The Tegra 4-powered SlateBook x2 running Android Jelly Bean (4.2.2) is the latest split-personality portable computer from HP. Detailed hardware specs have not be made available, but we do know that if will have an IPS panel with a screen resolution of 1920×1200, USB and HDMI ports. That’s about all we know about the hardware, but I’m sure it will [...]

In less than two months, April (2013) to be exact, you will be able to buy a Slate 7 Android tablet from HP for $169 USD. Announced at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, the Slate 7 Android tablet is HP’s first consumer-level tablet device since the failed webOS-powered Touchpad. But for that price, what will you [...]

CoolShip Android computer in a keyboard is the latest Android-powered computer. But this one is unlike other Android units. It’s not in a USB stick, but in a keyboard with most of the connectivity of a standard desktop or notebook computer. As non-standard computers come, the CoolShip is unlike others that are powered by Android. Think the Commodore 64/128, but [...]

A new USB stick-sized Android SmartTV from Sanko Co., Ltd of Japan features a quad-core 1.2 GHz Freescale i.mx6 processor. I think that’s more power than any other device of its type that I’ve come across. With it, you can turn any TV with the right connectivity into an Android device or TV. It supports Google Play, Japanese input (it’s [...]

Remember ZShaolin? Yep, it’s that Android ninja tool that gives you zsh and a whole bunch of command-line applications on your Android device, minus the need to root it. I first brought it to your attention via this article. Five days later, a new version has been released. And if you were happy with the features the first one shipped [...]

Want to do more than just touch, swipe, pinch and zoom on your Android smartphone or tablet? Want a powerful shell environment plus FFMpeg, ImageMagick, Sox, OggZ, GNU Awk, Sed, Grep, the LUA scripting language and a whole lot more on that Android phone or tablet without rooting it? If your answer for both is “yes,” then you want to [...]

It has just been announced that the ROM, kernel and bootloader for the APC (Android PC) are now available for public download. The APC is an initiative of VIA Technologies Inc., a manufacturer of integrated circuits based in Taiwan. It is a purpose-built Android PC system designed for keyboard and mouse input, and powered by a VIA 800MHz processor, with [...]

An HP TouchPad with 32 GB of internal storage takes the tile of “My first tablet computer.” It was an early Christmas gift to myself last year. Compared to the latest offerings, it is a little bit old, but for a device that enables me to step away from my desktop computers and still consume digital content comfortably, it comes [...]

Qualcomm has announced the public preview release of Snapdragon SDK for Android. Snapdragon is Qualcomm’s single-chip, all-in-one mobile processor for smartphones and tablet computers. “The Snapdragon SDK for Android is a collection of software components that can be downloaded to enhance your app – especially when it’s running on Snapdragon Processor powered devices. It is designed to make it easy [...]

The battle between malware writers and those trying to make their life miserable is a never ending one, will forever be a never ending one. The nature of the battle field makes it so. The bad guys will always find a way, sooner or later, to penetrate the security wall around an application. And as soon as one hole is [...]

You thought Android was open? The Android governance model consists of an elaborate set of control points that allows Google to bundle its own services and control the exact software and hardware make-up on every handset. All this while touting the openness rhetoric that is founded on the Apache permissive license used in the Android SDK. Indeed, Google’s mobile platform [...]

Today’s smart phones have all the speed, storage, and network connectivity of desktop computers from a few years ago. Because of this, they’re a treasure trove of personal information–and likely the next battleground for computer security. What makes smart phones attractive–the ability to customize them by downloading applications–is what makes them dangerous. Apps make the mobile phone a real computer, [...]

As mobile phones become increasingly powerful and can store more data, we’ve introduced new methods of search to get you to your content faster, such as search suggestions or search by voice. But sometimes, typing to get to the right search suggestion takes too long, and you may be in a quiet environment where speaking a query is inappropriate. Today [...]