Hasta La Gadget!

Peruse the Android Market this morrow and you might come across a hot new addition from the folks at DoubleTwist. That’s right, the iTunes-aping desktop sync manager has gone native on the Android platform and early feedback on its media player implementation has been positive. The free music and video player app does that whole seamless thing quite well, apparently, interfacing directly with your Windows or Mac computerino and porting over relevant playlists, ratings and media. A widget and other features are coming soon, though you’ll likely have to pay for them, given the “free for a limited time” note on the download page. Better get it while the gettin’s good.

DoubleTwist adds some polish to Android with new media player app originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 05:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure sure, Froyo is great and all, but Google just blew our minds with two previews of upcoming Android features at I/O: OTA application installation and remote music streaming. OTA installation is just as simple as you’d expect — after browsing to an app on your desktop, you can push it to your phone and install it with just a single click, all done over the air. Interestingly, Google also showed music being purchased and transferred from Android Marketplace in the same way, which could indicate a deeper push towards music integration, or just be a nice demo. Either way, it’s pretty slick stuff — the fewer wires we have to carry, the better.

The remote music streaming is a little crazier: Google bought a company called Simplify Media, which makes a bit of desktop software that can stream all your music directly from iTunes to your phone. The demo was quite slick — you just open the app and push “all,” and all your music is instantly available. Whether or not this’ll work over 3G or be limited to the local network is still up in the air, but we’re dying to try it out.

Google adding over-the-air app installation and iTunes streaming to Android originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 May 2010 12:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has never been too inclined to give the world the straight dope on total app counts in the Android Market, but other companies — notably AndroLib — have been happy to try to pick up the slack. The app tracking site now reports a grand total of 50,031 approved binaries as of this writing, marking a pretty magical milestone in light of the Market’s humble beginnings as a free-only cache of a handful of apps for the G1. To be fair, AndroLib is aggregating across all of the Market’s regional sites — you won’t find 50,000 apps in any one Market alone — but it’s undoubtedly a solid sign for the platform. Now we just need a little Froyo to go with that, right?

Android Market clears the 50,000 app mark, says AndroLib originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The latest version of doubleTwist for the Mac (1.0b1b to be precise, available now) adds a whole new Android Market element to the application. Much akin to the iTunes Store for apps, doubleTwist lets you browse Android apps in a beautified, desktop interface, but the “twist” is that you can’t actually download and sync apps with your phone. Instead, the Android Market browser presents QR codes for scanning with your Android phone and directly downloading the apps on the handset like you do already. Sure, desktop app downloads, backup, and syncing would certainly be better, but this is a nice start at least. D-Twist (as we like to call it) is also getting audio playback on the Mac, as well as podcast search and playback, with podcast subscription and syncing coming next (it’s already on Windows). Meanwhile, Windows users will have to wait until the next major version for Android Market. Not to worry, you can do the exact same sort of app browsing at apps.doubletwist.com on any plain old browser. You can even check out the Engadget app right here.

Update: We’re trying to play around a bit with the app, but at the moment the search functionality is broken and most of the QR codes are handing us bad URLs for apps. Hang tight! Every once in a while we see a blip of non-brokenness, but we’re guessing there are some server hiccups at the moment holding us back from Android Market enlightenment.

New doubleTwist for Mac adds built-in Android Market functionality originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We had a couple people at CTIA last week — people whose words carry weight — tell us off the record that the next major version of Android would take big strides toward stopping the ugly trend toward severe fragmentation that has plagued the platform for much of this and last year. You know, the kind of fragmentation that has already left users running not one, not two, not three, but four distinct versions of the little green guy (1.5, 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1) depending on a seemingly arbitrary formula of hardware, carrier, region, software customization, and manufacturers’ ability to push updates in a timely fashion. Put simply, Google’s been iterating the core far faster than most of its partners have been able to keep up.

Thing is, in light of our CTIA conversations, we didn’t have an idea of how Google planned on fixing this — until now. We’ve been given reason to believe that the company will start by decoupling many of Android’s standard applications and components from the platform’s core and making them downloadable and updatable through the Market, much the same as they’ve already done with Maps. In all likelihood, this process will take place over two major Android versions, starting with Froyo and continuing through Gingerbread. Notice that we said apps and components, meaning that some core elements of Android — input methods, for instance — should get this treatment. This way, just because Google rolls out an awesome new browser doesn’t mean you need to wait for HTC, Samsung, or whomever made your phone to roll it into a firmware update, and for your carrier to approve it — almost all of the juicy user-facing stuff will happen through the Market.

The second part of this doubled-edged attack on platform fragmentation comes from a simple reality: we’re hearing that Google may be nearing the end of its breakneck development pace on Android’s core and shifting attention to apps and features. By the time we get to Froyo, the underlying platform — and the API that devs need to target — will be reaching legitimate maturity for the first time, which means we should have far fewer tasty treat-themed code names to worry about over the course of an average year. We like awesome new software as much as the next guy, but Google’s been moving so fast lately that they’ve created a near constant culture of obsolescence anxiety among the hardcore user base — and in turn, that leads to paralysis at the sales counter.

How much of this strategy actually materializes — and how effective it is at changing the direction of the platform at large — remains to be seen, but it sounds like a promising turn of events. Considering it’s been a solid five months since the Eclair SDK premiered, that’s an eternity in Google years; time to shake things up a bit, we reckon.

Exclusive: Android Froyo to take a serious shot at stemming platform fragmentation originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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