ics
Latest
Xiaomi Phone to get vanilla Android 2.3.5 next month, Ice Cream Sandwich in January
By now most of you may already know that the attractively priced Xiaomi Phone will support both MIUI and vanilla Android ROMs (though not simultaneously on its dual-partition system); but earlier today, CEO Lei Jun confirmed that October will see the release of said device's vanilla Android 2.3.5 ROM, meaning the keen beans won't have to wait long after the Xiaomi Phone's launch in the same month. More interestingly, Lei also announced that his Beijing-based chums will be rolling out a vanilla 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich build in January, which is about two or three months after Eric Schimdt's expected launch date. Sounds about right if you look at previous releases, and we shall look forward to observing the epic 4.0 battle between the Xiaomi Phone, the ASUS Padfone and the rumored Nexus Prime.
App developers must play nice with Ice Cream Sandwich if they want a bite
Google's Android developer blog is warning creators of Honeycomb apps to rework their code for Ice Cream Sandwich or suffer unsightly consequences. The 'problem' with ICS is that it gets rid of the tablet/smartphone divide, such that HC apps designed specifically for tablets will suddenly be allowed to run on small-screen devices. Needless to say, in many cases that won't be pretty. Creators of HC apps must therefore either disable installation on smaller displays (at least temporarily) or make sure they are fully compatible. Either job will require some time and, by the looks of it, that commodity is quickly running out.
Eric Schmidt: Ice Cream Sandwich coming in October or November
Got your sights set on the next version of Android, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich? We knew it was coming near the end of the year, but we now at least have a slightly more specific time frame straight from the horse's mouth. Google's own Eric Schmidt revealed in an interview with Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff that ICS -- the highly-anticipated update to Android that will merge elements of Honeycomb and Gingerbread into one universal OS -- can be expected to arrive in October or November. This matches up with rumors saying the Nexus Prime will be released in the tenth month, but it's the first time we've heard anything official from El Goog since I/O four months ago. Check out the video below to get Schmidt's full statement.
Android Ice Cream Sandwich pictures leak, leave us slightly cold
Well what do we have here? It looks like Ice Cream Sandwich might have escaped from Google's freezer a little early. Let's be clear here -- we're not 100 percent sure this is the next major version of Android, but the evidence is somewhat convincing. Both Android Police and RootzWiki posted screenshots of a Nexus S running a blue-ish themed skin which appears similar to the Gingerbread UI, but with a revised dock containing four icons instead of the usual three. Most of the changes are mild, but introduce functionality that already exist in Honeycomb. The camera app is said to gain a panorama mode, and the Gmail app is supposed to match the design of the new OS. Follow the links below for more details, and jump past the break for an additional picture.
MeeGo Conference 2011 sights and sounds (video)
So the MeeGo Conference is winding down here in San Francisco and we have prowled the exhibitor area over the past couple of days to bring you a taste of what's stimulated our eyes and ears at the event so far. We got to play with the Indamixx 2 music tablet -- basically an iiView M1Touch Pine Trail tablet running an audio-optimized build of MeeGoo 1.2 Tablet UX, which features a customized kernel for more real-time control and better audio scheduling. It's expected to ship for $700 in "June or July" complete with DAW and DJ apps. Next we came across a MeeGo-based in-vehicle entertainment system that's currently available in cars from Chinese manufacturer Hawtai Motor. The device is Atom-powered, includes 3G connectivity, and provides navigation, communication, audio / video playback (for both stored and streamed content), along with Internet access. We saw a MeeGo app that gathers contact information on a form, sends it to an NFC-equipped Nokia C7, and writes it to a blank RFID tag. The tag can then be read by any NFC-capable phone, such as Google's Nexus S. A fun conference isn't complete without some games, and we were treated to a homebrew, QML-based Dance Dance Revolution clone running on MeeGo, written using just a few hundred lines of code. Speaking of QML, we got a demo of another in-vehicle entertainment system with built-in instrumentation. This MeeGo app was designed to interface with a MegaSquirt open source ECU and display engine and other car data on a set of virtual gauges -- this in addition to performing the usual audio and navigation tasks. Check out our gallery below, then grab a snack and hit the break for our 15-minute hands-on video. %Gallery-124363%
Android 0-click NFC sharing demonstrated in Ice Cream Sandwich (video)
Ready to get your bump on? You'd better be because Google's planning to bring peer-to-peer NFC sharing to the Ice Cream Sandwich release of Android. Imagine it: 0-click contact, web page, and YouTube video sharing between your NFC-equipped Android smartphones and tablets. Just bring the devices together and voila, data shared without launching an application or navigating through the UI. Google plans to build this functionality into as many systems apps as it can while providing the API to developers to 0-click enable their third-party applications. Watch it go down phone-to-phone and phone-to-tablet (prototype) after the break. It's the future, get used to it.
