Hasta La Gadget!

VMware has been chatting up seamless, sexy virtualization among multiple operating systems on a single smartphone for some time — and it’s finally getting the opportunity to deliver en masse thanks to a new partnership with LG. Targeted at the enterprise, Korea’s number two phone maker — which is going into 2011 with a big Android push — will be integrating VMware’s virtualization technology into some of its models next year, starting with Android but potentially moving to other platforms (Windows Phone 7 comes immediately to mind) if the market demands it.

You might think that being able to virtualize a second operating system on your phone doesn’t have much consumer relevance, but VMware’s got a point: with smartphones becoming more of an end-user phenomenon than ever before, it’s getting tougher for IT departments to sell employees on giving up their personal phones in favor of a secure, managed, corporate-provided alternative. With the virtualized setup, the work phone lives as an app within the personal phone — two phone numbers, two complete environments, and only the work environment can be controlled by the IT nerds. Long term, the concept would be that employees could use whatever phone their little hearts desire — companies would merely need to dump their VMware setup on top and you’ve suddenly got your work phone integrated. Follow the break for the press release and a video demo of VMware’s virtualization software (on a Nexus One, not an LG) in action.

Continue reading Work, play on a single phone: LG teams up with VMware to deploy Android handsets with virtualization

Work, play on a single phone: LG teams up with VMware to deploy Android handsets with virtualization originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been staring you in the face all this time. The Android fragmentation that not only threatens, but dooms Google’s mobile OS: the buttons are always in different places. How will we ever cope?

[Thanks, Drummertist]

Continue reading Visualized: the real Android fragmentation

Visualized: the real Android fragmentation originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 05:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You can have your doubts about when your phone maker will finally get around to delivering an Android 2.3 update (March if you’re with HTC, June if Samsung, 2017 if you’re unfortunate enough to own a Sony Ericsson), but the smartphone dev community doesn’t work that slowly. The guys who build custom ROMs just for the sheer pride of it have already begun work on delivering Gingerbread to owners of HTC’s EVO 4G, Droid Eris, and Wildfire. It’s all in the very nascent stages and warnings abound that you should only install these ROMs if you intend to contribute to the development process, but it does give us hope for a consumable new OS in the not so distant future. One thing that does look ready to be gobbled up, however, is Gingerbread’s new software keyboard — you’ll find the download and installation instructions at the Droid-Life link below, just remember to bring your rooted Android phone along.

[Thanks, Jacob]

Gingerbread ROMs start cooking for HTC EVO 4G et al; keyboard ported for rooted Androids originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 02:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You may not be able to get Android 2.3 loaded in any official capacity on your Nexus One yet — or any other phone, for that matter — but Google’s 2.3 SDK is now available, which means there’s an emulator attached, too. As with most development emulators, this one’s a stripped-down subset of the apps and settings you’d see on an actual retail device; basically, all that’s left is the bare minimum Google figures its developers are going to need to code apps. Be that as it may, we noticed a few things that stuck out:

• Overall, the UI changes are extremely subtle, and generally for the better. We prefer the new looks for the status bar, keyboard, and menus over their Froyo equivalents.
• We couldn’t get a sense of the performance improvements — the emulator is slow as molasses for us and really has zero bearing on how it’ll perform on devices.
• When you reach the end of a scrolled list, the side of the list that has reached the end glows orange briefly, presumably to make it even more obvious that you’re at the end. Even the browser does this — it’s an interesting effect that we kind of liked.
• The miserable default camera UI is exactly the same. Expect manufacturers to continue to replace this with wild abandon.
• The Gmail app isn’t included in the emulator, so fear not when you’re looking at the screen shot of the unthreaded messages — that’s the “standard” email app.
• The fingertip-sized markers for highlighting text work quite well, including in the browser. They seem to consistently disappear after a few seconds and automatically highlight and / or copy the text in between the markers; we’re not sold on whether we like that behavior.

Clearly, the jury’s out until we’ve got a Nexus S firmly planted in our hands — but in the meanwhile, check out a bunch of shots of Gingerbread doing its thing in the gallery below.

Android 2.3 Gingerbread in pictures originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 23:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s Andy Rubin brought more than just a Nexus S in his bag of goodies tonight. On stage at D: Dive Into Mobile, the man has brought with him a prototype Android tablet from Motorola. It’s got video chat, an NVIDIA processor, a “dual core 3D processor,” and… oh yeah, it runs Honeycomb, not Gingerbread. Little else is known — Rubin immediately turned his attention to a new release of Google Maps — but we wouldn’t be surprised if we were looking at Stingray, a tablet rumored for a launch on Verizon shortly. Is it seven inches? Ten? We honestly don’t know — but our gut tells us on the bigger side of the spectrum, which would line up with rumblings that the Stingray would in fact be a full ten inches diagonally. Feast your eyes on our pics below!

Updated: Video after the break!

Continue reading Motorola Android tablet prototype makes a cameo at D: Dive Into Mobile running Honeycomb

Motorola Android tablet prototype makes a cameo at D: Dive Into Mobile running Honeycomb originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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