Cell Bytes

Samsung’s back at it in London. First, you guys got the chance to become “Mobilers” and got to keep a free Galaxy S just by walking around and using it. Now, Samsung’s setting up shop to hand people some Samsung Galaxy Tabs to do the same. You don’t get the added cherry on top of keeping it this time, though, as they want their merchandise back after 48-hours. I still wouldn’t give up a chance to walk around with one of the hottest devices of the upcoming holiday season. (Let’s not think about the price here, folks.)

The Promotion starts in 4 days – that’s October 18th – and you can find it at a London tube station on every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each week. Those stations would be Liverpool Street, Balham, Highbury, and Islington or Ealing Broadway. I recommend you guys wake up early because you might have some nasty competition. Read on for the full details.

SAMSUNG INVITES COMMUTERS TO ‘TUBE TEST’ THE GALAXY TAB

Samsung’s tablet device available for 48 hour loans before it hits the shops

London, UK, October 14th, 2010 – Samsung is inviting selected members of the public to be the first in the UK to get their hands on its hotly anticipated Galaxy Tab, ahead of the UK launch on 1st November. Ideal for commuters, lucky Londoners will be invited to ‘tube-test’ the Samsung Galaxy Tab before it hits the shops so they can experience how it could transform their daily journey to work. The perfectly portable device is small enough to fit into a suit pocket or handbag so it doesn’t weigh you down and can be used one-handed, great for those mornings when you can’t get a seat. Add to that its incredible entertainment and communication and the daily commute will never be the same again. Just make sure you don’t miss your stop!

From Monday 18th October 2010, a limited number of Galaxy Tabs will be available for loan over a two-week period from one of four London tube stations: Liverpool Street, Balham, Highbury & Islington or Ealing Broadway. Each device will be lent for 48 hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week. People wanting to get involved, should apply by sending an email to galaxytab@tubetest.co.uk or speak to a member of the Galaxy Tab team outside one of the four tube stations.

The Galaxy Tab offers a world of possibilities, and Samsung wants to encourage the ‘tube-testers’ to try something new and escape the daily grind. Download or stream films and TV to watch on its TFT-LCD screen, edit the pictures you have never got round to looking at or use the Readers Hub to read books or magazines – perhaps try a different newspaper by getting it delivered daily directly to the Galaxy Tab?

Whether you want to read a newspaper, a magazine or book; check your emails; surf the web or play a game on the way to work, the 7 inch Galaxy Tab offers it all (Android 2.2 and Adobe Flash Player 10.1). It’s the perfect travelling companion, keeping you entertained on the tube or bus and even helping you find your way when you arrive using Google Maps.

It’s not all about entertainment, the Galaxy Tab is practical too and if you’re keen to get your work started early, you can use the Galaxy Tab to share and edit documents.

Travelling in a taxi or waiting on a station platform and need to contact someone? The Galaxy Tab is your perfect partner a you can contact friends or colleagues via voice and video calling, e-mail, instant messaging, SMS/MMS and access to all your favourite social networks.

Simon Stanford, Managing Director, Mobile, Samsung UK and Ireland said: “The portability of the Samsung Galaxy Tab is one of its key features – you can literally fit it in your pocket or your handbag so it’s great for people who spend time commuting to and from work each day. At Samsung we thought what better way to showcase this than to give Londoners the opportunity to test the Galaxy Tab for themselves before they can buy them in the shops. We’re keen to hear what they have to say.”

The Samsung Galaxy Tab will be available in the UK from 1st November across all major networks, key high street and out of town electrical retailers and online such as Carphone Warehouse, Dixons Store Group and T-Mobile.

Registration opens from 8am Friday 15th October.

For more information please visit www.samsung.com/uk/Galaxytab.

Opera has just announced that it’ll release Opera Mobile for Android phones in a month. The announcement was made during the Up North Web event and we learn that the browser will be supported on all Android versions and its main new features will be Hardware Acceleration and Pinch to zoom.

Hardware acceleration allows Opera Mobile to work faster, with enhancements in the UI department as well. This technology takes full advantage of your handset’s hardware also triggering features like full pinch to zoom for any site on the web. Interaction in the browser will also become more fluid.

Right now, the current version of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini only support two levels of zoom, so pinch to zoom is a welcome addition to the browser’s features. You’ll be able to reach a per character level thanks to this type of zooming in. Expect Opera Mobile for Android to hit Android Market and availability from m.opera.com in a month!

Browser preferences are a very personal thing and many people tend to be pretty die-hard about their browser of choice. For Opera users with Android devices, this has been rather frustrating. The company announced the beta of their Opera Mini for Android browser back in March, and updated the app in July, but still lacked many features of standard Android browsers like pinch to zoom. Not anymore.

