While it is not certain if Google is going to offer Android or ChromeOS for PCs, but Intel is already working on making the $200 Android PC to boost the sagging PC sales.

So far, the notebook market is dominated by two players, Windows and OS X, but there’s an operating system that could drop into this mix and be highly disruptive — Android.

There’s been a lot of discussion bouncing around the tech blogosphere about Intel’s plans to get all disruptive and start supporting Android on devices that will cost in the region of $200.

While Microsoft might not be happy about being sidelined by a company that was once one of its biggest supporters, this is exactly what the PC industry needs.

Think this is a huge leap? It isn’t. Some of Intel’s Atom processors are already compatible with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.

Read More.

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Asus Cube (was earlier Qube), looks like an interesting device.

• 5″ Cube, not exactly small enough to fit behind your TV.
• HDMI in and HDMI out
• LAN and Wireless
• 2 USB Ports
• IR Ports for remote
• Remote with keyboard
• Android 3.2 with Google TV
• Streaming media: Google, Amazon and Netflix.
• 50 GB free cloud storage from Google.

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Around week ago courier brought me Nexus 7 tablet (32GB, wifi only) as kind of upgrade to my Archos G9 80 ‘so called’ Turbo one.

First steps

Charged a bit, booted into Android 4.2 and was greeted by “upgrade to 4.2.2 is possible” soon after wifi connection. But decided to go my way instead ;)

Fetched Clockworkmod touch recovery, CyanogenMod 10.1 nightly image and Google Apps 4.2.2 pack and booted into bootloader. Quick ‘OEM unlock’, flash of new recovery and few minutes later I had CM 10.1 running just like I wanted.

Restored apps from Archos with use of TitaniumBackup and after some configuration I had tablet which responds fast and behaves properly.

Multiuser stuff

As my daughter was main user of Archos I waited for Android 4.2 to get multi user capabilities. Played a bit with them on G9 (with Paranoid Android installation) but 512MB ram and OMAP4430 gave my terrible experience with far too many moments when I wanted to crush tablet into pieces…

So when Mira had come from kindergarten I shown her Nexus 7, made a photo with internal ‘want to be a camera’ thing and gave instructions on how to turn device on and switch to her configuration. She had no problems with understanding it ;)

There are some issues with multiuser stuff. Each user is expected to have Google account, applications are not shared etc. I understand why but in my case it was annoying.

But there is Multi-User App Share app which allows to share applications with different users. So Mira has all her children apps and games available and is not able to spend real money on in-app payments due to lack of Google account (and credit card). I was able to remove them from my configuration as well.

Sharing files is more complicated as so far I did not check is there a shared space for them. So each of us has own music/movies.

Do I miss something?

There are few things which Archos G9 80 has and Nexus does not:

• HDMI output
• microSD slot
• USB Host port

I may miss video output sometimes but had not used it for over half a year now. MicroSD would be nice so I would not have to buy 32GB version. But ~20% of tablet (50$) was sponsored by Tizen ;)

And by USB Host port I mean normal EHCI host port. Not an OTG one present in Nexus 7.

But I do not miss crazy upgrade scheme invented by Archos. Also do not miss I Scream for Sandwitch version of Android they offered. We have XXI century and their upgrade path is from previous millenium.

Complains?

So far I did not find something to complain about. OK, screen could be more square (4:3 Archos, 16:10 Nexus) but it is fine for me. Ask me in few months ;)

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Nexus 7 — upgrade or complain? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

This year I spent Easter in other way than in past years. Instead of staying with the family I went for demoscene party — Revision 2013 in Saarbrücken.

Please note (RSS readers mostly) that this post will contain many YouTube videos embedded. Please go to my blog to have them properly displayed (I use WordPress + Jetpack plugin to embed them).

Friday

Took us 12 hours to get there (mostly due to waiting on TXL and FRA airports) but we managed to be at party place around 19:00 on Friday. Registered, met friends and went to Kirchberg Hotel to drop bags.

