming what we know as ‘skeuomorphic,’ where interfaces try to offer up almost photorealistic renderings of analogous surfaces in the real world – like a Moleskine for a notebook app, for instance.

“The Material metaphor cuts through a lot of this – we say, ‘what is this made of, what are some of the basic physics of this material?’,” says Wiley. “What’s nice about software is that it doesn’t have to be completely constrained by real-world physics, but you do want to set up an environment where it’s internally consistent.”

Building these physically sound worlds allows Google’s designers to create interface and interaction heuristics that users grow accustomed to and recognize across platforms. Which means that for users, intuiting required behavior becomes much easier.

“It’s actually an imposed set of constraints, but by imposing constraints it enables you to creatively solve within an internally consistent framework of how things work,” Wiley explained. “That way, as you use the software, you’re doing the task on one device, then you’re doing the task on another device, and you’re using multiple applications to solve whatever problem you have, that it doesn’t feel like you’re jumping around from one universe of physics to another universe of physics – that everything feels consistent in terms of how you interact with it.”

Material Design talks about real world analogs like paper and ink, but Google also considered another metaphor to guide its new animations and transitions, which are a big part of its visual and interactivity overhaul.

“The other metaphor that’s driven us quite a bit [...] comes from Fred Gilbert, who’s a director of design for Google+, is that software has followed a metaphor of film and television editing, where each interaction is a series of jump cuts and this is amplified on touchscreen devices,” said Wiley. “The actual world and software design and interaction is probably better suited to a metaphor of theater, where you’ve got almost a proscenium that you’re seeing things happening on. A bad play would go ‘Scene.’ and then a curtain would come down and then you’d wait a while and the curtain would come back up and there’d be something completely new.”

To counter that, Google wanted to pin down a visual language that would not just entertain with flourishes and animated shifts, but that would also inform a user, providing contextual information about how you might interact with the incoming interface as its being set up.

“We were looking at all this software and that’s what’s happening – you’re doing these really important things, and you’re interacting with the software and it’s doing these jump cuts, where you do this and it does this other thing and it’s actually really jarring,” said Wiley. “So we started thinking about how we can actually convey a sense of continuity, where you’re going from one state to the next and it’s done in a thoughtful, composed fashion.”

While Google made Material Design seem like a brand new revolution in software aesthetics during the show, it’s actually something the company has been working on for years, which pops up across its range of products. Wiley says that it’s also the product of Google’s unique approach to product development, where teams from distinct projects talk to each other all the time, and in this way they arrived collaboratively at the new principles. As Wiley said, it’s still relatively early days for high density displays and touchscreens, but it’s far enough along that any efforts to help deepen our experience of interacting with them is worthy of praise.

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