With the moral panic surrounding Grand Theft Auto and Bully one has to wonder what the media will make of a real world first person shooter game on Android phones.
Using GPS technology the game is designed to create a virtual World of Warcraft in the real world where you can locate enemies in the games virtual world, oh wait, my head hurts.
The scavenger hunt/paintball like game may sound confusing but check out the video demonstration below and imagine what the future holds for Android phone gaming.
While we are still awaiting the first Android phone we already have the Opera Mini browser launched in readiness for the HTC Dream’s release.
With no handset to operate the browser on you may be asking what madness is this? But tech heads keen to get a feel for Opera Mini’s Android edition can test the system using the Android Emulator and just squint real hard.
The excitement is definitely growing given Google’s track record and many are counting on May 6th and the rumored launch of the HTC Dream to get an idea of wehther all the hype is warranted and whether Google can deliver on Mobile OS as it delivered on email.
If you want to try it out you’ll need to download and install the latest version of the Android SDK, obtain the Opera Mini for Android package, start the emulator tool and transfer and install the Opera package to the emulator. Opera Mini should appear in the applications folder.
According to sources At&t and Google are in talk to join alliance on google andriod. So far only T-Mobile USA and Sprint are on google’s board. This agreement wont limit carriers to use only Google’s Apps, Carriers will be able to equip handsets with their own applications as well.
Rumors are spreading again that the HTC Dream is hot favorite to be the first Google Android phone to market.
The tentatively titled ‘Dream’ is likely not one of the speculated figures above but is said to feature a full QWERTY keyboard (that proportedly “slides or swivels”), touch screen display and a 3″ by 5″ body. Beyond this details are sketchy and extend understand little beyond what had been broadcast by Forbes 5 months ago.
There’s no word yet on when the Dream will hit the market but word is Samsung are hot on their HTC’s search-querying heels.
No less than Google’s VP Rich Miner is letting it be known that he expects Android sales to outstrip those of its more fancied rival the Apple iPhone. This despite sales of 4 million iPhones thus far, projected sales of 10 million by year end and an SDK that was downloaded 100,000 times in its first four days of release - explain sir.
“Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone”, said Miner. With both SDK’s out Miner suggests that the Apple’s restrictions hinder its ability to provide rich applications, a failing not shared by Google’s more open approach, “There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can’t do with the iPhone at least at the moment,” added Miner.
With the Android SDK having quietly accrued 750,000 downloads since February, Rich Miner may have a point, suggesting if he were a developer “I’d certainly be looking at the iPhone, and if you believe there will be lots of Android phones out there, as we do, I’d be developing for both platforms.”
With Apple’s huge satisfaction ratings and market penetration can an Android phone made by the ailing Motorola really match the lust factor of the iconic Apple?
Google have launched ‘Apps For Android’, which is an open source collection of sample Android Applications. The goal of the sample collection is to share sample applications that will demonstrate the features of the Android platform on the cell phones.
The first android application sahred is Wikinotes, “a wiki note pad that uses intents to navigate to wiki words and other rich content stored in the notes.”
The Wikinotes application demonstrates a number of core concepts:
Multiple Activities in an Application (View, Edit, Search, etc.)
Default intent filters for View/Edit/Search based on MIME types
Life Cycle of activities
Message passing via Bundles in Intents
Use of Linkify to add Intent-firing links to text data
Using Intents within an application
Using Intents to use an Activity within another application
Writing a custom ContentProvider that implements search by note title
Registration of ReST-like URIs to match titles, and do contents searches
SQLite implementations for insert, retrieve, update, delete and search
