We’ve just heard directly from HTC regarding that hotly anticipated upgrade to Android 2.2: it’s happening this weekend for lucky Euroland owners of the Desire. Provided your Sense-laden 3.7-incher is not carrier-locked, you should be receiving your serving of Froyo by the end of the week, together with a new 720p video mode and iTunes sync for your music. HTC is also throwing in its App Share widget that it first introduced with the Wildfire, along with its smart Caller ID feature. Very nice, though it’s quite a shame that operator-specific versions of the update are still stuck in testing and are expected “in several weeks’ time.” Ah well, guess that’ll teach us to buy our gear unlocked.
A wordy headline, to be sure, but a pleasing one nonetheless. We came across HTC’s Chinese web portal listing the Desire as coming with Android 2.2 (with Sense!) and simply had to ping the official source for confirmation. It turns out the info up there is no mistake: all HTC Android handsets shipping to China — which includes the Wildfire and Tianyi — will do so with Froyo preloaded, cutting down on your upgrade angst at least until the Gingerbread man comes a’knocking. HTC has also reiterated that a 2.2 update for its phones already on the market will be delivered “very soon,” so if all goes well, we should be looking at a Froyo-dominated August in the land of High Tech Computers.
Some cried and some cheered when Microsoft revealed that handset manufacturers couldn’t reskin Windows Phone 7 devices wholesale. But as it turns out, at least one major OEM is still banking on software to help differentiate its phones. HTC’s Drew Bamford told Forbes that Sense UI will still appear in the company’s Windows Phone 7 creations, and believes it will live on in Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) as well. “Microsoft has taken firmer control of the core experience,” acknowledged Bamford, who added that Sense wouldn’t be fully integrated into WP7 phones, but that HTC would “augment” the Microsoft experience with as-yet-undisclosed functionality of its own. As long as it doesn’t eat up too much memory and processor time, right?
It’s been a long, ugly road, but HD2 owners and hackers alike can finally bask in the glory of an open device with top-notch hardware and specs that still give mid 2010’s best phones a run for their money. We’d already seen a stock Android 2.1-based ROM, but now we’ve got your choice of stock Android 2.2 or Android 2.1 with Sense, too — seriously, pick your poison. Though HTC clearly never intended to get this kind of Sense on the HD2, there’s something that just feels right about it, isn’t there? Follow the break for videos of both firmwares in action.
Well, this is genuinely awesome: it seems AT&T is pulling back from its ban on third-party sideloaded apps on its Android devices, because HTC has just released an Aria update that enables them (either that or HTC just went rogue here, but we highly doubt it). While that doesn’t have much practical implication for your typical smartphone user, it’s a strong sign that AT&T might be ready to take a more reasonable stance on the openness of its branded devices that would put it inline with the attitudes Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile have all taken with their Android phones so far. Additionally, the update includes “the Mobile Network sharing function,” which we take to mean a mobile hotspot app in the same vein as the one that’s shipping with Froyo — if we had to guess, it probably requires AT&T’s 2GB DataPro plan plus the tethering add-on, which would put it in line with what they’re charging on the iPhone. Onward and upward, AT&T.
Update: We got downright excited for a second there, but an HTC spokesman just called to inform us there’s been a mistake — this download is only for the desktop HTC Sync client and doesn’t actually enable anything on the phone. We’re working to get more information right now, but it sounds like the sideloading ball is still squarely in AT&T’s court.
Update 2: HTC apologizes for the confusion, saying the update description was in error — it was merely supposed to read that the Aria now works with the company’s desktop sync client. On Monday, the text will be updated to remove every last ounce of false hope. Update 3: Sideloading works after all! Read all about it.
No patience to wait until Q3 for an official Froyo build? Fret not, dear Desire owners, as udK_dev has managed to push out a near-perfect Android 2.2 port that’s working spectacularly well so far. As you’d expect, HTC’s Sense overlay is indeed baked in, and while there are still a few quirks here and there, users seem to be generally pleased with how it’s going. Better still, the camera has been upgraded to handle 720p video recording, so there’s that. Hit the source link for the how-to, but make sure you set aside a few hours first. Or maybe just one.
