Android : Acer's Android tablet (and its gyroscope) previewed on video

Android : Acer's Android tablet (and its gyroscope) previewed on video

While Acer wasn't willing to let us power on its forthcoming Android tablets at its press event last month, it looks like the company just doesn't have the same kind of control over its partners or employees. Three videos of what appears to be Acer's 10-inch Android tablet have popped up on YouTube, and not only is the slate powered on, but the footage provides a pretty clear look at some of Acer's custom Android apps.

The entire UI looks like it's still in a beta stage and the video itself looks like it is some sort of internal test demo -- don't forget Acer is planning to ship these with Honeycomb in April -- but the company seems to be messing around with gyroscope-based page turns and some unique zoom gestures within the photo / e-reader application. We're assuming the tablet is running Froyo as there's a quick peek at the homescreen and app drawer in the first video, but other than that we're really at a loss for details here. Hit the break for the trio of videos and to see it all for yourself. Oh, and Acer, if you send us one, we promise to go easier on the screen (see 0:12 of video three) than this lady... just sayin'!

Tags : Android : Acer's Android tablet (and its gyroscope) previewed on video, Android, Acer's Android Tablets

Android : Axioo Pico Pad 7 Inch Enters Tablet Market

Android : Axioo Pico Pad 7 Inch Enters Tablet Market

One more 7-inch tablet Indonesia is ready to hit the market next year: Axioo Pico Pad.

Not to be outdone by the national team last night by stunning gocekan ball. Toshiba, a vendor from Indonesia to the global achievement of this bewitching Android-based gadget fans with a tablet that has been labeled Google certified.

What does it mean? According to Budi Wahyu Jati (Director - Corporate Division, Toshiba), Pico Pad lets users direct access to Google's Market and is always up to date with a variety of new applications that were there.

"If [the devices] are not yet certified to Google, users simply access a web site that is provided by the vendor to download the application," said Budi told reporters on the sidelines of the launch of the Pico Pad today (30/12) in Jakarta.

In addition, devices that are powered 600MHz Qualcomm processor and 512MB RAM it has the privilege of speaking menus batik Indonesia and nuance. "It's special to offer to the user's Indonesia," said Budi. But unfortunately this batik Pico Pad by Budi Wahyu Jati will not be sold to another country with a market Toshiba, such as the ASEAN countries and Europe.


Axioo Pico Pad adopt the Android operating system version 2.2, with the default Internet connection can accommodate HSDPA. Tablets that include grades 7 inches is expected to be thrown into the market at a price of about Rp 4 million. For completeness, bundling Toshiba 16GB MicroSD type memory card on Pico Pad.

Axioo questioned the possibility of making a tablet with the Android operating system other than, "While we are still with Android roadmap," Budi said diplomatically. According to Android offers a wealth of interesting content. In fact, Toshiba has been launched to embrace local developers to contribute more to Google Market.

Meanwhile, according to David Kartono (VP Product Development & International Sales, Toshiba), the operating system that is on the rise was chosen because it saw the development of the number and enthusiasm of its users. "They say until June 2010, Android users increased 160 thousand per day," said David. This, he said sure, will drive the technology and its market.

Tags : Android : Axioo Pico Pad 7 Inch Enters Tablet Market, Android, Axioo Pico Pad

Android : 8 Alasan OS Android Kuasai Dunia

Android : 8 Alasan OS Android Kuasai Dunia

Sistem operasi Android baru saja menjungkalkan Symbian, sebagai OS mobile terpopuler di dunia. Ini adalah tonggak yang penting bagi Google dan memberikan sinyal bahwa Android memang akan mendominasi ranah ponsel sejagat.

Kira-kira, apa sebabnya Android bisa melesat dan menguasai pasar smartphone dengan cepat? Berikut ada delapan alasannya.

1. Setiap Versi Bertambah Baik

Dengan upgrade rutin yang dilakukan, setiap versi Android dijamin semakin baik performa maupun fiturnya. Versi terbaru yakni Android 3.0 atau Honeycomb menjanjikan penambahan kualitas yang signifikan.

2. Smartphone Android Memang Bagus

Kesuksesan Android tidak lepas dari smartphone pengusung OS ini, yang memiliki bermacam fitur bagus. Sebut saja Droid X, Galaxy S sampai HTC Evo memiliki banyak kelebihan sehingga konsumen tertarik membelinya.

