Hasta La Gadget!

When Amazon’s Appstore rolled out last week, we glossed over one detail that merely seemed neat. Today, we’re inclined to say that Test Drive may be the most significant part of Amazon’s announcement that day. Basically, Test Drive allows US customers to take apps for a spin at Amazon.com, with all the comfort that their tried-and-true desktop web browser brings — but rather than sit you down with a Flash-based mockup of the app, Amazon is giving you a taste of bona fide cloud computing with an Android virtual machine.

In other words, what you’re looking at in the screenshot above isn’t just a single program, but an entire virtual Android smartphone with working mouse controls, where you can not only try out Paper Toss, but also delete it, browse through the device’s photo gallery, listen to a few tunes, or even surf the web from the working Android browser — as difficult as that may be without keyboard input. Amazon explains:

Clicking the “Test drive now” button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 – just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.

Today, Amazon’s Test Drive is basically just Gaikai for mobile phones — its purpose is simply to sell apps, nothing more. But imagine this for a sec: what if you could access your own smartphone data, instead of the mostly blank slate that Amazon provides here?

[Thanks, Ryan]

Amazon.com lets you play with an Android virtual machine, try apps before you buy them originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s tough to read too much into this, but when Apple publishes a couple of job applications hoping to bring on folks who can “radically improve how people interact with maps and location-based services,” we can’t help but take note. The outfit’s currently seeking a pair of full-timers to be labeled as iOS Maps Application Developers, and it’s honing in on applicants with “excellent skills in object-oriented software design and programming.” We’ve felt for awhile that Apple’s built-in Maps application wasn’t even comparable to Google Maps Navigation, but it could be time for that to change. Even now, iOS users need to fork out cash on a legitimate turn-by-turn app if they’re hoping to navigate with the iPod touch or iPhone, but we can only hope that these applications are hinting at a more full-fledged internal program for the software’s next major iteration.’Course, we’re sure TomTom would beg to disagree…

Apple looking to ‘radically improve’ iOS Maps experience, may look to you for help originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Mar 2011 04:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Michael Calore and Dylan Tweney bring you the gadget news of the week in episode #109 of our surprisingly popular podcast.

Top of this week’s gadget news is the fact that Amazon has finally launched its own app store for Android, cleverly called the Amazon Appstore for Android. It’s a more curated, easier-to-browse app store than the default Google Market. Of course, they’re being sued by Apple.

We also talk about a new app called Color, which is available for the iPhone and (if you can find it) for Android. It lets you take pictures and share them with random strangers in your vicinity.

We show off a web app that creates a Kindle-friendly interface for Google Translate, making your Kindle into a kind of universal translator.

Finally we take a look at Skullcandy’s Roc Nation Aviator headphones. These are stylish, comfortable, portable and have pretty good quality sound, though not quite worth the $150 pricetag.

At $0, they’re an outstanding deal, however. And you can get them for free, if you’re lucky: Thanks to the nice folks at Skullcandy, we have a pair of these headphones to give away. To enter our mini contest, just add a headphone-related photo to the Gadget Lab Flickr pool. (You’ll need to upload your picture to Flickr, then add it to the pool.) It could be a photo of you wearing your favorite headphones, a headphone mod, or maybe just an artsy photo of your best headphones. Be creative!

We’ll pick a winner at random from all the headphone photos we receive, and we’ll contact the winner via Flickr, so make sure that your contact info is up to date there.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast on iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our ugly mugs, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds. Thanks for listening and watching!

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast No. 109

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0109.mp3

There’s a lot of folks out there drinking and driving, and Congress sees DUI checkpoint location apps as enablers of all that cruising and boozing. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats have decided to use their powers of political persuasion to address the issue and ask Google, Apple, and RIM to pull such apps from their respective stores. The letter didn’t name names, but Reid and co. want offending software yanked or “altered to remove the DUI checkpoint functionality” to prevent checkpoint circumvention. Of course, the creators of one such app, PhantomAlert, claim it provides such information to deter drunk driving by letting users know the risk of getting caught (yeah, right). RIM agreed to comply with the congressional request while Google said no thanks, but mum’s the word out of Cupertino — time will tell if Apple gets on the banning bandwagon too.

Senator Harry Reid calls for DUI checkpoint app removal: RIM’s game, Google isn’t, Apple’s undecided originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Mar 2011 16:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unsurprisingly, El Goog gifted the Android versions of Latitude and Places with these updates a few weeks back, but now the iOS loyalists are being brought into a similar circle. The search giant has just added check-ins to the iOS version of Google Latitude, with any iDevice using iOS 4 or higher being deemed compatible. In related news, the Applefied build of Google Places is now available in 30 languages, and there’s an added ‘Saved Places’ feature for keeping tabs on your favorite spots. You can check your phone for updates, or if you haven’t dug in yet, have a poke around in the App Store.

Google brings check-ins to Google Latitude on iPhone, 30 languages to Places originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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