Ad:
Tablets on Fire, Ice Cream Sandwich instructions and SD card backups
#33 | 4:25 |
Wednesday October 5, 2011
Android Weekly
Wednesday October 5, 2011
In this week's episode of Android Weekly we give you our two cents on the Amazon Fire tablet. Next we talk about how fragments can help battle fragmentation in Ice Cream Sandwich, and we wrap it up by showing you a backup option by SanDisk.
Download this episode now
Quicktime 
Windows Media 
Mobile Subscribe to this show 
iTunes Show Notes
Fire runs Android, threatens to engulf tablet market
Word of Amazon's Fire tablet lit up the tech news wires. It seems everyone was just waiting for a tablet contender to the crown. Android tablets are making some inroads (last week's episode of Android Weekly will attest to that) but the iPad is still the incumbent.
HP's TouchPad sell-off demonstrated that people will by just about any tablet if the price is right. Well, it looks like the price of Amazon's offering is, indeed, right. It's $199 for the top-end Kindle Fire. A couple of other Kindles were announced in paving the way for the big Fire reveal. However, this is Android Weekly, not eReader Weekly, so we'll leave that discussion to someone else. Suffice it to say, the base level Kindle is so inexpensive at $80 as to become a commodity item.
The Fire drops on November 15, US only. There are legal issues around Amazon Cloud outside of the good ol' U S of A. Sorry international community. Judging by the response thus far, it'd be a good idea to pre-order the Fire from Amazon if you're interested.
Here's what we know: The Fire is Wi-Fi only. It runs Android at its base, but the UI (and the app store, music syncing, video playback and so on) are all Amazon. No cameras, no GPS, 8GB of internal storage, a 7-inch screen and an as yet unspecified dual-core processor. And, all told, it looks remarkably like the BlackBerry PlayBook. Probably because it's designed by the same firm.
Ice Cream Sandwich delivers activities, fragments
We've been eagerly anticipating more news of Google's Ice Cream Sandwich. This is the upcoming newest build of Android and it brings together smartphone and tablet development, which were previously separated into Gingerbread and Honeycomb forks.
The newest Android gets a full version number jump into 4-dot. Given some of the colossal improvements we saw in the jump from the 1-dot builds and the 2-dot, it'll be an exciting release. However, developing an OS that works as well on smartphones as it does on tablets, or vice versa, is no mean feat.
Now, Android is showing would-be developers how they plan to make one OS work across multiple screen sizes from the smallest smartphones to the 10.1-inch tablets. Turns out, the answer comes in the form of fragments. We can't imagine Android is oblivious to the fact that they're trying to fix fragmentation issues with these fragments, but I digress.
Rather than shoehorning tablet apps onto the smaller smartphone screen or upscaling smartphone apps for the tablet, the user experience will change depending on the platform. If you're on a smartphone, tapping on a so-called Activity will push you to the Fragment you seek. For example an Activity like tapping an email preview in your inbox or a calendar entry, task or what have you, will push you across to the Fragment, the email body, on the next page.
In the tablet UX though, tapping the Activity updates the Fragment that, thanks to the larger screen real estate of your tab, is already present on the screen.
In short, Ice Cream Sandwich does what Android always should have done by offering a familiar user experience on both the tablet and smartphone, without sacrificing either.
SD card Android backups by SanDisk
Backing up your Android device really is as simple as logging in to your Google Account on initial setup. All your contacts, apps, emails, passwords, Wi-Fi settings and so on are backed up to your Google Account settings, assuming you left the Back up my data option in the Privacy settings menu untouched.
What about pictures, videos, downloaded files, apps data stored on your SD card or internal storage though? SanDisk has released what it believes is a valuable backup addition for your Android phone.
The Memory Zone Android app just released in beta, lets you backup anything on your phone to the cloud. Music, videos, pictures and so on. You can also set a full back up schedule where your phone will incrementally back up any and all of your files to the cloud.