3. Membiarkan RIM Terlena

Pada awalnya, Google seakan terkesan membiarkan BlackBerry dari RIM menguasai pasar enterprise. Penjualan Android lebih terfokus pada konsumen umum. Namun setelah sukses di pasar consumer, kini Android mulai membidik pebisnis dan makin banyak kalangan korporat memakai Android ketimbang BlackBerry.

4. Dengan Sedikit Model, Apple Tidak Dapat Melawan Android

Dengan hanya memasarkan iPhone 3GS dan iPhone 4, Apple semakin kelabakan melawan Android. Lusinan smartphone Android bukanlah lawan yang sebanding meski iPhone sebenarnya masih sangat laris.

5. Penurunan Pangsa Pasar Microsoft

Peruntungan Microsoft di ranah OS mobile kurang baik belakangan ini. Peluncuran Windows Phone 7 dinilai terlambat dan pangsa pasar mereka menurun. Hal ini memberi celah bagi Android meraih semakin banyak kue pasar smartphone.

6. Nokia Sempoyongan

Dari yang semula sangat dominan menguasai arena smartphone, Nokia kini mulai sempoyongan. Salah satu alasannya, OS Symbian yang kukuh mereka pakai dianggap ketinggalan zaman dibandingkan Android. Jadilah konsumen mulai banyak melirik OS robot hijau.

7. Dukungan Vendor Kelas Atas

Dukungan penuh vendor kelas atas amat membantu melonjakkan popularitas Android. Bahkan mungkin tanpa dukungan nama-nama seperti Samsung, Motorola dan HTC yang menyajikan ponsel berkelas, Android tidak bakal sesukses sekarang.

8. Keampuhan Merek Google

Reputasi merek Google yang hebat membuat para konsumen tidak meragukan Android. Mereka sepertinya memercayai Android akan memberikan sebuah pengalaman memakai smartphone yang bisa mereka nikmati.

Tags : Android : 8 Alasan OS Android Kuasai Dunia, Android, 8 Alasan OS Androis Kuasai Dunia

Android : Android Galaxy Mini Dibanderol Rp 1,6 Juta

Android : Android Galaxy Mini Dibanderol Rp 1,6 Juta

Telkomsel bersama Samsung meluncurkan paket bundling smartphone berbasis Android, Samsung Galaxy Mini. Paket smartphone seri S5570 yang sudah dilengkapi kartu perdana Simpati ini dibanderol seharga Rp 1.599.000.

VP Channel Management Telkomsel Gideon Edie Purnomo berharap paket Samsung Galaxy Mini Telkomsel ini bisa membuat layanan berbasis Android ini bisa dinikmati masyarakat dengan harga terjangkau.

"Ini merupakan salah satu upaya kami dalam menyediakan solusi layanan mobile lifestyle berkualitas dengan harga yang semakin terjangkau, khususnya bagi kawula muda yang selalu mengikuti tren perkembangan teknologi terbaru," ujarnya di Jakarta, Sabtu (19/2/2011).

Pasar pengguna smartphone berbasis Android di Indonesia meningkat secara signifikan dalam kurun waktu satu tahun terakhir. Pada tahun 2010, Android menempati posisi ketiga sebagai sistim operasi smartphone yang paling banyak digunakan dengan tingkat pertumbuhan pengguna lebih dari 200 kali lipat dibandingkan 2009.

Yoo-young Kim, Managing Director PT Samsung Electronics Indonesia, melihat perkembangan smartphone Android tidak hanya di kalangan profesional namun juga bagi anak muda. Anak muda dinilai sebagai pasar yang tepat karena memiliki semangat ingin mencoba pengalaman baru.

"Melalui Samsung Galaxy Mini dengan sistem operasi Android Froyo, anak muda dapat menikmati pengalaman menyenangkan dengan berbagai macam aplikasi dan social hub yang telah terintegrasi sehingga memungkinkan mereka memilih cara berhubungan dengan sahabat dan keluarga," ucapnya.

"Bersama Telkomsel, kami ingin memberikan manfaat lebih agar anak muda dapat lebih leluasa menikmati pengalaman bersama Samsung Galaxy Mini," pungkas Yoo-young Kim.

Samsung Galaxy Mini merupakan smartphone dengan desain trendi yang memanfaatkan sistem operasi Android 2.2 Froyo, didukung prosesor berkecepatan 600 MHz.

