Sunday, 30 January 2011

Android Community

Android Community

Notion Ink Adam touchscreen damage means Valentine’s delay for some tableteers

Posted: 30 Jan 2011 08:35 AM PST

Tough luck for a small portion of Notion Ink Adam preorder customers this weekend, with the news that they’ll have to wait until around Valentine’s day before they get their Android tablet. The company has confirmed that the accidental touchscreen damage experienced by some units during transit, coupled with the Chinese New Year holidays, means a slightly longer than expected delay before replacement parts can be arranged.

Notion Ink says just 5.31-percent of pre-order customers have been affected – everybody else got a far nicer “shipment confirmation” email instead – but as you might expect that’s led to some disappointed would-be tableteers. One has forwarded on the email he received, which you can read below.

[Thanks SAGinwalla!]

Dear xxx
Greetings from Notion Ink!

We understand that you have been eagerly waiting for the arrival of
your Adam. However, we regret to inform you that a fraction of our
touch-screens got damaged during transportation due to which your
shipment has been effected.

The Chinese New Year holidays that are in the first week of February
further add to the delay. However, our touchscreen partner, Sintek,
have agreed to work through the holidays and deliver the screens as
soon as possible. We are afraid that until we receive these
touchscreens, your device would not be ready for shipment.

The estimated date of your shipment would be 14th February 2011
(Buffer included).

In case you need any further assistance, please contact the Notion Ink
Support Team at support@notionink.com.

We thank you for your continued patience and co-operation in this
matter.
Warm Regards
Notion Ink Support Team

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Android 3.0 Honeycomb Full Preview Guide [USER FEATURES]

Posted: 30 Jan 2011 12:47 AM PST

Hello there and welcome to your full guide and preview of Google’s new Android operating system version 3.0, also called Honyecomb, also known as Android’s first tablet-centric OS. The first of two main points we’ll be going through here are is New User Features. The second of two points is covered in a second post – New Developer Features. We’re going to break it down for you in both technical terms and layman terms so everyone can have a crack at understanding what’s going on here. Shall we begin?

NEW USER FEATURES

First we’ll be going through User Features – what’s this mean? It means that this is the part anyone who DOESNT plan on getting into developing apps, games, or hacks will be seeing and using. Everyone should pay attention though, as this is the face of the future of tablets in Android, and everyone knows that the face is half of the body.

New User Interface

The folks at Android are saying they’ve designed this new UI from the ground up. They’ve optimized this system to work on devices larger than your average smartphone, the same way you design a giant poster different than you design a business card. More space, different design. In doing this, Android has introduced a new “holographic” UI design (which we’ll get into later) as well as a content-focused interaction model. This means that while smartphone versions of Android did have content on them, apps, games, this tablet is living in that world wholeheartedly. Android versions of the past, on smaller devices, devices that still have their hearts in communicating with other such devices, this Android is made to be utilized as a fuller work and play machine. A comparison can be made to a letter and a book, if you catch my meaning.

Android 3.0 claims to be refining such things as multitasking, home screen customization, widgets, and notifications. All of these items in Honeycomb have been looked at, poured over, and modified – integrated and expanded into this new 3D experience, one that will seem at first to be brand new, but will quickly feel familiar, even when you’ve got your fingers on features that are completely new. Apps written for earlier platforms should translate perfectly well to this new environment, and new apps will have the opportunity to make use of a new set of UI objects, new media capabilities, and more powerful graphics.

Action Bar — Application Control — TOP
At the top of your screen in every application, the Action Bar will give you access to contextual options, navigation, widgets, and more. This bar is of course controlled by the open app rather than the system, just adding another component for developers to take control of an use to add functionality to their apps. For example – Android supposes this feature will be used where apps otherwise used overflow dropdown menus written individually for each app – now there’s no longer a need for that.

System Bar — Global Status and Notifications — BOTTOM
At the bottom of your screen always*, apparently even while you’ve got apps open, the System Bar will be open, sending you notifications, system status, and some soft navigation buttons (back, home, menu.) *The one time this bar will be invisible is “Lights Out Mode” which is essentially a “full screen” situation for when apps and movies wish to take up the entire real-estate.

