Amazon’s Android App Store Launches: Test Drive Apps Directly From Your Browser

This morning Amazon is officially launching its Android App Store — a storefront for apps that will compete directly with Google’s official Android Market. We first broke the news about the impending App Store back in September and had some thorough coverage on the details in January when it opened to developer submissions. But now the store is finally going live to consumers (it will be rolling out over the course of the day, so you may not be able to access yet). And while there were leaks abound about this morning’s launch, there are still a few details that Amazon managed to keep quiet.

The biggest one: Amazon will let you ‘Test Drive’ nearly any Android application in the App Store directly from your browser using some very interesting technology. Click the ‘Test Drive’ button, and Amazon will launch an emulated instance of Android on its EC2 cloud, which you’ll be able to control directly from your browser (it uses Flash). Some features won’t work right now (like functions that take advantage of the phone’s accelerometer) but you should be able to at least get the gist of what you’re buying. Amazon was unable to give me early access to this prior to today’s launch, but I’ll update with my impressions as soon as I get to try it out.

The other big revelation is Amazon’s free app-of-the-day. Every day, Amazon will be choosing a premium application and making it free to consumers, giving people a reason to check in on the store on a frequent basis. This is made possible by the fact that Amazon, not developers, sets the pricing of each application. Here’s how I described the pricing model in my previous post:

The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we’ve grown accustomed to involves pricing. Unlike Apple’s App Store and Android Market, where developers can set their price to whatever they’d like, Amazon retains full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a ‘List Price’, which is the price you’d normally sell it at. Amazon will use a variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, or offers it for free, you’re guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.

In other words, if your app gets picked for Amazon’s deal of the day, you’re entitled to 20% of the list price that you previously set. That may not sound like much, but these daily specials are probably going to see download counts that are far higher than normal.

To coincide with the launch, Amazon is also announcing (as has been previously reported) that it has exclusive rights to the Rio version of Angry Birds, which is a tie-in to an upcoming feature film. The game will normally sell for 99 cents, but will be available free for a limited time. This is a smart move on Amazon’s part, as it will give legions of Angry Birds fans a reason to check out the store in the first place (and will also likely prompt word-of-mouth exposure as friends show off their ‘special’ version of the game to each other).

The App Store is a bold move on Amazon’s part because it’s going head-to-head with Google’s official Android Marketplace — and it may actually provide some serious competition. Unlike Android Market, which has a very open submission process, Amazon will be screening every application to ensure that it meets a certain standard of quality (it isn’t a high bar, but at least you’ll be assured the app won’t crash at launch). Amazon will also be undercutting Google’s marketplace on pricing. And it’s going to be recommending applications to users — even when you’re browsing physical goods on Amazon (if you’re checking out a baseball bat, it might recommend a baseball game for your phone).

Of course, while you can access Amazon’s App Store from both its website and a mobile application, it isn’t coming pre-installed on most Android phones the way Market is, so it’s going to take a while to gain traction. But that will likely change. Expect Amazon to work out deals with carriers to come preloaded on phones. And my hunch is that the store will become very important for various splintered versions of Android that aren’t backed by Google, not the least of which could come from Facebook.

Oh, and just in time for the launch, Apple is suing Amazon over its use of the name ‘App Store’.

Source: Information provided by CrunchBase

Official: Adobe Flash for Motorola Xoom coming March 18

Source: Computerworld
By JR Raphael

Motorola promised, and it’s delivering: Adobe Flash will officially become available for the Motorola Xoom next Friday, March 18.

Xoom users are getting a software update over-the-air right now to prepare the device for the new Flash player. The update — numbered Android 3.0.1 — will roll out in waves, meaning it may take a few days to reach everyone.

The Flash software itself will show up in the Android Market next week, according to a blog posted by Adobe this morning. It’ll be considered a beta release for Honeycomb tablets like the Xoom.

Per Adobe:
We have been working very closely with Google to ensure tight integration between Flash Player 10.2 and new OS and browser capabilities in Android 3.0. The March 18th beta release of Flash Player 10.2 in conjunction with Google’s first system update to Android 3.0 (version 3.0.1) currently underway for the Motorola Xoom will deliver the first phase of our work together. This will be followed by subsequent updates, which will complete the optimizations and result in a production GA release of Flash Player 10.2 for Android 3.0.

Though it’ll also run on Android 2.2 and Android 2.3 phones, most of the new features of Adobe’s Flash Player 10.2 seem geared toward Honeycomb tablets. The software includes a special kind of rendering designed to provide smoother video playback on tablets; "deeper integration" with the Android 3.0+ browser, said to result in a faster and more desktop-like Flash browsing experience; better support for touchscreen keyboards; and a handful of other performance-based enhancements.