Smartphone dengan layar sentuh berukuran 3,14 inci ini menyediakan berbagai fitur, seperti memori internal 160 MB, kamera 3 megapiksel, radio FM, bluetooth, GPS, konektivitas 3G yang sudah mendukung HSDPA, serta slot microSD berkapasitas hingga 32 GB, dan Wi-Fi.

Paket Samsung Galaxy Mini Telkomsel memberikan penawaran layanan akses internet unlimited TelkomselFlash seharga Rp 50.000 perbulan yang bisa digunakan untuk browsing, email, chatting, dan social networking.

"Untuk mendapatkan paket tersebut, pelanggan cukup menghubungi *253*557# atau mengirimkan SMS, ketik ULMINI, kirim ke 3636," jelas Gideon.

Paket bundling Samsung Galaxy Mini Telkomsel ini mulai dipasarkan di lebih dari 50 gerai ponsel berlogo Samsung di Jakarta, Bandung, Medan, Pekanbaru, Padang, Palembang, Bandar Lampung, Batam, Banjarmasin, Pontianak, Balikpapan, Samarinda, Makassar, Kendari, Palu, dan Manado.

Saat berlangsungnya pameran penjualan di Plaza EX, Jakarta, 19 Februari 2011, pelajar dan mahasiswa bisa memperoleh harga spesial Rp 1.299.000, cukup dengan menunjukkan kartu pelajar atau kartu mahasiswa ketika melakukan transaksi pembelian.

Untuk mendukung kenyamanan pelanggan saat menikmati berbagai aplikasi Android dalam Samsung Galaxy Mini, Telkomsel telah menyiapkan jaringan broadband yang didukung lebih dari 37.000 Base Transceiver Station (BTS) termasuk 8.000 Node B (BTS 3G) di seluruh Indonesia.

Tags : Android : Android Galaxy Mini Dibanderol Rp 1,6 Juta, Android, Android Galaxy Mini

Android : Customizing the Action Bar

Android : Customizing the Action Bar

[This post is by Nick Butcher, an Android engineer who notices small imperfections, and they annoy him. — Tim Bray]

Since the introduction of the Action Bar design pattern, many applications have adopted it as a way to provide easy access to common actions. In Android 3.0 (or Honeycomb to its friends) this pattern has been baked in as the default navigation paradigm and extended to take advantage of the extra real-estate available on tablets. By using the Action Bar in your Honeycomb-targeted apps, you'll give your users a familiar way to interact with your application. Also, your app will be better prepared to scale across the range of Android devices that will be arriving starting in the Honeycomb era.

Just because Action Bars are familiar, doesn’t mean that they have to be identical! The following code samples and accompanying project demonstrate how to style the Action Bar to match your application’s branding. I’ll demonstrate how to take Honeycomb’s Holo.Light theme and customise it to match this blog’s colour scheme.

Icon

This step is easy; I’ll use the wonderful Android Asset Studio to create an icon in my chosen colour scheme. For extra credit, I’ll use this image as a starting point to create a more branded logo.

Navigation

Next up, the navigation section of the Action Bar operates in three different modes; I’ll tackle each of these in turn.

Standard

The Action Bar’s standard navigation mode simply displays the title of the activity. This doesn’t require any styling... next!

List

To the left, a standard list drop-down; to the right, the effect we want to achieve.

The default styling in list navigation mode has a blue colour scheme. This is evident when touching the collapsed control in both the top bar, and the selection highlight in the expanded list. We can theme this element by overriding android:actionDropDownStyle with a custom style to implement our colour scheme:

The above uses a combination of state list drawables and 9 patch images to style the collapsed spinner, the top bar of the expanded list and sets the highlight colour when picking an item.

