Archive for January, 2010
Cyrket is back
Jan 31st
Cyrket.com appears to be back online after going silent last October. It appears that the site went down because Google changed the way it rate limited access to the Android Market. So, Jay Freeman (saurik), the Cyrket webmaster figured out a way As he said on his twitter feed; ”About a week ago, it finally hit me: how to run a ~reasonably~ live Cyrket without being rate limited by Google. A week of no sleep later…”
It looks like the site is fairly up to date, but the sorting and some of the previous features still aren’t quite 100% there yet.
Bravo to saurik for getting it back on-line. Keep up the good work!
50 Android Games
Jan 28th
AndroidHD has put up a cool video of 50 games for Android.
This was done as a promotion for the Game Developers Conference ® and Android Phone Promotion.
Smartphones such as Android™ devices have created many new opportunities for game developers. To help developers get started and catch the Android wave, Google™ and The Game Developers Conference are working together to provide complimentary Android phones to qualifying mobile game developers.
http://www.gdconf.com/androidphone.html
I want to go!!
Cyanogen is a god
Jan 25th
WOW! Cyanogen has done it again. I started seeing a new version of CyanogenMod ROM (version 5 beta) showing up on the list for the Nexus One. How does a 245% speed improvement sound? Holy Smoke! Almost 2.5X faster!! How’s he doing it? It looks like JIT can be turned on. JIT is the Just In Time compiler for Dalvik.
Wayback a year ago, a paper and presentation was put out about performance on Android. This was done by a team from the Berlin Technical University. The presentation was my inspiration to get Linpack for Android working. A couple of the things that they pointed out that hinder Android was that there was 1) No Just-in-Time compilation and it was 2) Optimized for small footprint, not raw performance. It looks like Cyanogen is fixing that problem. I wonder if it could help my G1?
Woodie MyTouch 3G Fender
Jan 24th
I think it is a pretty cool phone, but doesn’t the Limited Edition MyTouch 3G Fender Phone remind you of the fake Woodie Station Wagons from the late 1970’s?
Also, I think the tag line in their commercial… “It’s not only a great phone, it’s a collector’s item” is a little odd. A collector’s item?? Somehow I don’t think you’ll have too many people keeping these in their original packaging and putting them on the shelf.
Nexus One #### It!
Jan 23rd
One feature displayed when the Nexus One was rolled out was the ability to do voice recognition in any text input. The phone is supposed to listen to what you say and convert it to text. From what I’ve seen and heard, it does a fantastic job. Only one small little glitch. It filters out curse words. REALLY!? According to Reuters when a reporter was sending a message inquiring about a buddy’s whereabouts is transcribed as “Hey #### where are you?
So is Google getting politically correct? Not according to them: “We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent,” said Google.
Too bad George Carlin isn’t alive, he’d have a field day with this one.