Tabula scores $108 million to bring cheap, programmable chips to the masses
If you were to pry open your laptop, microwave or TV you'd find they're all loaded with an array of highly-specialized silicon. Designing, manufacturing, or just purchasing these chips is a major cost for electronics makers. Semiconductor company Tabula, which just secured $108 million in funding to help bring its 3PLD ABAX reprogrammable chips to market, hopes to make these dedicated components a thing of the past. Compared to similarly customizable FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), Tabula's chips are cheaper, smaller, and faster. This magic trifecta of attributes could put programmable logic into consumer products like HDTVs and may one day allow for hardware to be updated over the internet the way software is now. However, the immediate promise is being able to use the same chip for multiple purposes across several products. That should drive down costs -- and there's no way to make consumers happier than by slashing prices. Full PR and video after the break.
Integrated circuits with no standby power could be in use by year's end
There's certainly no shortage of companies working to make electronics of all sorts more energy efficient, but NEC and Rohm Co now say that they're on the verge of a breakthrough that could change things in a big way, and we could possibly see it in "practical use" by the end of this year. As Tech-On! reports, both companies are hard at work on integrated circuits that consume no power at all when they're in standby mode, and turn themselves on only when power is needed. That's apparently possible by making the entire chip nonvolatile, as opposed to many current chips that only use nonvolatile merged memory. According to NEC, that'll let them "cut dissipation for digital consumer electronics in the standby mode to just a few percent of what it is now," and at no expense of convenience. While NEC isn't making any promises for the near future just yet, Rohm says that it'll begin shipping its first custom ICs in the second half of this year, and that the first products using them could start showing up by the end of 2009.
Mac 101: iCal calendar subscriptions
iCal has always been an elegant program. Though it has a "subscribe" function for public calendars, it hasn't always played nicely with other devices and other calendars. This limitation forced many a user to seek greener pastures elsewhere, like Google Calendar. Calendars created in Google's web app permitted a better cross-platform solution for home and mobile use, but made iCal clunky and hard to use, even when you only subscribed to your own Google calendars. Recently, Apple enabled CalDAV subscriptions on the iPhone (which also play well with Google Calendar); that made me dust off my copy of iCal and take a second look. If you're not using iCal at all, you may want to take a moment to learn about what you can do with it. The idea of calendar subscriptions is simple: store a calendar event database somewhere online, and then provide a link in a common format for calendar programs such as iCal to access. The calendar program then imports the calendar data and puts it in your calendar, updating itself at a frequency of your choosing. Online databases of public calendar links abound, and you can add calendars from your local little league schedule to stargazing guides to the galaxy in your area. The format that Apple uses is the "ics" format, and you'll see calendars with that extension all over the web.
WWDC schedule: Ajax to iCal
Okay I promise this is that last time I'm talking about the WWDC schedule (I can't speak for my confreres). Earlier today Brett posted on a nice Ruby script to convert the data to a readable PDF. Yesterday when we first noted that the WWDC schedule was available I complained about the lack of iCal compatible files and apparently Adrian Kosmaczewski agreed. He proceeded to cook up a little script to make the necessary conversions. You can download iCal format ics files for the iPhone, Mac, and IT tracks at his website.