Tabs

Here are the before-and-after shots on the tab navigation control:

The tab navigation control uses the standard blue colouring. We can apply a custom style to android:actionBarTabStyle to set our own custom drawable that uses our desired palette:

Actions

Before-and-after on the individual items in the Action Bar:

The individual action items inherit the default blue background when selected. We can customise this behaviour by overridingandroid:selectableItemBackground and setting a shape drawable with our desired colouring:

@drawable/ad_selectable_background

The overflow menu also needs some attention as when expanded it shows a blue bar at the top of the list. We can override android:popupMenuStyle and set a custom drawable (in fact the very same drawable we previously used for list navigation) for the top of the overflow menu:

Selecting items within the overflow menu also show the default selection colour. We can set our customised selection colour by overridingandroid:dropDownListViewStyle:

These changes gets us most of the way there but it’s attention to detail that makes an app. Check boxes and radio buttons within menu items in the overflow section are still using the default assets which have a blue highlight. Let’s override them to fit in with our theme:

@drawable/ad_btn_check_holo_light @drawable/ad_btn_radio_holo_light

  

Background

I’ve left the background transparent as inheriting form Holo.Light works well for our desired palette. If you’d like to customise it you easily override theandroid:background item on the android:actionBarStyle style:

Bringing it all together

Putting all of these components together we can create a custom style:

We can then apply this style to either an individual activity or to the entire application:

Note that some of the system styles that we have overridden in this example will affect much more than the Action Bar. For example overriding android:selectableItemBackground will effect many widgets which support a selectable state. This is useful for styling your entire application but be sure to test that your customisations are applied consistently throughout.

Familiar but styled

Customising the action bar is a great way to extend your application’s branding to the standard control components. With this power, as they say, comes great responsibility. When customising the user interface you must take great care to ensure that your application remains legible and navigable. In particular, watch out for highlight colours which contrast poorly with text and provide drawables for all relevant states. Explore this demo application which exercises the functionality offered by the Action Bar and demonstrates how to theme it.

Tags : Android : Customizing the Action Bar, Android, Customizing the Action

Android : PIX: Top 5 Android Honeycomb Tablets

Android : PIX: Top 5 Android Honeycomb Tablets

So you think iPad is the best thing to happen to humankind since the invention of the wheel? Take a look at this year's best Android Honeycomb tablets that might just be up your alley.

Tablets have been around for a number of years now but it is only recently that they have risen to popularity. This is largely thanks to the Apple iPad released not so long ago.
Are you a gadget/gaming wizard? Would you like to write on gadgets, gaming, the Internet, software technologies, OSs and the works for us? Send us a sample of your writing with the subject as 'I'm a tech wizard' and we will get in touch with you.

Toshiba Tablet

 The most celebrated aspect of the Toshiba is that it brings something to the table that the popular iPad 2 does not.

This includes a changeable battery, dual cameras, Flash support, as well as a number of extra data ports. It also appears to be one of the more durable devices of its type, having been made out of materials specifically resistant to the activities of daily life.
If you have been thinking of investing in your very own tablet then take a look at this year's top 5 Android Honeycomb tablets.

T-Mobile G-Slate

The T-Mobile G-Slate is one of those products that promises the world but doesn't really deliver much more than the average tablet.

On the other hand, it is one of the best in its price range. It features a slightly smaller screen display than competitors, but makes up for it in its better quality screen.

While the optional 3D camcorder was a good idea, many say it is not worth the price.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer

The IT world was wondering when Asus was going to come to the party.

After much anticipation it finally released the Eee pad transformer. Even though it is on the lower end of the price spectrum it has much to offer. It sports The Android 3 Honeycomb, a dual core processor and an entire 16GB of storage.

With the optional extras you can use your tablet for business by day, and transform it into an all-round entertainment device by night.

Acer Iconia Tab

The Iconia Tab from Acer is a pioneer in its price range, proving that you can get a device for all your needs at a fraction of the cost without compromising on quality.

As with its competitors, it is powered by the Android 3 Honeycomb and a Nvidia Tegra 2 processor.

Other great features are the 5MP camera, integrated LED flash, as well as GPS and Flash capability.

Galaxy Tab 10.1

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 was somewhat of a follow-up to the 7-inch tab which ran on 2.2 Froyo. This offering seems to be at the forefront of tablets and is giving iPad a run for its money.

It runs on Android Honeycomb 3, built to be sleek and streamlined, featuring an 8MP camera, 1280 800 resolution, and is extremely light.

These are the top 5 Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets at the moment. They are each built to suit different lifestyles anywhere from the workaholic to the gaming enthusiast. These devices are at the top of their class, so if you are looking to add a tablet to your collection then think seriously about investing in one of these.

If you are aware of any other Android Honeycomb Tablets do share it with us, via the comments section.

Tags : Android : PIX: Top 5 Android Honeycomb Tablets, Android, Androis Honeycomb Tablets