Category: Android

Sony’s “We’ll tell you later” fitness tracker sums up the problem with CES

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One of the issues that is building up around CES is the need for companies to present ‘something big and world changing’ every twelve months. Sony’s announcement of their new fitness and emotions tracker (Gizmodo) feels like a company that has had to find something to present to get the headlines – presumably because another waterproof smartphone and a return to the American smartphone market isn’t enough for the ravenous hordes prowling the show floor for something shiny and ‘new’. The device and associated smartphone app (to be released when? We’ll tell you later) will have other partners involved (we’ll tell

Reviewing The Russian Reversible Smartphone

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With an LCD screen on one side, and an e-Ink screen on the opposite side, Yota’s prototype smartphone was one of the big winners of CES 2013. Now, a year later, the handset is now on sale in a number of European territories. I’ve taken a closer look at the handset over on Forbes: The easiest way to think about the e-Ink screen implementation is that it is related but subservient to the main interactions on your smartphone. To set up one of Yota’s applications on the e-Ink screen you need to ‘send it to the back’ from the LCD screen… In my time

Start the death-watch on the Android alarm clock app Timely

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Bitspin are the team behind Timely, the popular replacement alarm clock for Android, and they’ve just been bought by Google: We’re thrilled to announce that Bitspin is joining Google, where we’ll continue to do what we love: building great products that are delightful to use. For new and existing users, Timely will continue to work as it always has. Given Google’s previous form in buy-outs, I expect Timely to be removed from the Google Play store in the first weke in April and the Bitspin team assigned to ‘other roles inside Google’.

Sony’s SmartWatch knows its limits, but needs a bit more work in software

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As wearables continue to be the big tech trend going into 2014, I’ve taken a look at Sony’s third version of a smartwatch, the snappily titled Sony SmartWatch 2: I actually found it really useful when writing, Because the email is flashed up on the screen I could simply tilt the wrist and decide if that email needed to be dealt with immediately, or if I could mentally defer it and keep writing, with almost no break in my typing. It’s also a discreet option when in meetings or in situations where you wouldn’t feel right going to your smartphone. The

The Android watch that you need to hack to run Android apps

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ArsTechnica highlights the hack on the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch so that it breaks out of the ‘walled function garden’ that Samsung placed it in, and allow it to almost any Android app. As wearables becomes the new technology battleground, the battle between ‘companion’ and ‘standalone’ will continue… just as the old one-box or two-box challenge dogged the PDA/mobile field at the turn of the century.

How can developers solve the ‘one night stand’ issue with mobile games?

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Chris Kerr at Pocket Gamer: What usually happens is, I pour a good few hours into each game – if it’s particularly good, that is – before swiftly putting it out of its misery and searching for my next victim. The fact that the App Store has so much choice – a preposterously large amount of games to sift through and discover, in fact – means that I’m never content to find a game that I enjoy and devote a substantial amount of time to it.Instead I’ll always be in search of that next hidden gem, the next game that will