Hasta La Gadget!

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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The iOS platform isn’t the only way to make money on the mobile apps scene.

Tech news site Electricpig took a look at eight groups that have made it big — more than six-digits big — with hit Android apps.

Better Android Apps, for example, has made approximately $1.34 million from purchases of its hits Better Keyboard and Open Home. Yongzh created emulators for the PlayStation, Sega, Nintendo and Atari systems, and gathered about $1.81 million from sales of these apps.

“Conventional wisdom told us that to be successful, we had to focus on iOS. Conventional wisdom was wrong,” said Gary Gattis, CEO of Spacetime Studios.

That certainly seems to be true with the tower-defense game Robo Defense. It has also been a big winner, netting creator Lupis Labs more than $2.09 million.

An estimated 3.7 billion Android apps have been downloaded to date, according to AndroLib. Many developers wish that number would rise at a faster rate and are counting on tools like in-app payments to spur app purchases and developer earnings. However, that hasn’t stopped developers such as Eddie Kim, creator of Car Locator, or almost anyone else on this list, from netting big profits.

These high sales figures illustrate that Android’s app market is finally coming to fruition as a solid distribution platform, where software programmers can make good money. Within months of the opening of Apple’s App Store in the summer of 2008, a few lucky programmers quickly struck gold with hot sales of their apps.

Android has been around for about the same time, and only now are we beginning to see comparably high sales figures for Android app makers. Though Google’s app market has been slower to mature, these success stories should give programmers more incentive to make killer apps for Android-powered tablets and smartphones.

Beautiful Widgets netted its maker, LevelUp Studio, more than $934,000. Halfbrick Studios (maker of Fruit Ninja) has netted more than $242,000 after porting its iOS favorite to Android.

Other big winners, thanks to pop-up advertising, include Rovio, for (what else?) Angry Birds, and Arron La for Advanced Task Manager.

Spacetime Studios‘ Pocket Legends, a 3-D MMO, has managed to garner profits of $8,000 per day from in-app payments, making it a shoo-in for six-figure earnings in the not-too-distant future.

“The Android platform has seen phenomenal growth, and it’s great that new avenues for app distribution are opening up,” Rovio CEO Mikael Hed said in a recent news release.

The addition of new marketplaces like Amazon’s App Store is proof, showing that Google’s OS has the potential to be just as lucrative as Apple’s, and companies want to get in on the action.

Spacetime’s Gattis summed up the Android app scene pretty nicely: “In some ways, it’s kind of like the wild, wild West,” he said, “but that’s where the Gold Rush people made their claim.”

Image: Bad Piggy Bank (Rovio)

Meet The Android App Millionaires [Electricpig via Android Guys]

As if the world needed one more association to keep up with, CTIA Wireless 2011 is delivering just that. The Femto Forum, which has done an excellent job remaining undercover of late, has just published an “industry-wide agreed set of API specifications” that will enable “advanced mobile applications based on femtocell technology.” Truth be told, the first apps based on the specifications have already been built, and their currently available to the femtocell community. The specifications are for network-based APIs, which will purportedly “allow operators to drive the development of femtocell-powered open access, enterprise and consumer applications,” and it’ll also provide awareness information in order to allow developers the opportunity to incorporate enhanced presence, context and location-sensitive features into new and existing apps. Granted, we’d care a lot more about those location-based apps if we could drag our 3G MicroCell to Panama to use it to make free calls whilst on vacation, but hey — maybe that’s the next logical step. Not that we’re much for passing along hints or anything.

Femto Forum publishes API specification for femtocell apps, places focus on ‘awareness information’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Amazon Appstore is the exclusive source (for now) for Angry Birds Rio, which is a free download on Tuesday only.

Amazon opened the doors Tuesday on its own marketplace for Android apps.

As reported by Wired.com last week, Amazon’s new store, the Amazon Appstore for Android, appears to be a more-carefully curated, selective virtual storefront than the Google’s default Android Market. It features the new Angry Birds Rio game, as well as many other popular Android apps, including Twitter, Fruit Ninja, Shazam, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and others. The Amazon Appstore has 3,800 apps, according to reports.

While most of these apps (with the exception of Angry Birds Rio, which is an Amazon exclusive for now) are also available through Google’s Android Market, Amazon’s sales pitch to customers appears to be trust and ease of use. For developers, it’s access to Amazon’s vast customer base.

“The Android platform’s openness provides a great opportunity to reach new customers,” said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, in a statement provided by Amazon.

The Google Android Market is primarily accessible through Android phones, which makes comparison shopping difficult, hampers the ability to read many reviews and slows down search to the speed at which you can type on your phone’s keyboard. (Google recently added a web version of its store.) In addition, the Android Market has been frequently criticized for the low quality of and even security risks posed by some apps, a probably inevitable side effect of Google’s rather open policies. However, it contains over 200,000 apps, a far wider selection than any mobile app store save Apple’s.

With the Amazon Appstore, by contrast, apps are easier to browse and appear to be more carefully vetted by Amazon. Customers can browse Android apps through Amazon’s familiar web interface, which makes it easy to see customer ratings and reviews, look at screenshots, read details on the app and see related apps.

In addition, Amazon says it will provide the ability to “test-drive” apps in the web browser, through a simulated Android phone. We were not able to find this feature on any apps in the store, however.

To purchase apps, customers must install an Amazon Appstore app on their Android phones, which requires Android 1.6 or higher.

One problem for Amazon is that its store does not work with AT&T phones, although Amazon says AT&T is working on a solution. AT&T Android devices are currently configured to install apps from the Android Market only. There are workarounds, but they require a bit of comfort with using the command line.

AT&T told Wired.com that it plans to support third-party app stores, including the Amazon Appstore, on Android phones soon.

“We’re working to give our Android customers access to third party application stores,” an AT&T spokesman said. “This requires updates to our systems and finalizing arrangements with Amazon.  We we will share more info with our customers in the near future.”

Apple Sues

Another obstacle Amazon will face is a lawsuit Apple filed March 18, which claims that Amazon is improperly using the term “App Store,” which Apple says it has trademarked.

In addition to its store’s ease of use, Amazon’s biggest advantage may simply be the option to pay for apps through Amazon.com, which is available in more countries than Google Checkout and has been around more than a decade longer than Google’s payment system.

Once installed and connected with your Amazon account, you have the option of shopping through the Appstore app or on the Amazon.com website. However, you need to use Amazon’s app to actually download and install your new apps (they cannot be “pushed” to your device).

In addition, the Amazon website displays information about each app’s compatibility with your phones, since it knows what kind of hardware you have.