Customizable Home Screens
If you’ve never customized the way your home screens look, you’re in for a treat. Where apps such as ADW Launcher EX are used for home screen replacement now, on Honeycomb that sort of functionality will be built in. Honeycomb allows you to have five customizable home screens (that means each screen can be whatever you want it to be, where home screen replacements now only do universal changes.) Each of these five screens can have widgets and apps as normal, but also a dedicated visual layout mode, wallpapers, and more.

Lots of shadows and subtle visual cues help improve visibility while layouts of both app shortcuts and widgets are being arranged. Each individual screen also offers access to your launcher (with all of your apps) as well as a search box for universal searching of apps, media files, web, contacts, and more.

Recent Apps
A feature everyone in the world uses 100 times a day, recent applications, is available here now to help you rock and roll with speed to the apps you use most. This feature is in place to help you multitask by rapidly finding the app you need by showing you a snapshot of the actual state the app was in the last time you used it. How helpful! This feature can be found in the System Bar.

Keyboard
Of course you know the keyboard would be enhanced for this larger world – each key has been reshaped and repositioned for what the folks at Android have found to be the optimal location location and tapability, for speed, for accuracy. Furthermore, new keys have been added such as TAB to make your keyboard experience a totally awesome one. This new keyboard works together with the System Bar, the bar having touch-hold buttons that bring up menus of special characters and switch text/voice input modes.

Text Selection / Copy Paste
Not entirely new, but improved is the ability to select, copy, and paste text. Just press hold in an area you plan on copying and two selection arrows will appear. Adjust the location of these arrows, seeing the text highlight as you do so. Once you’ve got what you want selected, the Action Bar will allow you to copy, share, paste, or search with what you’ve copied (or of course paste over what you’ve copied.)

Connectivity
You’ve got a new set of options as far as connecting with Honeycomb. Connecting to Media/Photo Transfer Protocol will allow you to sync your media files with a USB-connected camera or desktop computer without the need to mount a USB mass-storage device. Someday we’ll be able to do away with cords altogether, but not this update, so says Android.

This new set of connectivity features also works with full keyboards, allowing you to connect one via USB or Bluetooth, should you have a keyboard that does such a thing. As far as Wifi goes, there’s a brand new combo scan which reduces the time you’ll be waiting to scan across bands and filters. Then there’s improved Bluetooth tethering offering you connections to more types of devices than ever before.

Standard Apps
Amongst the standard apps improved for this larger tablet environment are Browser, Camera, Gallery, Contacts, and Email.

Browser
Tabbing is now implemented on this standard browser, an excellent addition considering the fact that pressure has been put on Android to do such a thing for several cycles now. Also included is “incognito mode” which will allow you to browse the internet without the places your going being added to your browser history. History and bookmarks are now both presented and managed from a single page, making it easier to work with both.

Google is put at the forefront of your browsing experience with an easy sync with your Google Chrome bookmarks and an automatic sign-in for Google sites with a supplied account. Multitouch support is updated for working with JavaScript and plugins, and users will have a nicer time browsing websites not optimized for non-desktop use with improved zoom and viewports, overflow scrolling, and support for fixed positioning.

Camera / Gallery
The camera has been reworked for a larger screen, offering quicker access to features such as zoom, front-facing camera, focus and flash, and more. Gallery has been similarly reworked for larger screens, with a very similar look other than a slightly optimized interface.

Contacts
The app you use for collecting and viewing your contacts now works with a two-panel user interface. You’ll quickly scroll back and forth, up and down between contacts, easily organizing and creating them as usual. Improved formatting allows for international phone numbers and more user types based on country, international number, and etc. Contacts are now presented in cards making it a more familiar place to browse colleagues, friends, and family.

Wrap-Up
This is only the beginning. We can’t stress this enough. In a couple days we’ll be at the Honeycomb special event in California and we’ll be able to give you a much more full account of what’s going on this this new version of the Android OS. The stuff you see above is just the basics, just the preview. It’s going to be a whole lot bigger than this.

Also, take a peek at our post on the rest of the new features in Android 3.0 Honeycomb from the Developer side of the equation. Gain a deeper understanding of what you’re looking at from the outside by having a peek from the inside.

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Android 3.0 Honeycomb Full Preview Guide [DEVELOPER FEATURES]

Posted: 30 Jan 2011 12:47 AM PST

Hello there and welcome to your full guide and preview of Google’s new Android operating system version 3.0, also called Honyecomb, also known as Android’s first tablet-centric OS. The first of two main points we’ll be going through here are is New User Features. The second of two points is covered in a second post – New Developer Features. In this half of the introduction to the tablet OS we’re going to assume you know a bit about developing for Android already. Hope you don’t mind. Let’s take a look at what you’ll be dealing with in this fabulous new system.