Until Android comes up with its own way to back up everything on your phone, Memory Zone looks like the best backup bet we've seen.
Word of Amazon's Fire tablet lit up the tech news wires. It seems everyone was just waiting for a tablet contender to the crown. Android tablets are making some inroads (last week's episode of Android Weekly will attest to that) but the iPad is still the incumbent.
HP's TouchPad sell-off demonstrated that people will by just about any tablet if the price is right. Well, it looks like the price of Amazon's offering is, indeed, right. It's $199 for the top-end Kindle Fire. A couple of other Kindles were announced in paving the way for the big Fire reveal. However, this is Android Weekly, not eReader Weekly, so we'll leave that discussion to someone else. Suffice it to say, the base level Kindle is so inexpensive at $80 as to become a commodity item.
The Fire drops on November 15, US only. There are legal issues around Amazon Cloud outside of the good ol' U S of A. Sorry international community. Judging by the response thus far, it'd be a good idea to pre-order the Fire from Amazon if you're interested.
Here's what we know: The Fire is Wi-Fi only. It runs Android at its base, but the UI (and the app store, music syncing, video playback and so on) are all Amazon. No cameras, no GPS, 8GB of internal storage, a 7-inch screen and an as yet unspecified dual-core processor. And, all told, it looks remarkably like the BlackBerry PlayBook. Probably because it's designed by the same firm.
Ice Cream Sandwich delivers activities, fragments
We've been eagerly anticipating more news of Google's Ice Cream Sandwich. This is the upcoming newest build of Android and it brings together smartphone and tablet development, which were previously separated into Gingerbread and Honeycomb forks.
The newest Android gets a full version number jump into 4-dot. Given some of the colossal improvements we saw in the jump from the 1-dot builds and the 2-dot, it'll be an exciting release. However, developing an OS that works as well on smartphones as it does on tablets, or vice versa, is no mean feat.
Now, Android is showing would-be developers how they plan to make one OS work across multiple screen sizes from the smallest smartphones to the 10.1-inch tablets. Turns out, the answer comes in the form of fragments. We can't imagine Android is oblivious to the fact that they're trying to fix fragmentation issues with these fragments, but I digress.
Rather than shoehorning tablet apps onto the smaller smartphone screen or upscaling smartphone apps for the tablet, the user experience will change depending on the platform. If you're on a smartphone, tapping on a so-called Activity will push you to the Fragment you seek. For example an Activity like tapping an email preview in your inbox or a calendar entry, task or what have you, will push you across to the Fragment, the email body, on the next page.
In the tablet UX though, tapping the Activity updates the Fragment that, thanks to the larger screen real estate of your tab, is already present on the screen.
In short, Ice Cream Sandwich does what Android always should have done by offering a familiar user experience on both the tablet and smartphone, without sacrificing either.
SD card Android backups by SanDisk
Backing up your Android device really is as simple as logging in to your Google Account on initial setup. All your contacts, apps, emails, passwords, Wi-Fi settings and so on are backed up to your Google Account settings, assuming you left the Back up my data option in the Privacy settings menu untouched.
What about pictures, videos, downloaded files, apps data stored on your SD card or internal storage though? SanDisk has released what it believes is a valuable backup addition for your Android phone.
The Memory Zone Android app just released in beta, lets you backup anything on your phone to the cloud. Music, videos, pictures and so on. You can also set a full back up schedule where your phone will incrementally back up any and all of your files to the cloud.
Until Android comes up with its own way to back up everything on your phone, Memory Zone looks like the best backup bet we've seen.
Tagged:
activities
,Amazon
,Android
,Android news
,Android Weekly
,backup
,Fire
,Fragments
,Ice Cream Sandwich
,mobile
,news
,SanDisk
,Smartphone
,tablet
App of the day
Weibo iPhone
Sina Weibo, an informal mini-blog product, is a new expression to Web2.0.