If you have a Xoom, the Motorola software update will show up automatically on your device sometime in the next few days; you’ll receive an on-screen notification letting you know when it’s ready to download and install. The Flash Player itself will likely have to be downloaded manually. All you’ll need to do is head into the Android Market on the 18th and find it there.
Adobe says its tablet-ready Flash Player will come preinstalled on future Android tablets.

Source: Computerworld

Check out video from the Android Event held today including information on the new Android Market website.

Google showcased on Wednesday the first version of its Android software designed to run on tablets with larger screens and greater computing horsepower, allowing for a sleeker and theoretically faster interface with built-in video conferencing.

When we launched the first version of Google Translate for Android in January 2010, we were excited about the year ahead. For the first time, we were bringing the capabilities supported on Google Translate—like machine translation, romanization of non-Roman scripts and spoken translations—to the Android platform. We also offered voice input to let you speak the word or phrase you wanted to translate instead of typing it in, and SMS translation so you could translate SMS messages sent to you in foreign languages.

Today, we’re refreshing Translate for Android with several updates to make the app easier to interact with. Among other improvements, we’ve created better dropdown boxes to help select the languages you want to translate from and into, an improved input box, and cleaner icons and layout.

We also want to let you in on an experimental feature that’s still in its earliest stages—Conversation Mode. This is a new interface within Google Translate that’s optimized to allow you to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. You may have seen an early demo a few months ago, and today you can try it yourself on your Android device.

Currently, you can only use Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish. In conversation mode, simply press the microphone for your language and start speaking. Google Translate will translate your speech and read the translation out loud. Your conversation partner can then respond in their language, and you’ll hear the translation spoken back to you. Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. Even with these caveats, we’re excited about the future promise of this technology to be able to help people connect across languages.

As Android devices have spread across the globe, we’ve seen Translate for Android used all over. The majority of our usage now comes from outside the United States, and we’ve seen daily usage from more than 150 countries, from Malaysia to Mexico to Mozambique. It’s really rewarding for us to see how this new platform is helping us break down language barriers the world over.

Translate supports 53 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and voice input for 15 languages. You can download the application, available for devices running Android 2.1 and above, by searching for “Google Translate” in Android Market.

Content by Google  Mobile Blog

Now You Can Use AT&T Billing for Android Market Purchases

Content by Mashable

Android users on the AT&T network now have another payment option in the Android Market: AT&T direct carrier billing. Besides paying for apps with a credit card, you can now simply charge the fee to your AT&T bill.

Up until now, T-Mobile was the only U.S. carrier to offer carrier billing in the Android Market.

The update has been gradually rolled out to all AT&T users in the past couple days as an update to the Android Market, which also brings a couple of other improvements. These include new categories: “Media & Video,” “Music & Audio,” “Business,” “Sports” and others. Furthermore, there’s now a 15-minute refund window for payments, and .apk packages can be up to 50 MB in size.

Voice Search gets personal

Tuesday, December 14, 2010 | 9:02 AM

When we launched Voice Search more than two years ago, we wanted it to “just work” right out of the box, without an initial setup process. And so, we built speech models broad enough to accommodate a wide variety of people, regardless of gender, age, and accents, or variations in pitch, pace, and other factors. But we always knew we could build a more accurate model by listening to your voice, and learning how you — as a unique individual — speak. So today we’re launching personalized recognition.

If you opt into personalized recognition, we begin to associate the recordings of the words that you ask us to recognize with your Google account. We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you. This speech model enables us to deliver greater recognition accuracy. Although subtle, accuracy improvements begin fairly quickly and will build over time.

The first time you use Voice Search, you’ll be presented with a dialog to turn on personalized recognition. Google takes your privacy seriously, so you can enable or disable personalized recognition at any time through the Google voice recognition settings on your phone. If you’d like to disassociate your voice recordings from your Google Account, you can do so through the Google Dashboard in the Speech section.

The personalized recognition functionality is currently available for English in the United States. We plan to support other countries and languages in the near future. To enable it, you must have Android 2.2 or higher, and download the latest version of the Voice Search app from Android Market. The new app also includes some improvements to name recognition and speed, especially over 3G and EDGE connections.

So go ahead and download the latest Voice Search app, and let’s get personal!

Scan this QR code to download:

The Android Google Reader app is here!

Wednesday, December 01, 2010 Content by Peter Baldwin

It’s been a long time coming, but the official Google Reader app for Android is finally here. Let’s jump into the features, shall we?

