Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been one week since Google pulled the PSX4Droid emulator from the Android Market without warning, and today its lead developer has decided to take a stand — ZodTTD’s made a new version of the app free of charge, and is hosting it at his personal website as a downloadable APK. He now claims that not only did Google pull his app, the company has frozen his developer accounts, effectively restricting his ability to publish to (and profit from) the Android Market until this gets sorted out. We can’t confirm his story at this point — and we hear things may not be quite as cut-and-dried as he claims — but we can tell you that if you happen to have a legally-obtained PlayStation BIOS and ROMs sitting around, you’re only a few clicks away from being able to use them on your Android phone. Not a bad deal, eh?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

ZodTTD makes PSX4Droid 3.0 free, claims Google booted him from Android Market originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the right Arduino board, an R/C race car, a couple paperclips and the MacGyver spirit, we imagine most anyone can hack together a creative remote control these days… but how many can open-source an HTML5 web app that’ll do the deed from any tablet, phone or PC? Gaurav Manek crafted just such a thing, and he’ll demonstrate it for you on an Apple iPad in the video immediately above. What’s more, he’s also got a Kinect hack that uses Microsoft depth camera (with Code Laboratories’ NUI SDK) to control the very same with the wave of a well-placed hand — we’re already envisioning fisticuffs should he and a lab partner try for some head-to-head racing action. That said, you don’t need to wait for an illustrious creator to have all the fun. Why not download his source code at our links below and give it a go yourself?

Man steers R/C car with his hands, not to mention an HTML5-based web app (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Itching to put some sweet, crunchy AOSP Honeycomb on your hardware of choice? You might have quite a wait, as BusinessWeek reports that Google will not release the Android 3.0 source code in the near future, and we just received confirmation of the same. Google forwarded us the following statement, which pretty much says it all:

Android 3.0, Honeycomb, was designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes and improves on Android favorites such as widgets, multi-tasking, browsing, notifications and customization. While we’re excited to offer these new features to Android tablets, we have more work to do before we can deliver them to other device types including phones. Until then, we’ve decided not to release Honeycomb to open source. We’re committed to providing Android as an open platform across many device types and will publish the source as soon as it’s ready.

It’s fairly clear that the company’s motivation here is the same as it’s been all along — Google wants to restrict Android to the devices it was designed for. Though the company long insisted that earlier versions of Android were not for tablets, manufacturers quickly adapted the source code to slates anyhow, and we can imagine the company wasn’t thrilled some of the middling results. At that time, Google’s only weapon was to deny access to Gmail, Maps and Android Market, which it did liberally (with a few exceptions to the rule) but this time it sounds like it’s simply withholding the “entirely for tablet” source code instead of sending cease-and-desist letters out. Another explanation, however, could just be that Honeycomb’s not ready for primetime without some OEM help — last we checked, smartphone support was a far cry from final, and even the finished Motorola Xoom still has a few software kinks to work out. Here’s hoping a nice cold bowl of Ice Cream will smooth things over with the open source community before long.

Google keeping Honeycomb source code on ice, says it’s not ready for other devices originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What with all the excitement about Sony’s quad-core handheld and Nintendo’s autostereoscopic screen, we have to say, we nearly forgot about the open-source Pandora handheld slowly but assuredly shipping from the UK. Well, we’ve got some bittersweet news to share, and here it goes: you can now purchase a Pandora for $500, and have it ship within a week. What’s bitter about that? Because normally you pay $350 and get put on the pre-order waiting list. That extra $150 sounds like quite the surcharge, but it’s an option if you simply can’t wait for your number to come up, and OpenPandora chief Craig Rothwell tweets that some portion of those monies will help support the project. Still, those extra units have to come from somewhere, and if you’ve been standing in line for months, we imagine you won’t happy to hear that some rich kid can just swoop in and buy your Pandora out from under you without a care in the world.

OpenPandora begins ‘private’ sales, fast-track your open-source gaming handheld for an extra $150 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looks like VLC’s role as champion of open-source legal rights is no more — rather than lawyer up, Apple’s taken the easy way out, and simply removed the VLC media player from the App Store. Rémi Denis-Courmont — the VideoLAN developer who originally sued to have it removed — reports that an Apple attorney informed him that the company had complied with his takedown request, and pulled the app accordingly, which likely puts the kibosh on other potential VLC ports as well. If you think about it, the open-source community may have just planted the first brick in a walled garden of its own.

Apple pulls VLC from the iTunes store originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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