NEW DEVELOPER FEATURES

Let’s have a look at what’s under the hood here, let’s take a peek at what you as a developer will be working with. You who is responsible for making the apps, taking cracks at hacks, and adding to an already amazing system with your customizations. We’ll be covering a new UI framework, 2D and 3D graphics, multicore processor architectures, rich multimedia and connectivity, enhancements for enterprise, and compatibility (for already existing apps.)

New User Interface Framework
As you may already know, Android 3.0 Honeycomb is built to work with larger devices, especially what they’re calling tablets. The new UI framework you’ll be working here is made to create tablet apps.

Activity Fragments
Beginning here in Android 3.0 Honeycomb, you’ll be able to break Activities of your apps down into subcomponents called Fragments. These Fragments, once they’re broken down, can be combined to create a greater and more rich interactive experience. For example, you’ll be able to create a pane system similar to the home screens used as desktops in the main UI of Android. With these panes you’ll be able to create an situation where users can interact with each pane independently — multi-player games, anyone?

Fragments can be added and removed, replaced and animated inside an Activity dynamically, each of them being both reusable and modular. Because Fragments are modular, they can be made to run efficiently in both large and small screen environments (this leading us to believe that this sort of functionality will be available on Android 2.4, or a similar upgrade.)

Redesigned UI Widgets
As the screens this version of Android will be used on will be bigger, so too must the widgets be redesigned to work as well as they could be. Android 3.0 offers you an upgraded set of UI widgets that you can use to add brand new spectacular bits of contents to your applications. Each of these new UI widgets are made to be used in Honeycomb’s new “holographic” UI theme. Amongst these are:
• 3D Stack (for tiny galleries, cycling through panels)
• Search Box (for searching with, silly)
• Date/Time Picker (for scheduling, countdowns)
• Number Picker (for similar such things)
• Calendar
• Popup Menu (extreme potential here)
• and More, we assume

Persistent Action Bar
At the top of the screen as often as you’d like it to be there (it can be hidden and disregarded if you’ve got no use for it,) is the Action Bar. This bar can give users quick access to widgets, status, contextual options, navigation, or whatever you’d like it to give them access to. Your application can make the Action Bar whatever you’d like it to be. Users will become familiar with the existence of the Action Bar on their home page, thusly they’ll look for it in every app they bring up.

Richer Notifications
If you thought your notifications were rich before – you were wrong. So wrong! In Honeycomb, you’ll be able to make notifications the center of the user’s experience, showing them updates in real time (as always,) but as this is expanded upon in Honeycomb, so too should you utilize it in an expanded way. A new builder class will allow you to create notifications with
• large and small icons,
• a title,
• a priority flag,
• and all the properties already available in previous Android versions. These notifications build upon the expanded set of UI Widgets that will now be available as remote Views.

Multiselect / Clipboard / Drag-and-Drop
Multiselect mode can now be used to manage collections of items in lists or grids, the ability to select multiple items for an action now a reality. You may now also utilize a system-wide Clipboard to clip, copy, and paste information in and out of applications. Through the new DragEvent framework, you can now allow users to have an easier time managing and organizing files with drag-and-drop.

High Performance 2D and 3D Graphics
Animation Framework
This new feature is a platform that includes flexible animation framework that makes it easy for you to animate the properties of UI elements like
• Views,
• Widgets,
• Fragments,
• Drawables,
• or any arbitrary object. These animations can fade between states, add movement, loop an animated image or an already moving animation, change item colors, and more.

Hardware-Accelerated 2D Graphics
In Honeycomb you’ll be working with a brand new hardware-accelerated OpenGL renderer that give your graphics operators and applications running in Android a performance boost – the acceleration you need to blast your apps off into outer space! Operations in
• Canvas,
• Paint,
• Xfermode,
• ColorFilter,
• Shader,
• and Camera are accelerated. You’ll now be able to control how this hardware acceleration is applied at every single level. You’ll be able to select where to enable it – in specific Activities, Views, or simply globally.

Renderscript 3D Graphics Engine
There’s a brand new runtime 3D framework in town, and it’s called Renderscript. This framework lends both the API for building 3D scenes and a platform-independent shader language for max performance. With Renderscript you’ll be able to accelerate both data processing and graphics operations, this being the absolute best new way to create high-performance 3D graphics on this engine for all sorts of wild stuff Google hasn’t even imagined.