Hotel has two stars but was perfectly fine for such trip as our. Clean bed, good breakfast, quiet place (except church bells at 10:00 on Sunday). All just ~2km from E-Werk where Revision took place.

Back to party, more people to meet, discuss a bit with guys from ARM Ltd about Samsung Chromebook, Cortex-A15, Mali etc. One guy joined with his Chromebook and recognized me when I asked “may I fry your speakers?” :D

Timetable listed one interesting thing: “Curio’s 2012 Essentials” which was ~1 hour long set of PC demos from previous year. It was nice as I was totally out of PC scene so was able to check how it looks.

Taxi to hotel was just 6€ ;D

Saturday

Attended “How to start writing compilers without a Ph.D” seminar as it sounded interesting to me. And it was ;) Video below:

Also had discussion with ARM guys about presenting not only technical demos (like Unreal Engine one) but also to show some demoscene productions. Soon “Beginnings” by Elude started on one of Nexus 10 tablets and was working nice. But coder who wrote it was not so happy about that when we discussed that later… I think that it would be a good thing for ARM Mali team to get some good demoscene groups to write demos for Android platform to amaze people with nice looking productions. ARM even had seminar for OpenGLES 3.0 API:

But Saturday was also full of competitions. Tracked music, oldskool music (read: 8-bit mostly), photo, animation/video, game, ascii/ansi, Amiga intros, PC 4K intros, Oldskool demos (8-bit, Atari STE, Amiga 500)…

There were many entries in compos where productions from long time no see groups/people were presented. For example in oldskool demo we got “RINK A DINK REDUX” from Lemon which was astonishing:

There were also demos for Amstrad CPC, MSX1, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and other platforms. Oldskool music compo had even NES entry ;)

But it was also visible that demoscene is not full of amateurs like it was years ago. Some of videos in animation/video compo had professional level. “Lübeck 24x7x365″ took 50 days of recording but was really nice:

There was a concert in the evening… Ear plugs were not strong enough for me so I spent most of time outside talking with people. Next time need to take some better hearing protectors…

Sunday

As Saturday ended really late for us and competitions were planned for 13:00 we decided to not rush and stay in bed longer :) But at around 10:00 bells in local church started their music compo so we were not able to sleep anymore.

We got music, graphics, wild and of course PC 64K intro, web browser demo/intro, Amiga demo and PC demo competitions that day.

Graphics one was won by “Double Trouble by the Royal Forces” made by forcer & prince. Huge amount of details which was not so visible on big screen as it was on a tunnel’s wall where it was hanging as few square meters photo copy.

Wild compo… Man, that was something great. From productions made for Arduino (with some shields) though ARM Cortex-M3 one to interesting hack by Dexter/Abyss which shown one view on monochrome TV and second on oscilloscope while both were connected to Composite video signal only… See it for yourself (or grab separate entries from scene.org FTP server):

Then DJ set by h0ffman (skipped by me) and clue of party — Amiga and PC demos/intros. Different quality but most of them was really good — both from technical or design view (but not always from both at same time).

But as I am not a coder I looked mostly at design and audio/video part. All those names like ‘ray matching’ etc meant nothing to me so when someone tried to explain why demo which I did not like was so great I just told similar thing ;D

Monday

Wake up, breakfast, pack, pay, go to party place. We did not manage to get there before voting ended so not voted for PC demo compo entries. Greeted those who was still present, discussed a bit and then return trip… This time just ~9 hours but next time (if there will be such) we plan to go there by car. Less time needed.

Random stuff

I liked how party was organized — it was my first such event abroad and many people told me that Revision is the last demoscene party in old style. I really liked it. Saw many different platforms like MSX1, MSX2, C= VIC20, Amstrad CPC or Videoton…

Due to Easter time shops where closed on Sunday/Monday but it was not a problem for me as there was free coffee/tea, beer/water/orange juice was available to buy at low price (2.5€ for 0.5l beer) and there was hot food served all time (like 10:00 – midnight) also not so expensive.

