If you’ve got a nagging urge to get your Android action on that big fat HDTV you just purchased, a company called Always Innovating might have something for you. It’s an HDMI dongle that is essentially a little PC all on its own. It’s got its own TI Dual Cortex-A9 OMAP 4 (1 to 1.8GHz) processor, 256MB to 1Gb of RAM, WiFi and is capable of 1080p video decoding. Oh, and it’s running Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich. The idea is that you take any ole TV, plug this into the HDMI port and off you go, running Android as if that TV was a mobile device. You can run apps, browse the Internet, watch movies and do whatever else you’d do on an Android device.
Always Innovating isn’t selling these directly to the consumer, instead opting to license them to third party vendors. They expect to see them in shelves come summer 2012, for a price somewhere between $49 and $99.
The joys of the intertubes are many and plentiful, and among these are things like Nyan Cat, the wonderful soaring cat with rainbows coming out its behind. So great is he that you can access an Easter egg in the latest version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich) that features 8-bit Android doing the Nyan Cat, sadly sans the psychedelic music. Get your Nexus out, because here’s how to see it:
To access the treat you’ll have to head into the settings, neatly accessed via the notifications bar in Ice Cream Sandwich. In the “about phone” section you’ll find the details of the Android version. Tap repeatedly on “Android version 4.0.1″ and you’ll get the 8-bit Android with an Ice Cream Sandwich body. Now, to take this to the next level, press and hold on 8-bit Android and he’ll grow, like Mario, into a super Ice Cream Sandwich Android man and start flying across the screen, with his buddies, in a huge Nyan Cat-style onslaught.
If you didn’t follow any of that, just watch the below video.
If you’ve got an iPad, you’ve no doubt found it to be a decent replacement for a netbook, in addition to being a tablet. One good use for a netbook is creating and editing text documents. I’ve yet to break down and buy any of the iWork apps for my iPad because to be honest, I’m cheap. Between OpenOffice and Google Documents, I haven’t paid for an office suite in a very long time. I figured if was patient enough, a good free one would come to the iPad eventually. My patience, it seems, has paid off.
Yesterday Google announced that they would be releasing both Android and iPad versions of their Google Documents suite sometime in the next few weeks. These versions will allow for full editing of documents, as well as the collaborative functions seen when using them on desktop operating systems. I’m definitely glad I held off.
We have to give Cloud Telecomputers credit for trying to defibrilate a heartbeat into what is clearly a platform in need of change: the desk phone. Sure, businesses still use them as they have massive infrastructures built around them and they’re not going anywhere soon, but feature-wise these machines have nothing on our smartphones. Which is why the Glass Platform looks interesting.
Featuring an 8″ touchscreen and a flavor of Android under the hood, the phone will allow you to dial directly from Outlook, dial by name, link to your cellphone with Bluetooth and answer through the deskphone, even access your mobile’s contacts and dial them through the interface. Finally, since this is a full OS you can also access applications, such as Salesforce integration, find and call taxis, connect to LinkedIn, etc.
“As you probably picked up, however, this is still a platform and not an actual product just yet, but Cloud Telecomputers does have some pretty heavy backers behind it, and it “anticipates” that the first phones should be available sometime in the first quarter of 2010 for between $599 and $699.”
The first Android smartphone to hit the market was the T-Mobile G1. The device was met with enthusiasm by many fans of open source phones, but there were some teething problems with the new OS. It took Google and T-Mobile a bit to get things sorted and other smartphone makers and mobile carriers watched to see how the G1 did before jumping into the Android waters.
Now that the kinks are mostly sorted out of the Android OS, more and more new smartphones are being announced that would run the operating system. Strategy Analytics says that in 2009 Android will be the fastest growing smartphone OS with a predicted growth rate of 900% for the year.
Related Tags: Android, HDMI, HDTV
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