Cell Bytes

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.

Turns out TweetDeck’s recent statistics were teasing more than just a few unreleased devices and the Gingerbread update to Android. The full app is now available free-of-charge in the Android Market for all to download, enjoy, and tweet away. The release appears to be for the most part the same as the most recent beta release of the app, which, by the way, you will want to uninstall before downloading the final release from the market. The new version won’t overwrite the beta and you will be dealing with the confusion of two identical applications. Grab it with the QR below.

[via DroidLife]

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.

Android 2.2 (v2.25.771.1) will begin its push to HTC Desire handsets on the UK carrier Three tomorrow, October 14th, according to the mobile provider. They are so ready to push the update that they have its launch pinned down to an exact hour (now that’s something you don’t see everyday). That time would be 9AM when you can begin to feverishly refresh your “System Updates” menu item until Froyo descends from the Android heavens unto your Desire.

[via AndroidCommunity]

The recently leaked Android 2.2 ROM for the Dell Streak has to mean the official update is coming soon right? Well if you haven’t installed it already, Froyo isn’t too far off though Dell won’t commit to anything other than their “before the end of the year” stance. The timeframe was reconfirmed, but users are promised the update will come “much sooner” than December 31st.

In fact, due to the additional resources necessary to get Froyo ready for its push to the Streak, Dell is calling off any future Android 2.1 updates and ceasing to push the update to users who have yet to receive it. That’s a bummer, especially if Android 2.2 manages to get delayed. However, it’s a small price to pay if it means we will see Froyo that much sooner.

[via StreakSmart]

Another rumor to start the early week off. According to Android Police, a source of theirs has let loose that the SDK for the update to Android Gingerbread (2.5? 3.0?) will make its way to the internet next week. I question the validity of this claim considering Google has yet to say a word about the forthcoming iteration. It’s not often that we see them (intentionally) release the SDK before formally announcing the new version. (And I do discern the difference between SDK and the source code here.)

If this does somehow turn out to be true, it doesn’t mean that a release would be on its way right afterward. It could be weeks before we hear more about it, but it’d at least give us an early look at what Google’s looking to do with Android going forward. Rumor has it that this new version will either be tailored for tablets or will be a good starting point leading into that before Honeycomb.

While source code from the AOSP would still be miles off, we’ve seen the geniuses from XDA create full-fledged ROMs based on the SDK image before. If we do end up getting an SDK release next week, expect no different (especially considering everyone’s excited to see what Google’s done UI-wise after grabbing ex-Palm user experience leader – the man directly responsible for webOS’s polish – Matias Duarte.)

Let’s just try to not get too excited before we’re actually able to confirm or deny this rumor. I guess we’ll all know by the time next Friday rolls around.

Remember the days when we were hoping for wireless N and FM radio support through the Android 2.2 update? Well, the software came, but some of the features aren’t here… Thank God for Cyanogen and his developer skills, since apparently he’s just posted this tweet hinting towards the release of some unofficial update that will bring FM radio to your Nexus One units.

Cyanogen aka Steve Kondik and kmobs have already worked on this update previously, only enabling wireless N and now the other feature is here. We’re expecting a new CyanogenMod to pop up any time, following up the 6.0.0 version.

Remember the days when we were hoping for wireless N and FM radio support through the Android 2.2 update? Well, the software came, but some of the features aren’t here… Thank God for Cyanogen and his developer skills, since apparently he’s just posted this tweet hinting towards the release of some unofficial update that will bring FM radio to your Nexus One units.

Cyanogen aka Steve Kondik and kmobs have already worked on this update previously, only enabling wireless N and now the other feature is here. We’re expecting a new CyanogenMod to pop up any time, following up the 6.0.0 version.