Weather could be better as it was cold but at least there was no snow (which we still have here).

It was also nice to see Kiero at work as he was finishing “Machinist” Amiga demo on his x86-64 laptop with WinUAE running fullscreen. I was surprised that ASUS UL30A is capable to run it fast enough.

Amount of discussions with people is probably uncountable. Chromebook, ARM, Android, Amiga, scene were just subset of topics…

Will I go there next year? Will see…

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Revision 2013 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

While Samsung is busy launching the Galaxy Grand and Micromax the A116 Canvas HD, Karbonn has launched the S1 Titanium.

All of them are big screen phablets (phone+tablets) and here is what is common and whats not.

• Dual Sim
• 1GB RAM
• Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)

Here is the difference, Lets see which one rocks.

Micromax has the best display, while Karbon has the snappiest Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The Karbonn is the best value for money. The price difference of Rs. 4000 for Micromax is huge, Expect them to drop prices even before it is launched. If the price of Micromax is dropped to around Rs. 13,000 it would be worthy paying the extra over Karbonn.

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Samsung has launched the Galaxy Grand while Micromax has launched the A116 Canvas HD. Both are big screen phablets (phone+tablets) and here is what is common and whats not.

• 5″ Screens
• Dual Sim
• 1GB RAM
• 8 Megapixel camera
• Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)

Here is the difference, Lets see which one rocks.

The Micromax has better specifications at a lower price and seems to be better value for money. The Micromax has a better display, Samsung Galaxy Grand has a newer generation processor and hence should give comparable perforamce to Micromax’s Quad Core.

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Root Transmission: the ONLY app that allows you to root other phones straight from your own device!

Inspired by Kos’s p2p-adb hacking toolkit (http://hak5.org/episodes/hak5-1205), this app is a pleasant, easy way to root other phones while away from your computer! Just two buttons, Root and Unroot! Connect the cable and root away! It couldn’t be simpler!

Even has its own terminal window so you can see exactly what’s going on while your phone does its thing!

You will need a ROOTED device capable of USB hosting (USB On The Go), a USB OTG cable and one-click root scripts for the devices you wish to root.

Get it here.

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Android UI Fragments look like a great way to build re-usable elements within an app, but they don’t work exactly as expected out of the box (well, exactly is I expected – but that could be a lack of experience with android):

After defining an onClick event on a button within my fragment:

  <Button android:id="@+id/add_goal_button"
      android:layout_width="wrap_content"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:text="@string/button_create"
      android:onClick="addGoal" />

I’d expected this event to be routed directly to my fragment class without the containing Activity class needing to know about it – but instead, the addGoal() method is expected on the containing Activity instead.

To connect the fragment event directly to a click handler on the fragment class (so the view doesn’t need to be handling the fragment events, you can do the following instead (thanks Brill Pappin):

public class NewGoalFragment extends Fragment {
	
	...
	
	@Override
	public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater, ViewGroup container,
			                 Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		final View fragmentView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.fragment_new_goal,
							   container, false);
		...
		Button addGoalButton = (Button) fragmentView.findViewById(R.id.add_goal_button);
		addGoalButton.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
			@Override
			public void onClick(final View v) {
				// Pass the fragmentView through to the handler
				// so that findViewById can be used to get a handle on
				// the fragments own views.
				addGoal(fragmentView);
			}
		});
		return fragmentView;
	}
	
    public void addGoal(View view) {    	
    	EditText newGoal = (EditText) view.findViewById(R.id.new_goal);
	...
    }

During last few days I played with CyanogenMod 10.1 nightly builds on my Nexus S phone. Then went back to CM 10 as it is more stable. But this also reminded me that I have 2 years old device…

So I did another round of checking what are options. As it will be for next 2 years I want 2GB of RAM, 720p screen and LTE support. And there is very small amount of those :(

1. HTC Butterfly. MicrosD slot, 1080p screen, Japan only so far.

2. LG Nexus 4. Latest Android for few releases granted. But also lack of microSD slot and only 16GB of storage.

3. LG Optimus G. Base of Nexus 4. Not available outside of few operators (mostly US).

4. Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE (GT-9305). MicroSD slot, MHL video output.

