Hasta La Gadget!

The T-Mobile G-Slate may be fully official now, but the rest of the world needs love too, and LG’s just announced it intends to deliver said loving at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few days from now. The Optimus Pad, as this 8.9-inch tablet will be known outside the US, will offer Android Honeycomb as its OS, along with a 3D-capable 1280 x 768 display, dual-core Tegra 2 processor, a front-facing camera plus a pair of imagers on the back allowing for 3D picture-taking, 32GB of onboard storage, and a 6,400mAh battery. We should be getting to grips with the device at MWC in due course — look for it to launch alongside or shortly after its US twin hits retail in March.

LG Optimus Pad (aka G-Slate) coming to MWC 2011 with Honeycomb, Tegra 2 and 3D display originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before Angry Birds mania swept mobile device users everywhere, the masses were interested in words.

The Scrabble-like Words With Friends app, that is. An upcoming new platform release for the game may prove that while pigs may be dying in droves, words are still alive and well.

Previously exclusive to iOS mobile devices, the Scrabble-like Words is coming to the Android OS as soon as next week, says social game developer company Zynga. Playing the game on an Android device will be pretty much the same as if you played it on your iPhone, the company says.

Now, people will also be able to play in the same game across both platforms. That means no more Droid lovers feeling left out while their iOS-using pals are geeking out on triple-word scores.

Words With Friends on the iPhone/iPad platform has proven its immense popularity in the past. The app boasts 2.5 million daily active users, with over 10 million downloads since its creation. Currently supported by ads, the app is free for download from Apple’s app store. A paid version with no ads displayed will be coming soon to the Android Market and Apple app store.

But releasing the app on Android is not as simple as slapping a bunch of iOS code onto your Android phone.

“We wrote Words from the ground up with Android in mind,” Zynga Senior Engineer Jason Tomlinson told Wired.com in an interview. “For instance, because there’s so many different resolutions across Android devices, screen size compatibility is a serious issue.”

Leading a small team of three or four engineers, Tomlinson and his crew worked since October writing code in Java, the primary programming language for the Android OS. Knowing software update fragmentation across devices has been a serious issue for Android users, Tomlinson’s team made the Words app compatible with hardware running the most up to date 2.3 version (Gingerbread) all the way back to 1.6 (Donut). It will also run on Google’s yet to be released version 3.0 (Honeycomb), the version of Android optimized for tablets.

Some transitions to the Android OS environment were easier than others. “The art ports over mostly seamlessly,” Words co-founder Paul Bettner told Wired.com. “Same with the sounds we use. And the same set of servers on the back end are supporting both iOS and Android users,” Bettner said.

But when Bettner founded Newtoy Inc., the developer studio that created Words, in 2008, the whole studio was focused on iOS coding, and has continued to be until last year.

“When a relatively new platform like Android comes along,” Bettner said, “it’s difficult to find coders in the beginning. Even the most experienced Android developers in the world would have only a few months of experience doing it. Once Google’s OS started growing in popularity, the requests for an Android version of the app came flooding in. That’s when we started looking for help.”

Help came in the form of Tomlinson, who has worked with Google on Android since the open-source code’s inception. Tomlinson worked with the existing engineers to help acclimate them to coding in Java rather than the Apple-preferred language, Objective-C.

“Whichever platform an engineer begins programming for, there’s always going to be a few hurdles jumping from one to another,” Tomlinson told Wired.com. “Generally, however, the learning curve for switching from Objective-C to Java is much simpler, as Java is easier to pick up.”

With the success of the iOS version of the game in mind, Zynga is preparing its servers for “the most optimistic projections” of new user adoption rates, says Bettner.

If the game takes off for the Android OS, it’s probably not a stretch to expect other big cross-platform releases in 2011.

Photo: Words With Friends running on a Motorola Xoom tablet.
Mike Isaac/Wired.com

See Also:

• 10 Apps We’re Excited to Try on iPad Launch Day
• Wired.com Readers’ Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• Scrabble Is First Paid Game App for Kindle
• Wired’s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
• Google Removes Flash App From Android Market
• Google Launches Android Market Web Store, Improves Payment System …
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Malware Sneaks Into Android Market
• Android OS Now World’s Leading Smartphone Platform

There was plenty about yesterday’s Android event that didn’t make headlines but was worth noting. Hardware acceleration of both 2D and 3D UI elements — shown off to great effect by Google’s Hugo Barra, who managed to scroll through three lists simultaneously without inducing any lag on the Motorola Xoom — should make Honeycomb as delicious to look at as it sounds, while our personal favorite, the new tablet-specific email interface, should be part of Gmail yesterday. The email UI is built out of elements Google calls fragments, which will supposedly be easy to transition down to smartphones, so thumbs up all around. The video above also runs you through the big news of the day, namely that Android Market can now be accessed via a dedicated website and apps downloaded to your device remotely, along with the equally important (for devs) addition of in-app purchases. Finally, Cee-Lo Green pops in for a video chat session from wherever he is on the internets, and we’re all treated to an exhibition of lag-afflicted, awkward conversation. What’s not to love?

Watch Google’s Android event in full: Honeycomb on the Xoom, Android Market website, in-app purchases, and Cee-Lo Green originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 02:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is how an Android tablet should feel. Android 3.0 running on Motorola’s Xoom tablet is almost iPad-like, a legitimate threat to the only successful tablet on the market right now. It’s about damn time! More »

Fully-functional Xooms with complete (or seemingly complete) builds of Honeycomb are out in force here at Google’s event in Mountain View today, and a bunch of partners are hanging out to demonstrate the tablet apps they’ve been working on. We checked out both Monster Madness — a game that’s been on Xbox 360 and PS3 for some time — and Grocery IQ, both of which obviously bring very different experiences to the table (unless you consider grocery shopping “a game,” which some of us admittedly do).

Though we thought we detected some stuttering and lag from Monster Madness when it was demoed on stage, the experience up close and in person was much smoother — definitely 100 percent playable. We double-checked and confirmed that the tablet game is a 100 percent content port from the console games, you’re not missing anything here. It features three control modes that let you toggle between two on-screen analog sticks, one stick, and a fully accelerometer-based mode that most users probably won’t consider practical because you’ve got to tilt the screen too much. Interestingly, the developer noted that there’s a low-res mode that he actually toggled in an area of the game with a lot of water because it tends to slow down, despite the fact that it’s running on Unreal Engine and is fully optimized for multiple cores. Could it be that game studios are already pushing the limits of this hardware from day one?

Moving onto Grocery IQ, it’s basically a fancy shopping list with coupons — it’s already on both iOS and Android phones, and odds are good you already know what it is. What was really interesting, though, was that we got a full demo of “application fragment” layout switching between landscape and portrait views (the app has a two-pane view for tablets) and the process of adding and removing widgets. As with some of the first-party widgets we’ve seen, Grocery IQ seems to have done a good job making its widgets visually rich and engaging — particularly the coupon browser, which appears as a stack of rotating coupons with color graphics. See videos of both products after the break!

Continue reading Android Honeycomb / Motorola Xoom hands-ons: widgets, Grocery IQ, and Monster Madness (video)

Android Honeycomb / Motorola Xoom hands-ons: widgets, Grocery IQ, and Monster Madness (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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