Cell Bytes

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.
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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.

It appears some T-Mobile G2 users have been getting an OTA update recently, but it might be a limited test, not the final software. No direct link to the OTA download was found so far and screenshots from the already updated devices show features like native tethering and WiFi calling. Pictures are available courtesy of Stryf3.

Also, for those who already rooted their devices, the expert folks of the g2root IRC channel advise against performing the OTA update right now. Some commenters on Android Police have claimed that T-Mobile’s implementation is not UMA, as it doesn’t transfer the calls between WiFi and T-Mobile towers.

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In what is the exact opposite of what wireless operators and government have stated before, the wireless trade association 4G Americas, is claiming that text messaging is NOT reliable in case of emergency. Or at least that’s the way Rethink Wireless reports it, inaccurately in my opinion with the misleading headline “SMS cannot be trusted for emergency communications”.

The wireless trade association, 4G Americas, has warned of the risks of relying on SMS or instant messaging to contact emergency services, an issue it says is increasingly urgent for safety and cellular groups.

In a white paper called ‘Texting to 911: examining the design and limitations of SMS’, the body says there is a “perception that SMS is reliable; however SMS was never designed as a reliable means for life saving critical communications”. It has similar reservations about instant messaging, MMS and other varieties of ‘texting’ such as Twitter.

… “Today, voice 911 communication is the best and most reliable method of reporting an emergency and summoning help quickly. The industry is working on developing a reliable, non-voice solution to contact emergency services that is not based on SMS.”

This solution is called Non-Voice Emergency Services (NOVES) and is being developed by various north American safety organizations plus wireless groups like 3GPP. This could be applied to other countries too.

Here is what we’ve been told over and over again until this day:

Text messaging can be a fast, efficient and reliable way to communicate in the event of an emergency, it doesn’t clog cellular lines lines as much as voice calls. And, if more wireless users rely on text messaging in crisis situations, the people who need to make voice calls the most – emergency responders and 911 callers – can get through more easily.

Here’s a more accurate press release. The bottom line? Sending data by text could be made more efficient than the actual SMS system in emergency situations so the Wireless industry is working on a new and different text messaging system.

The industry is working on developing a reliable, non-voice solution to contact emergency services that is not based on SMS.” The report notes that there are substantial limitations inherent in the design of the current Short Message Services which make it impractical to be used for emergency service.

No priority or special handling is given to SMS messages, so a potential emergency message would contend with the millions of other messages being processed at any given moment.

– SMS is not a real-time communications service. SMS messages is “store and forward” and thus may have a delayed delivery, may be delivered in a different order than the sender intended, or may be lost or discarded.

– SMS was not designed with security mechanisms.

Read more.

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