Smartphone Experts–Smartphone Fan

The awesome Android modding community continues to amaze. One of the hardest things to do is port a GSM ROM ot a CDMA phone. Koush, has recently ported the latest and greatest cyanogenmod to the Droid. Cyan’s Rom’s are always near the top of the hill in the custom ROM world. This is a luxury that was previously only available to users with HTC branded phones until now.

Recently there has been a push to port cyan’s ROM’s to non-HTC devices, there are two beta ROM’s at ModMyMoto for the Ciq which suffer from multiple bugs. But for the Droid, early reports from users has been positive. Users state that it’s very fast and stable which is a staple of cyan’s work. CyanogenMod’s add a new dimension that is unmatched by the stock firmware in a manner that makes your phone feel totally different than it did when it was stock.

Head over to cyanogenmod to try it out. Welcome to the world of cyan Droid users, enjoy!!!

The upcoming Streak from Dell, we all know it as the Mini 5, has a few services  from Amazon preinstalled. One of which is a Kindle app.  Amazon’s MP3 store is expected since that’s already on several Android devices. On a promo picture for the Streak is has “Kindle Book Reader Applications” listed as well as a few other apps. Could Dell’s Streak  usher in Amazon’s digital book reader to Android?

There’s already a Kindle app for Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry platforms for mobile e-book reading. Android could join them with it’s own Kindle app very soon. There will be no monthly fees for this, you can possibly download books in 60 seconds and there’s over 300,000 of the most popular books, magazines and blogs available.

[via androidcommunity]

We’ve been hearing a few success stories about Android developers in recent weeks, and the latest to trumpet their achievements is Snaptic.  The company is claiming almost 2,000,000 active installs, in no small part thanks to Android’s Intent functionality which allows developers to combine functionality of other applications.

In that way, Snaptic’s note-taking functionality has been integrated with the BBC’s News app, together with various recipe, dictionary, horoscope and other apps.  The app allows for text and media to be snipped from those apps and saved in a user-specific database, which is sync’d in cloud-based storage and accessible via a website.

Snaptic now say they’re adding in new developer functionality in the latest version of their Notes API, with more news coming out of SXSW this weekend.  What they haven’t said is anything about financial success; it’s not entirely clear how much money Snaptic are making from their 2m active users.

Press Release:

Snaptic Nears 2 Million Installs on Android

Quietly establishes lead in note-taking applications on Android, new developer integrations announced at SXSW

San Francisco, Calif. — Snaptic , a developer of smartphone and web applications that capture, organize, and share information has quietly become the leader in note-taking applications on Google’s Android™ with nearly 2,000,000 active installs. With a vision of easy information capture for all, Snaptic has introduced a simple way for Android developers to integrate note-taking capabilities into their own applications.

Many of the most popular applications in the Android Market, collectively representing millions of users, have integrated with Snaptic to make it easy for their users to save content to their notebooks. Some of the applications include:

1. Free Dictionary.org – Provides definitions, synonyms, pronunciation, spelling, and word quizzes.
2. BBC News – Delivers the latest news and headlines from the BBC.
3. DailyHoroscope – Conjures fresh horoscopes daily.
4. Favorite Recipes – Serves up thousands of recipes by ingredients, keywords or categories.
5. 10,001 Cocktails – Mixes preloaded recipes with drink search across a broad range of drink categories.
6. Tip Calculator – Simple to use calculator that makes it easy to split up a bill without having to do the math.

Snaptic is leading the charge in offering note-taking integration options for developers using the Android Platform’s “Intent” feature. Android Intent offers a simple way for developers to collaborate and leverage each other’s strengths and core competencies to deliver new, feature rich experiences for their application end-users. Snaptic has defined its own note-taking Intent API and published examples for developers to reference.

“Snaptic is focused on making it easy for people to capture information into a personal data cloud that’s accessible 24/7,” said Steve Brown, CEO of Snaptic. “Now Android developers can easily add note-taking to their apps and their users can save what they want from their favorite apps into their mobile notes.”

Information that is captured from integrated applications is automatically tagged to make it simple to navigate and retrieve saved content. End-users get additional benefit by being able to sync with the web at http://snaptic.com so that no matter where content is captured it’s consistent and available at all times.

Snaptic will be presenting at the SXSW 2010 conference in Austin Texas on Saturday, March 13, at the Hilton at 12:50PM to showcase how Android developers are working together to enhance end-user experiences. More information can be found at http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/748

About Snaptic
Snaptic is a leading developer of smartphone and web applications that capture, organize, and share information. As the leader in note-taking and geo-tagging applications in the Google Android Market, Snaptic provides the easiest way for developers to integrate note-taking capabilities into their applications. For more information, please visit http://snaptic.com.

Snaptic™, 3banana®, and AK Notepad™, Compass™, are trademarks of Snaptic, Inc.

It’s no surprise that Vodafone are set to offer the Google Nexus One, what we haven’t known so far is when it might be arriving or how much the Android 2.1 smartphone will cost.  Still no figures or exact dates, but Vodafone UK have updated their Coming Soon page with a “register for updates” option for the Nexus One.

So far all the listing says is that the Nexus One is coming soon, though we previously heard from a UK paper that the launch would take place in April 2010.  As for pricing, a leaked Vodafone Germany document suggested that the subsidized handset would come in at €149.90 (£136).  We wouldn’t be surprised to see the Nexus One hit the UK from free on high-priced contracts, however.

[Thanks Andy!]

The XDAndroid project, for Windows Mobile devices with (W)VGA displays, has progressed to a fully usable port of Android to a Touch Pro 2. Past ports haven’t been as successful as this one, there were too many bugs and the build was not user friendly. That’s now a thing of the past and maybe now all WinMo phones with a WVGA display will be able to load Android and use it like it was the native OS on the device.

The Galaxy Spica has been in the news often in the past few weeks. Earlier in the week there was an announcement that the handset was on its way to Roger’s Wireless in Canada. Today, a short video demonstration was released.

The Galaxy Spica offers a 3.2? AMOLED HVGA capacitive display, 3.2 megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, 3.6Mbps HSDPA/UMTS, 800MHz processor and up to 7 hours of talk time and 10 days of standby. It has Android 1.5 preinstalled with the promise of being updated to 2.1 in the future. That may come sooner then expected, although in the video it seem pretty unresponsive or maybe because its two guys trying to demo the same device.

Click here to view the embedded video.