Support for Multicore Processor Architectures
You didn’t think they’d leave you with a system that’d only provide support for the ancient single-core devices we’ve been using so far, did you? No way, man, check it out: Android 3.0 is the very first version of the Android OS to provide real support for running on either single or multi-core processor architectures. To add symmetric multiprocessing in these two-or-more core environments, several changes in the Dalvik VM, Bionic library have been made, as well as changes elsewhere we don’t even really know about yet. Optimizations made in this area will benefit all apps, even those that remain single-threaded.

Rich Multimedia and Connectivity
HTTP Live Streaming
Apps can take a M3U playlist URL and toss it unto the media framework for HTTP live streaming. This new media framework supports most live streaming on HTTP including adaptive bit rate.

Pluggable DRM Framework
Honeycomb gives you an extensible DRM framework that allows apps to manage protected content according to the mechanisms of DRMs that may be available on the device. For you developers, this framework API will be giving you a consistant, unified API that make it simple to manage protected content no matter the DRM engines that lie below.

Digital Media File Transfer
This new platform give you built-in support for MTP/PTP (Media Transfer Protocol/Picture Transfer Protocol) over USB, giving the users that sweet sounding ability to transfer any kind of media file between their device and a host computer. Imagine the possibilities.

Additional Connectivity Types
API support is now added for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP profiles allowing apps query Bluetooth profiles for audio state, connected devices, and etc, notifying then the user of what’s going on. Apps may also now register to receive system broadcasts of pre-defined vendor-specific AT commands. Along these same lines, apps may now take advantage of the ability of the user to work with full keyboards connected with USB or Bluetooth, as Honeycomb supports just that.

Enhancements for Enterprise
Device administration application developers may now support new types of policies such as those for
• encrypted storage,
• password expiration,
• password history,
• and password complex characters required.

Compatibility with Existing Apps
Android 3.0 Honeycomb will be fully compatible with apps developed for smaller screens and earlier versions of the Android OS. No code changes will be required for apps to work with Honeycomb’s new “holographic UI” by simply adding a single attribute to their manifest files. This attribute should take what would normally be activated by the menu key and replace it with the overflow menu in the new Action Bar. Of course, you may also take full advantage of the larger screens that’ll be working with Honeycomb most often by creating dedicated layouts and assets that work specifically with Android 3.0

Wrap-Up
Again, this is only the beginning. We’ll be at the full-blown Honeycomb special event in California this Wednesday and we’ll be blasting every little pixel we’re able to peek at straight through your screen into your eyeballs before the folks at Google even say it out loud. What you see above is bound to only be scraping the surface when it comes to what this brand new version of the Android operating system is capable of, especially since it was designed specifically with BIGGER devices in mind.

Also, take a peek at our post on the rest of the new features in Android 3.0 Honeycomb from the User side of the equation. Gain a deeper understanding of what you’re looking at from the inside by having a peek from the outside.

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Why Has Honeycomb Dissapeared?

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 06:48 PM PST

Folks across the web who didn’t act fast enough to download the preview package for Android 3.0 Honeycomb a few days ago are apt to find a surprise when they attempt to do so today – it’s gone! Where did it go? Speculation is still out to the dogs as Google’s send out no response!

We’re guessing there’s been a problem where Google’s either had to pull the file for the moment so as to stop speculation into what’ll be shared at the event coming up on Wednesday, February 2nd, but who knows? Any suggestions as to why the file’s been pulled from Google’s database? While we’re all running around with our hands up in the air, let’s also mention that we’ll be there at the Android Honeycomb event reporting to you faster than anyone else on the internet – get pumped up!

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Android 3.0 Honeycomb Running on NOOKcolor [VIDEO]

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 06:37 PM PST

Would you like to see Honeycomb running on a Motorola XOOM? Wait a second, that’s not gonna happen until we show it to you a few weeks (or a few days) down the road. Alright, how about we take a look at it on NOOKcolor instead? Sounds good! The folks at XDA Developers have you covered! Check it out.

You’ll see here below one of the worst videos EVER, but inside is 2 minutes of booting to Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Not much to see inside of course, but heck! It’s a tasty treat on a magical device.

[Via XDA Developers Forum]

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