In a magic trick that only geeks can pull off, researchers at MIT have found a method to let users click and scroll exactly the same way they would with a computer mouse, without the device actually being there.
Cup your palm, move it around on a table and a cursor on the screen hovers. Tap on the table like you would click a real mouse, and the computer responds. It’s one step beyond cordless. It’s an invisible mouse.
The project, called “Mouseless,” uses an infrared laser beam and camera to track the movements of the palm and fingers and translate them into computer commands.
“Like many other projects in the past, including the Nintendo Power Glove and the Fingerworks iGesture Pad, this attempts to see how we can use new technology to control old technology,” says Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who hasn’t worked directly on the project. “It’s just an intermediate step to where we want to be.”
Though new user interfaces such as touchscreens and voice recognition systems have become popular, the two-button mouse still reigns among computer users. Many technology experts think the precision pointing that a cursor offers is extremely difficult to replicate through technologies such as touch and speech.
Last week Intel CTO Justin Rattner said though Intel research labs is working on new touchscreen ideas, the mouse and keyboard combination is unlikely to be replaced in everyday computing for a long time.
In the case of the Mouseless project, the infrared laser and camera are embedded in the computer. When a user cups their hand as if a physical mouse was present under their palm, the laser beam lights up the hand that is in contact with the table. The infrared camera detects this and interprets the movements.
A working prototype of the Mouseless system costs approximately $20 to build, says Pranav Mistry, who is leading the project.
Mistry is one of the star researchers in the area of creating new user experiences. He previously developed the “Sixth Sense” project, a wearable gestural interface that lets users wave their hands in front of them and interact with maps and other virtual objects — much like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
The Mouseless idea is not as big a breakthrough as Sixth Sense. Though it is fun, it is difficult to see a real-world case for getting rid of hardware while keeping interaction the same. User interfaces are going beyond the point-and-click interaction that the computer mouse demands. And mouse hardware itself is cheap, so there’s not much of a cost saving here.
Check out this fun, partly animated video to see what the Mouseless can do and how it works:
For reasons seemingly known only to Peter Chou himself, HTC has mostly steered clear of producing high-quality physical QWERTY devices running Android, despite the fact that there might be no phone manufacturer in the world more skilled at making them (let us remind you of the Touch Pro2, among many others dating back the better part of a decade). Anyhow, we caught wind last month of a possible entry in the form of the so-called “Vision,” but we didn’t have any visuals — just a user agent profile that may or may not amount to anything. Well, that seems to be changing today with a couple blurry shots out of a Croatian site that allegedly shows the goods featuring a 3.7-inch display, a 1GHz processor (Snapdragon, we assume), and Android 2.1 with Sense (the launcher looks like stock Android in this photo, but the status bar is clearly HTC custom). At a glance, it doesn’t seem to be the prettiest thing in the world — but for a form factor traditionally associated with power users and suits, this might be just the ticket.
It’s summer. It’s hot. Naturally, everyone wants to lick some frozen dessert in one form or another. Shortly after the Nexus One got its absolutely official Android 2.2 update, HTC has once again leaped out to tell us of its own Froyo offering. The Taiwanese mobile giant has informed Recombu that it’s expecting “several of our 2010 models including Desire, Legend and Wildfire” to join Google’s latest green bot party “beginning in Q3.” We went to the trouble of confirming this with HTC ourselves, and while this isn’t really much of an update from the company’s previous statement in terms of time frame, here’s hoping that at least some of its customers will get the delivery before the summer fiesta ends.
False starts aside, that promised late June Android 2.1 upgrade for the GSM version of the HTC Hero is finally here — for unlocked models, anyhow. It seems that users are being greeted with an update clocking in at nearly 80MB, and despite HTC’s own warning to the contrary, apps aren’t being wiped, so you should be able to undertake the endeavor pretty safely. Orange and T-Mobile versions of the phone apparently haven’t yet begun to see the rollout, but the wait shouldn’t be terribly long now — meanwhile, let us know how your upgrade experience goes in comments, folks.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
