This Week in Android #2 with Andreas Schobel

Episode 0 2

This Week in Android #2 with Andreas Schobel

TWiA #2 with Snaptic

Featuring Barb Dybwad, Senior Editor of Mashable and Andreas Schobel, CTO of Snaptic.

CoHosts Ray Slakinski and Jeff Ammons. Skype CoHost Nicole Cozma is the Associate Editor at AndroidGuys.com. She is also the grammar hammer at Tmonews (T-Mobile news), contributing editor to KnowYourCell.com.

The Big News This Week? The Apple iPad — and what it means for Android Tablets, including devices like Barnes & Noble Nook ebook reader (an Android device a
lso) And it turns out there IS porn in the Android store The issue of Android’s apparent lack of multi-touch support was discussed. @cyanogens was talked about: a developer who has managed to 3x the speed of Android 2.1 and created a neat hack to allow multi-touch support.

Android Open Lines
Barb Dybwad, Senior Editor of Mashable.com, took us through the various Android Tablets that debuted at CES this year an opined on what she thought was best and what the apps were.

App of the Week
Snaptic CTO Andreas Schobel showed 3Banana, a simple but very popular note-taking app. He also took us through the process of what it takes to build an android app.

News:
Read by Amanda Coolong

Back in August, Samsung claimed there would Android handsets for under $100. At the time, the claim seemed far-fetched. However, there’s now a rumor that a new Qualcomm processor powering Motorola’s yet-to-be-announced Devour handset may be low-cost enough to make this a reality. Will we see Android phones for less than $100 or even $50 in 2010?
One of the big gripes about the new Apple tablet is that it is missing a camera. Augmented reality fans in particular felt snubbed. However, the new Archos 7 Android-based tablet is rumored to have a front-facing camera. Does a camera matter in tablet device?
Is Apple organizing a media attack on Google?An article on AndroidGuys this week speculates that Apple may actually be manipulating coverage of Android. Listen to these two quotes:USA Today says:
“This is an epic failure for Google,” says Rob Enderle, an independent analyst at the Enderle Group. “It tried to create an Apple-like experience, but it’s so far off from the Apple experience, it’s not even on the same planet.”
ABC News said:
“… The Android strategy was compared to that of Microsoft Windows, which broke the market hegemony of Apple’s non-open OS. This time around, the new Android phones were supposed to break the hegemony of the Apple iPhone. So far, it hasn’t quite worked out that way with Android.”
IS Apple behind these attacks?
Walmart / Nexus One?
Earlier this week, the Walmart ‘Coming Soon’ page featured the Nexus One, suggested that soon consumers would be able to purchase Nexus One handsets at Walmart stores across the country. Then, mysteriously, the Nexus One reference was removed and Walmart issued this statement:
“Due to a technical error, this item erroneously was displayed on our site. We have no plans to carry Nexus One in Walmart stores or online at Walmart.com at this time.” – Walmart spokesman Ravi Jariwala
What happened here? Was this a premature announcement of something real? Or just a mistake?
Doubletwist Partners With T-Mobile
Doubletwist – last week’s App of the Week here on this show – just announced a major partnership with T-Mobile. The new myTouch 3G Fender Edition now includes a custom installer for multimedia sync. So does the Android platform now have the equivalent of iTunes?

Download the MP3 Here!

Rose
Great show this week! I’m looking forward to future shows. Thanks, Mark!
http://androidguys.com Scott Webster
Re: Android phones at sub $100 pricing. We do have some at or below that price but that’s generally with rebates either by mail-in or someone like Best Buy eating some the cost. I think we could see handsets with limited specs below $100 without anyone having to subsidize much, if at all.
Great show, enjoyed it. Looking forward to more!
http://ryocentral.info Ryo
Well another nice episode.
One things bugs me. This isn’t “This Week in iPhone”. Please don’t compare Android to iPhone all the time. I can only speak for me, but I have an Android phone, because it’s NOT an iPhone. So it would be much cooler to hear about Android news and stuff, and not how it competes with other phones. There is more talk about Apple stuff then anything in this episode. See the net is full of Apple. Please make a show fore Android users and fans. They need it. Apple don’t need another webshow.
Bye
Ryo
http://www.totalmadownage.net Wintermute
Fictionwise.com and Ereader.com have an Android version of their eReader software on which you can read their books. There is also Aldiko on the Android Market which allows access to non-copyrighted (mostly old books) novels.
And with a lot of big book stores introducing Android eReader devices like the Kindle it is just a matter of time till their software is available for our smartphones as well.
Ed
Like the show. When will it be available on in the Zune Marketplace?
You need some better audio for your guests.
Ed
Casper Bang
It’s there since 2.0 and can track 3 points (you can see that in the official API: http://bit.ly/android-mt). It’s not used by Google apps since Apple holds a vague patent, and therefore asked Google (probably because Google CEO Eric Schmidt was a member of Apple’s board) to leave multi-touch out. In Europe we don’t allow software patents, which explains why Google’s less conservative approach here. Google needs to flick Apple the finger claiming prior art, it’s ridiculous we need to rely on 3′rd parties for this.
You do not need apps2sd, that was mostly in the old days when/if you wanted to run a lot of applications. In practice, large applications rely on the SD card for bulk-data anyway (images, map data etc.). Google probably have a reason for this (internal RAM has a guarantied speed, permissions can be controlled i.e. no accidental deletion). As Nicole mentioned, at the Nexus One launch they did promise native support for whole apps on the SD card.
Agree with Nicole, iPhone has 18+ month of advantage so it WILL lose when compared naively against iPhone – especially if done by an existing iPhone user (used to iTunes rather than the cloud, used to multi-touch, not used to multi-tasking). The reason behind the conspiracy theory can be demonstrated pretty easily by some of the ridiculous review video’s, i.e. Engadget’s lame browser micro-benchmark: http://bit.ly/lame-benchmark
You can already do one-click purchasing of MP3 from the phone (incl. Droid) by installing Amazon’s app which comes natively on the Nexus One.
John
Good job, the podcast is getting better already! Thanks for putting together a professional podcast about android. I do have one major issue though, the podcast does not play on my android device!! I have a HTC Eris and have tried playing the video w/ gallery and meridian. Also can you make an audio only podcast that has a smaller file size? Thanks keep up the good work.
anthony
I was recommended to this from android guys because Nicole was on this program. But i have to say you show sucks. I listen to a lot of podcast. All you did is talk about apple. Then you talked about the Nexus One at walmart and made comments like “why would they use the nexus one to draw publicity” I think you are a bunch of iphone users. And you don’t know jack **** about android!
twitter.com/velazcod
Multi touch is officially supported in Android 2.0+… pinch-to-zoom wasn’t available on Google Apps (Maps), Gallery and Browser, but every other app has support for multitouch, including the android keyboard… until yesterday, or the day before (2/2/10), google announced updating the Nexus One to include pinch-to-zoom on Maps, Browser and Gallery.
As for Games.. well, games developers might be lazy to integrate multitouch, but there are official APIs for multitouch in Android 2.0+.
twitter.com/velazcod
BTW the show is great, didn’t like much the “speech” Barb did, too long, ended up being boring after a while.