5. Samsung Galaxy Note II. MicroSD slot, MHL video output.

Now it is time to complain :)

LG Nexus 4 is available only in some stores (or phone operators) for 450+ € — no Google Play Store like it was with earlier models (I do not call current state as selling). Also no LTE on European frequencies. No 32GB storage model.

Samsung GT-9305 sounds interesting. But… It is Exynos 4412 based. And I read The Saga of a CyanogenMod Exynos4 device maintainer by Andrew Dodd which gives clear message “avoid Exynos4 if you can”. If even Samsung update can break your device then something is going wrong. And so far SGS3 LTE lacks CyanogenMod support which is one of main blockers for me as it shows that there are no custom “ROMs” for it (I do not count images remixed from stock images).

Galaxy Note II is huge and would take some time to get used to it. Has CM support already. But again — Exynos4 ;(

So it looks like I need to wait another few months and check will there be something worth buying. In meantime I will stay with last CM10 release running on my Nexus S.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I want to update my mobile phone was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

HTC has upgraded the One X with One X+

• It now has a 1.7 GHZ quad-core processor
• 64 GB Memory
• 2100 mAh battery to give you upto 50% more usage

If you are using HTC One X, then there is not much for you. If you are planning on buying the HTC One X, you should buy the One X+

Google Nexus range has announced the Nexus 10 which beats the iPad 4 in display resolution, where is what is cool:

• Dual Core 1.7 GHz processor vs iPads 1.4 GHz Dual Core
• 2GB RAM vs 1GB on ipad 4
• Display resolution: 2560X1600 300 PPI vs 264PPI of iPad
• 10″ Display vs iPad’s 9.7″
• Weight 603gms vs iPad’s 662 grams
• 8.9mm thickness verses iPads 9.4mm
• 5MP camera with 1.9 MP rear camera
• WiFi
• Pricing start at $399 vs $499 for iPad

Google is claiming this to be highest resolution tablet in the world. This model is WiFi only model, if you need 3G, you need to wait for the 3G model to get released.

• Quad-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 CPU
• 2GB of RAM
• 4.7″ Display
• Sealed battery which can’t be changed or replaced.
• 8GB  or 16 GB of internal storage (which won’t be expandable as no microSD slot)
• Price of US$ 399 (no contract or locked)

While most of the recent media attention on NASA has understandably focused on the Curiosity rover on Mars, that’s not the only experiment that the space and aeronautics research agency has in the works. A team at NASA’s Ames Research center in Moffett Field, California, is working on the future launch of miniature satellites constructed with Android-powered Nexus One smartphones at the helm. Dubbed “PhoneSat,” this project is part of a larger experiment called the Small Spacecraft Technology Program that incorporates small consumer electronics into working nanosatellites.

Read more.

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Nikon is releasing the CoolPix S800C in September. With the Android and WiFi powered, you will be able to use your favourite application (Whatsapp, Facebook, Ubuntu One, DropBox, etc.) to share photos easily. Here is the cool features of the CoolPix.

• 3.5-inch OLED touchscreen with 819,000-dot resolution,
• 10x optical zoom
• GPS, 1080p video capture at 30 frames per second
• 1.7 GB onboard storage
• SD and SDHC external storage support
• 18 filter effects
• HDMI Out (up to 1080i resolution)
• USB port, and Wi-Fi
• Weight than a half-pound (6.5 ounces)
• 1.1-inch depth.

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Samsung has announced the Note II, lets see how they compare:

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From TheDroidGuy.