At Up North Web, the company announced they were hard at work on Opera for Android and would launch the browser within a month.

The release comes with 3 main improvements:

• A new name: Opera for Android sounds a lot better than Opera Mini 5.x if you ask me
• Pinch to zoom: previously there were only two levels of touch and zoom in/out
• Hardware acceleration: essentially allows Opera to run at “lightning speed” so they’ve improved performance

You can’t quite download Opera Mobile for Android yet, but they assure us that it will be available “within a month”, so mark November 14th on your calendar and if you haven’t heard anything by then, let the inevitable complaint storm begin.

Grooveshark has quickly become one of the most popular streaming music services in the Android market, and yesterday they released a big update in the Android market to appease their customers. Alongside a bunch of bug fixes (those are always welcomed), we’ve been treated to a host of new features that should win over a lot of new customers (and keep existing ones happy.) Here’s the full list of changes:

Subscribed playlists – You can listen not only to playlists you’ve made, but ones you’ve Favorited while using Grooveshark.
Genre Radio – If you *really* don’t know what to listen to, we’ve added a bunch of Radio stations created by genre. Pick one and go.
User stations – You can save a Radio session as a playlist and come back to it.
Repeat Options – Repeat a single song, or an entire queue.
Queue is remembered across app restarts – The songs in your queue will remain there, even if you restart your phone/app.
Last.fm scrobbling support. I don’t think I have to explain this one to you fans out there.
Bluetooth support for play, pause, next and previous song controls.
Bugs We Fixed:
Playlists will now sync!

Wifi-only songs are now playable over cellular networks, if you like.
Using Shuffle won’t cause the app to crash anymore!
Fewer “Lost connection to Grooveshark” messages, and significantly saved battery.
QueueService (the player code) now manages its life-cycle properly, and shuts down when not in use.
Removed the Quit button—it’s not needed anymore.
 The app frees background resources when a the last song queued plays, or the current song is paused.
 Quitting the app now happens when the phone’s home button or back button are pressed enough.
Now Playing didn’t always clear when the app wasn’t in use; this is fixed.
After a force close, sometimes songs wouldn’t play and the “Unknown
Media Player” error was displayed; this has been fixed.
*
For some Android phones, music would stop playing when the app went into the background; this has been fixed.
Skipping between songs frequently would eventually cause the app to hang and force close.
 Not anymore!
After favoriting or unfavoriting a song in Now Playing, the song’s state was not updated in any widgets—and vice versa. This has been fixed.
After an extended period of no use, pressing play from widgets 
wouldn’t start the last song; this has been fixed.

Offline Song Fixes
Now stops and starts when needed which saves battery.
It prevents the phone from sleeping while any downloads are queued or active—so they won’t fail.
Songs being downloaded to Offline Songs during a connectivity transition (e.g. 3g to wifi) will seamlessly download the song.

Sounds like they’ve been quite the busy studio. Scan or touch (on your Android browser) the QR code below to get started, or just search “Grooveshark” in the Android market.

Best Buy’s getting even more white phones and the Dell Streak soon, it seems. A new leak from AC shows that the Samsung Fascinate on Verizon and the Xperia X10 on AT&T will be getting makeovers for a re-release exclusively for Best Buy. For the Fascinate, the entire back of the phone will be white, while the front bezel of the Xperia X10 will be white as well (I can’t imagine that the back wouldn’t match up.) The Dell Streak isn’t getting that same makeover, but this will mark the first time it’s been available at a third-party retailer here in the states.

All of these phones will be available October 24th and Best Buy has already begun taking pre-orders for the devices. Throw $50 down and your name will be on the list for one of these in a week and a half.

Samsung’s been working around the clock trying to get the upgrade to Android 2.2 ready for their flagship line – the Samsung Galaxy S series of phones – and it looks like a release may be impending. Today, they’ve released the source code for the Samsung Galaxy S GT-i9000 (also known as the international Galaxy S.) This doesn’t mean an update is right around the corner – especially for those of us here in the states – but it does mean we’re damn close. I imagine the source for all of the other versions of the phone won’t be too far behind as they’re as similar as similar can be. We’re sure XDA and SDX folks have already gotten their hands on this so if you’re the rooting and ROM flashing type of user, then I’d keep close eye on those scenes from here on out.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Verizon and Amazon today announce that Amazon’s Kindle app for Android will come preloaded on all of Verizon’s future Android handsets. I haven’t taken a good look at the application myself (I’m not a big fan of digital books.) but Amazon’s ridiculously extensive catalog of titles available should please the eBook fan who isn’t too big on Amazon’s actual Kindle eReader. If you aren’t a fan of this being on your device, you’ll probably have to deal with it as I couldn’t get it to uninstall on the Samsung Fascinate (unless you root your device and remove the .apk yourself, of course.) Press details sit below.