The app supports all the basics you’d expect like unread counts, friends, sharing, liking, and starring, but it also has a whole lot more, including:

• Multiple accounts
• Synced preferences
• Full subscription features (subscribe and search from your phone)
• Search

A couple harder to discover features we’d like to highlight:

• Volume-key navigation: if you enable this in the settings, you can navigate by using your phone’s volume keys for next and previous
• Long-press on a folder or subscription to bring up a contextual menu that lets you rename, unsubscribe or change folders
• If you hit the menu key on an individual item, you can use the “send” feature which integrates with other apps on your phone to send the item using any 3rd party app

We’re really excited to make the first version of the app available today, and we hope you’ll try it out and let us know what you think on Twitter or our help forums.

Update: Here’s a link to the app on Android Market. It should run on Donut and higher.

Rovio’s Angry Birds mobile game is going great guns in the mobile space, but Android users may be feeling a tad left out as the iPhone version of the popular game has already seen a Halloween edition and a new Mighty Eagle update coming soon, however Android fans of the game are going to see a new edition as well.

According to an article over on Intomobile by Kelly Hodgkins, and by way of Phandroid, Rovio has used their Twitter account to let it be known that Android gamers will be getting a special Christmas edition of Angry Birds “any day now.”

Furthermore another Rovio tweet announced that the Android version of Angry Birds has now hit a huge download milestone of 7 million times, which is behind the iOS version of the game that has been downloaded 10 million times.

However, when you take the download figures across all platforms and versions, Angry Birds has been downloaded a huge 30 million times, which you’ve got to admit in quite impressive for a game that has you throwing birds at pigs.

Of course as an Angry Birds fan I will be keeping an eye out for that Christmas Android edition to get my Christmas fix of green pig destruction, anyone else?

Content by Phones Review

Google reached a significant milestone for its Android mobile operating system today: 100,000 applications are available in the Android Market.

The company announced the news in a post to its Android Developer Twitter account, nearly two years to the day since the Android Market formally opened for business. An unofficial estimate of Android applications by AndroLib had pegged the number at 50,000 in April, but it’s not clear how accurate that was, as AndroLib currently predicts that 150,000 applications are available in the market.

Google is still well behind Apple when it comes to mobile applications, of course, with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad owners having access to over 280,000 iOS-based applications at last count. Still, the milestone is worth noting as Android continues to cement its role as the Apple alternative for developers and consumers.

Before Google made the formal announcement The New York Times posted a story noting the milestone and pointing out some of the challenges that remain for Android developers, such as the subtle-yet-important differences between the hundreds of different Android devices on the market as well as payment issues with Google Checkout.

Content by Tom Krazit
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20020616-265.html#ixzz13P0JqHOg

How long to you think before Android Market hits 200,000 application?

Say you’re not a mobile phone geek like us, and you don’t have your Android smartphone at arm’s length from you (at most) at all times. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get notified right from your desktop when your handset receives a call or text message without having to be within earshot of your phone? Well, you’ll be happy to hear that Android Notifier is an application that will conveniently tell you when your phone has missed a phone call or received a text message.

Android Notifier is something like a backwards Chrome to Phone, as your phone pushes notifications to your computer. While Chrome to Phone for Android 2.2 Froyo smartphones can push websites or Map directions from your computer to your phone, Android Notifier is only meant to push voice call and SMS text message notifications to your phone from your computer.

In order to get Android Notifier set up, you’ll need to download the desktop app, as well as the Android app so the two can communicate properly. Both apps are easy enough to set up, and you’ll be up and running phone-free in no time. So if you’re listening to music at your computer, and might not be able to hear the phone in your desk drawer ringing, Android Notifier may be your savior. You can’t reply from your computer, but at least you’ll be able to know when your handset needs some attention.

You can also customize your notification. If you don’t want your computer to tell you what your battery percentage is, it’s only a check box away in the settings to be removed. You can also use the service through Bluetooth if you so choose. So for what Android Notifier does, it’s rather flexible, and many people will enjoy it’s functionality. So for those of you who aren’t permanently attached to their mobile phones, what are you waiting for? You’ve got a call/text to ignore!

I was a little skeptical about this app, as I’m always near my phone, but once I got it up and running I was impressed. I’m not sure if I’ll continue to use it, but it’s something that may appeal to a lot of people. We’d be interested to see if this will be integrated into Google TV someday. Imagine watching your favorite TV show on Google TV and you’re notified via pop-up box window that you’ve just received a text message on the smartphone that you left on the kitchen table. We have to admit that a Google TV version of this app could be as annoying as it is useful, but we’d like to see it happen anyway.

To get started, you can go to the products home page here. And just a heads up, there are two separate programs for the desktop. One for Windows/Linux, and one for Mac, so make sure you download the right one!

Desktop App

Mobile App

Content by IntoMobile.com