According to Samsung, the Galaxy SIII Jelly Bean operating system tests have passed through the firmware tests and is currently awaiting a few things including a ‘public version of software agreement’ from Google.  There have been no issues in the testing of the SII and Galaxy note Jelly bean so far but they went ahead and said that in case they change their minds on the update, they may roll out a ‘value pack’.  There is no cause for worry on this issue now though considering that the SIII and the Galaxy Note 2 are still the hottest items in the Android market at the moment.

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In my previous entry, I argued that Ubuntu is possibly the best development environment to write connected android apps, thanks to Juju. Although using WordPress was possibly not a great example I still think that this idea has legs! Hence, I have decided to build an example project.

The example will mainly  be a simple and plan ToDo list app for Android, that gets its items from a back-end MySQL server.

So here is my list of things to get done for this example project:

• Proof that you can access a Juju local environment from the Android Emulator
• Develop a TODO list android app
• Using a few charms from the charm store plus a custom one, set up a MySQL database that can be exposed through a web service with simple commands/steps
• Connect the android app and the webservice, so they talk to each other.

And as there is no time like the present, here is the first bullet point!

Accessing a Juju Local Environment from the Android Emulator

As I was working on my wordpress charm, the easiest thing for me to do was to access the local webserver set-up for the blog.  I first installed the Android SDK, which turned out to be pretty easy to do by just following the instructions posted at http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html . Apart of the sdk tools that download you the emulator, build tools and so on.. you can also choose to use Eclipse as your IDE. If you do this, you can then install an Android plug-in that is *very very* complete.  Having had previous experience with Eclipse, I choose this root and unless you feel very strongly against it, I recommend that you do the same.

Once I had the SDK installed, I run the 2.2 emulator (because that happens to be the version in the spare Android phone that I plan to use later on) and open the local IP address of the WordPress service.  That just worked fine.

Then I decided to create a sample android project and tried some code to do the same. I found that the following method within the main activity of the project was able to ping and then open in a browser window the wordpress app:

private String hostip = "192.168.122.137";

...

public void pingme(View view) {
 TextView info = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.mytext);
 WebView mweb = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webView1);
 InetAddress in = null;

 Log.w("PING","trying to reach" + hostip);
 info.setText("trying to reach" + hostip);
 in = InetAddress.getByName(hostip);

 if (in.isReachable(5000)) {
   info.append("\nHost found");
   Log.w("FOUND",in.getCanonicalHostName());
 } else {
   info.append("\nHost found");
 }
 mweb.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
 mweb.loadUrl("http://"+hostip);
}

So in a nutshell, the first bullet point (and the easiest) of my list is completed!

XBMC Media Center is a very popular free and open source cross platform media player application that is developed by the XBMC Foundation. Being an open source application, XBMC media center software is available for multiple operating-systems and hardware platforms.

It has been a popular alternative to Windows Media Centre and likes, and now the popular platform is finally going to be available for Android.

Read More.

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As if Android everywhere wasn’t enough

Microwave Android Integrated Device (MAID) can auto-cook virtually unlimited number of dishes besides making microwave operations simpler with user-friendly interface.

Read more.

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We’ve been extremely busy at Computex, with over 1,000 people visiting the Ubuntu booth, and over 25 media interviews about Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu TV.

One of the highlights so far was ARM’s Ian Ferguson, director of server systems and our very own Mark Shuttleworth presenting a keynote session at the Computex industry forum about cloud computing. As part of this, they unveiled MiTAC’s new ARM server, based on Ubuntu. This is only the third ARM server made in the world and it’s a significant step forward in a new era of hyperscale computing. Based on ARM processors, these servers have higher densities and lower power to enable more efficient cloud deployments and lower cost.

The MiTAC server can be seen on the Ubuntu stand at M0106, Nangang Exhibition Hall, alongside the latest developments in Desktop and Cloud until the end of the show on June 9th.