The Evolution of Technology

Archive for October, 2011

How do you bury the competition? By taking one of their strongest services and improving on it. For the past year or so Google has been seeking its answer to the iTunes Store. We’ve heard various rumors, but we’ve also heard that Google has faced significant obstacles from the record companies. Frustrated that the record companies didn’t see things their way, Google went ahead and launched a comprehensive music locker service, Google Music. But now they’re back at the table with record companies, and it appears that they’re on the brink of something even bigger.

The rumors have started to resurface, and now we’re starting to see evidence of their reality. Phandroid links information that contains a screenshot of the Google Music landing page. Option No. 1 comes as no surprise, since it’s the service we’ve all grown to know and love. Option No. 2 confirms at least part of the rumored addition to Google Music: a music store. We don’t yet know which labels Google has on board, so we don’t know the depth of the catalog. But chances are they wouldn’t launch one without the majors on board. And so they’ll have a music selection comparable to the iTunes Store. Only, the rumors don’t stop there.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my almost-five years of tech blogging, it’s to never believe that we’ve exhausted the capabilities of any technology prematurely. There have been so many instances where it appeared that we’d found all the uses for one particular aspect, only to find out that there’s so much more we can do with it. I’m not sure anyone particularly thinks that we’ve exhausted touchscreen functions, but it does seem that we’ve reached a comfort level with them. But thanks to some work by folks at Carnegie Mellon, we might see touchscreen, and therefore smartphone, functionality take another step forward.

Their development: sensing the particular part of your finger touches the screen. Using a microphone — though not the phone’s existing internal microphone — the researchers were able to distinguish various types of taps. That is, they could tell the difference between a tap with the fingertip and with the finger pad. It could also distinguish a nail tap and a knuckle tap. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of the possibilities this creates for future app development.

It’s been a long, wild ride for Android. It’s hard to forget the Droid Does campaign that really got the platform moving in 2009. Since then Android has grown rapidly, eventually surpassing iOS’s US market share. Today we have a little treat that documents this history.

The following infographic not only examines the past of Android, but it also goes into the present and future of the platform. To be fair, it’s not exactly your typical infographic. That is, it’s large and comprehensive — almost a blog post in itself. BUt the visuals never hurt. With pull quotes from various gadget blogs, this really is a neatly designed bit of literature.

Of course, we’re restricted by column width, so make sure you click on the image to see the full-sized version.

This post originated at AndGeeks.com – home to all things Android! Also a great source of info about Android Phones.

Android’s rise to the top

AndGeeks – Android News and Reviews

Are you looking for the best provider of Geographic Information System? Well, as a business operator, you surely want to be able to maximize your business’s profitability, efficiency, safety, and compliance because those four factors are the success indicators of a business. If you are able to maximize your business profit, optimize your business efficiency, improve your business safety, and increase your business compliance, you will surely be able to have a successful business. In fact, in order to maximize those four factors, you surely need to find the best partner. As if you are running a pipeline or petroleum enterprise, you should find the best provider of Geographic Information System.

Actually, finding the best GIS provider enables you to get the most suitable solution for Pipeline integrity management. As you surely have known, receiving the most suitable solution gives you better chances to maximize your business profit. To find the best GIS provider, you surely need to do a research because there is more than one GIS provider. In your research, you have to choose a provider that has good reputation because reputation shows quality. If a company has good reputation, they usually have high quality. You should also consider choosing a GIS provider that has great software including software to create Pipeline Alignment Sheets. You certainly have known that GIS software is highly needed by your enterprise because such software can simplify various calculation and procedures. If you use the right GIS software, you will be able to run your business efficiently and effectively.

Best Android Apps for Office Document

Google Docs

The Google Docs Android App by Google Inc is a document storage database and creation tool for Android os.Therefore, in essence you can both equally create docs on the mobile phone and save them as soon as synced thosedocuments can look under the Documents section of your Google account. Access, edit and share your Google docswith all your friends directly with this best app for Android. You can also create a document, spreadsheet, or evenplease take a photo of printed text, tap Suitable for it to upload and convert to a Google document with optical character recognition. Over-all, this is a really good app for documents creation, storage, and editing.

Documents To Go

The best android apps to see Microsoft word & Excel files and docs. With this helpful business application you could doall the things you commonly can easily with Microsoft Office, over your android smartphone. If you are a typical user of MS office and are looking for more mobility using office, than we highly recommend you think about acquiring thefull version of this good program. Features such as creating and editing are for paid-for full version unless they already came unlocked with your gadget.

Best Android Apps for PDF Reader

E-Book Reader

Moon+ Reader
Read books in various types such as ePub, txt, html, chm, fb2, umd or zip, with user configurations for visuals, handlesand styles. You can also bookmark, high light, add notes and lookup words, and get free ebooks from online libraries.

Adobe Reader
See PDF files clearly on selectable viewing modes such as fit-to-screen, continuous scroll or reflow text, supports for multi-touch zoom and navigation, and sharing PDF files via bluetooth or email.

Even a week after its announcement, it sounds as thought the Kindle Fire buzz is still running strong. They have more than 250,000 pre-orders right now, and with a November 15th release date they’ll surely add to that number. The Fire will undoubtedly top any Android tablet launch to date by a significant margin — despite it not being your typical Android tablet. Which brings me to a question for those in the tablet market: Are you more apt to pick up the Fire or a more traditional Android tablet?

The general population, it appears, has chosen the Fire. This is based not only on pre-sales, but also on survey data. People say they’re more willing to buy a tablet from Amazon than from any other non-Apple manufacturer. Not only that, an overwhelming number of people said they’d buy an Android tablet rather than the iPad if the price were below $ 250. It seems that Amazon hit all the right notes when announcing the Fire. Without a true low-cost competitor, they could take the lion’s share of the Android tablet market share.

It’s smartphone contract time for me, so that means shopping around. The preference is to stay with my current carrier, Verizon, because 1) I’m grandfathered into unlimited data and 2) they get the best reception in my area. At the same time, my handset of choice is the Samsung Galaxy S II. While Verizon does have a few quality handsets — I have a few friends who swear by the Droid X2 — none of them made me want to plunk down $ 200 to $ 250. That is, until it became clear why Verizon was the only major carrier to not carry the Galaxy S II. Chances are by now you’ve seen that Verizon will get the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Now that’s a smartphone worth $ 300.

It’s impossible to look at the spec sheet and not drool. It has everything that that a modern smartphone should: 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a gig of RAM, 32GB of device storage, LTE. Sure, there are other little aspects, but those are the big ones. It means the device will run with blazing speed, and will store tons of music and video files, not to mention apps. For viewing those video files that will surely fill your internal memory — and your SD card — the Galaxy Nexus has an amazing screen, Super AMOLED HD at 1280 x 720 pixels. Seriously, find me a screen better than that. It’s big, too at 4.65 inches.