Verizon Wireless Brings Kindle Experience to Android Smartphones and Other Devices

Kindle for Android Comes Ready to Go on DROID™ 2 by Motorola, DROID X by Motorola and the Samsung Fascinate™

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and SEATTLE, Oct. 13 — Verizon Wireless and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) today announced that the Kindle reading experience is now easily found on many Android devices running on the nation’s most reliable wireless network and will be available on more devices in the future.
Kindle for Android lets customers discover and read more than 700,000 books in the Kindle Store and is easy to find on the application screen of the new Samsung Fascinate™ – which boasts a brilliant 4-inch Super AMOLED touch screen display – as well as on DROID™ 2 by Motorola and DROID X by Motorola.
Kindle for Android allows customers to browse, download and start reading their favorite books directly from their Android phone. Features of the Kindle app include:
•Buy Once, Read Everywhere – Amazon’s Whispersync technology syncs your bookmark across devices, so you can pick up where you left off.
•With Kindle Worry-Free Archive, books purchased from the Kindle Store are automatically backed up online, where they can be re-downloaded at any time.
•The largest selection of books people want to read. The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 700,000 books, including New Releases and 107 of 111 New York Times Bestsellers. Over 575,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 80 New York Times Bestsellers.
“We’re very excited to bring Kindle for Android directly to Verizon Wireless customers,” said Jennifer Byrne, executive director, business development and partnerships for Verizon Wireless. “Our smartphones come with great screens that make buying and reading books simple and easy, and Amazon’s commitment to reading and offering a seamless customer experience is directly in line with what our customers want.”
“Customers are already telling us they love Kindle for Android, and we think they are going to be excited to get their Verizon Wireless phones and other devices preloaded with the Kindle app,” said Dave Limp, vice president, Kindle. “We are thrilled to be working with such an innovative company as Verizon Wireless and are excited to have Kindle for Android on these three phones and on other devices down the road.”
Customers can also find the app by searching for “Kindle” in Android Market™. For more information about the free Kindle app, go to www.amazon.com/kindleapps. For more information about Verizon Wireless, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.

We know you love you some Android, and the mobile OS has become pretty darn dominant over the past three years, but it’s no secret that Google has some other tricks up their sleeve besides Search Engines and Androids. While Chrome Browser hasn’t taken off in terms of adoption and market share like the search giant had hoped, it IS one of the primary options of an oligopoly driven market. And if you can remember, it wasn’t too long ago that we were talking about Chrome neck-and-neck with Android, wondering if one of them would swallow the other one in the long run.

This is a friendly reminder that while Android seems to have taken over mother earth recently, Chrome could be a dark horse this holiday season. Last night we saw the launch of Sony Internet TV, essentially an iteration of Google TV, featuring Android 2.1 and eventually featuring Android Market. But Google TV is also pumped full of Chrome juice, something that you can’t really miss when searching your Google TV (Omnibar FTW).

I’ve been surprised at the lack of excitement for Google TV in the Android universe but I think the phans will come around once the product is in the streets. And when Android Market lands on the units – watch out. But while Android and Chrome combined to form their Google TV love child, it doesn’t say much about Google’s overall Chrome initiative.

What initiative you might ask? A little something the world forgot about called Chrome OS. To jog your memory, perhaps you should watch this video from November 19th, 2009 where they show sample products and promise Chrome OS products in one year time, including launch plans.

It’s almost a year later and Google has confirmed that Chrome OS hardware will launch before the end of the year:

In terms of Google Chrome OS schedule, we are very happy with the progress of Chrome OS and expect devices will be available later this year. We’ll have more details to share at launch.

In August, Google filed for the Speedbook Trademark, and it’s looking like Chrome OS Tablets could be included in the mix along with Netbooks. I’ve said before that the launch of the iPad will only help Android and Chrome have success on Netbooks, Tablets and other form factors. But now, as Chrome hardware waits silently and patiently in the shadow of Android, I think it’s a great time to revive the discussion about the intersection of Android Avenue and Chrome Court.

While Sergey Brin said they “will likely converge over time,” Eric Schmidt had this to offer:

In fact the Chrome OS is a different product and a different target market. One way to think about it is that Android is really targeted towards people who are phone centric… and we all understand what phone-centric means: it’s a mobile device, it has a Wi-Fi connection and you carry it. If it isn’t a phone it’s something like a phone – a tablet or something like that.

The Chrome OS is really targeted at the PC/Netbook-centric user. And that’s somebody who is at a desk, they’ve got a keyboard or something like that, they’ve got a reasonable screen and a they’ve got a good processor.

The uses are different and we don’t think the two completely overlap.

That was November 23rd, 2009 and things were a lot different then. That’s when Google still thought they could revolutionize the method of mobile phone buying. They’ve since abandoned that and more recently taken a different approach that pretty much admits defeat in terms of selling phones direct.

Android has, up until now, been mainly featured on smartphones with 4.3-inch screens or smaller. With the launch of Google TV, the biggest takeaway was that the largest screen in your house wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Google TV would make better (and awesome) use of your television… with the help of Android and Chrome together. But what about screen sizes in between? What ABOUT netbooks? What ABOUT tablets?

Android netbooks have, thus far, failed pretty miserably. Android tablets it appears, with offerings like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, could become pretty popular. It’s clear that the use-case for Chrome OS is different than that of Android, but might creating Android this and Chrome OS that further confuse consumers who are still trying to figure out what “Droid” really means? Or could Google be working on a hybrid solution for larger devices that makes use of both Android and Chrome, similar to the nature and integration of Google TV?

I don’t have all the answers, but if Google makes good on their promise to release Chrome OS products later this year we won’t have long to wait. But as we saw with the Nexus One experiment, Google isn’t too proud to admit they miscalculated and take a newer and re-calculated approach, and they should be applauded for that. Either way, until we know the bottom line, I’m asking you again one year later…

What will we see from Chrome and Chrome OS this holiday season and how will it affect Android?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is history in the making. Someone finally got internet TV right. OK, so technically Google TV got internet TV right, and the experience mirrors the Logitech Revue almost identically (more on that later), but when you package it in some beautiful Sony hardware it’s enough to make a grown man turn into a comatosed drool machine. That is what will set Sony’s offering apart from the likes of the Revue, right on down to the beautifully designed, PS3-inspired remote.

You may have already read Rob’s boyish gushing over the remote controller, and hopefully this isn’t the last time we see Google TV and PS3 associated, because a next-gen console with the Android-based service would probably be so awesome it would create a blackhole and suck the universe we know directly into it. But enough of my incessant rambling, we want demos!

So, like I said, you can see what you are getting inside the box is pretty much the same Google TV we saw hashed out from Logitech. But let’s talk a bit more about Sony’s hardware. For starters, Sony’s line of Google TV-enabled devices all feature 8GB of internal flash storage. From what we gathered, this space is reserved for apps, bookmarks, and other OS-related functions rather than media, but that doesn’t mean you can’t access stored files from a network drive. The media player lets you get your pictures, images, and videos right on a beautifully crafted HD screen.

And speaking of that screen, the Sony Internet TV will be available in four sizes: 24 inches at $599, 32 inches at $799, 40 inches at $999, and 46 inches at $1399. No monster 50+ inch set, but still a serviceable range for almost any use. Need one for a bedroom? The 24 inch and 32 inch couldn’t be better. The 40 and 46 inch sets are perfect for the living room. All but the smallest iteration feature LED backlighting bringing out the gorgeous picture on their LCD screens. And believe me, Sony didn’t cut any corners in terms of build quality and picture reproduction. Just because the focus is on the “Internet” part doesn’t mean Sony overlooked the “TV” part. These sets will rank right up there with other high-end HDTVs from the company.

But what if you just bought a new HDTV? No problem, that’s where the Blu Ray player comes in, though at $399 if you already own a PS3 or BRD player, you are probably better off grabbing the Logitech Revue to score the exact same functionality for a hundred bucks less, though I am almost tempted to justify an extra BRD player in the living room and an additional portrait of Benjamin Franklin simply to secure Sony’s remote, which will only be compatible with Sony’s devices. Still, aside from some stylish looks and the ability to play HD discs, the Blu Ray option doesn’t offer much in the way of unique features.

If I was in the market this would be my next HDTV. Hell, I might jump into the market just to pick one of these up. The 32-incher would look perfect in my room. If somehow Google TV flops I will be surprised, because the hardware and software are just too darn well-executed for this thing not to be a success. Check out a little walkthrough and hands-on below.

Keep your eyes wide open for some hot Android 3.0-related info coming next week, maybe screenshots, maybe some details about the platform’s features, as the operating system’s SDK will debut in a couple of days or so. Rumor has it that the Gingerbread SDK will drop next week, but some say the version number might as well be a mere upgrade from Froyo – Android 2.5.

Access to the latest Android SDK means we’ll find out interesting stuff like the new API calls showing the OS features and see an emulator in action for details concerning the looks of the stock Android 3.0. Since Froyo was announced on May 20th of this year and Android has a rollout cycle of 6 months, we’re getting pretty close to its release.

However, the rollout could take a while, since not all handset makers will be ready at once, so the updates could drag into 2011. The arrival of Android 3.0 means that a bunch of tablets will also pop up, since there are some nifty devices that big companies have been holding back, waiting for Gingerbread to launch.