Appnoodle

Have you tried the Google Goggles app? It’s amazing. Flippin’ amazing! I mean really, really mind bogglingly, unbelievably… amazing. You have to try it if you’ve got an Android phone.

Err, so what is it? It’s sort of a reverse image search look-up. Take a picture with your phone’s camera and the app tries to recognise the image and return search results. Apparently if you’re out and about you can take a picture of a landmark and it’ll try to tell you about it. For best results activate GPS so Google knows roughly where you are.

I haven’t tried the geo-location functionality yet (it’s 11.30pm, it’s dark and I’m at home) but just taking a couple of photos of books and CD covers convinced me of its genius. In every case the item was recognised in a couple of seconds. If you’re cynical (like my GF) you’ll assume it’s just performed some simple OCR function – but no – cover the text and it works just as rapidly.

So, anyway, it’s good. Try it.

The Speed Test app for Android is brought to us by speedtest.net who provide a free to use analysis tool for testing broadband internet connections via their web site.

The app does pretty much the same thing for your Android phone – providing latency (ping), download and upload time tests. This isn’t the most feature packed app in the world but the results are interesting and it’s very well executed. Results are stored, so you can check your connection (wi-fi or 3G) at various times of the day and in different locations (if that’s the kind of thing you like to do) and you can choose which server to connect to too. Good job since my local server consistently refused to allow the download test for some peculiar reason.

3G on T-Mo. Not that bad.

Test results. 3G & wi-fi.

Interesting fact: My G1 managed an upload speed on a 3G connection almost as fast as my supposedly-much-faster wi-fi connection.

In truth, there’s probably not a lot of point to this app but it is quite revealing and I guess useful if you’re experiencing problems with your connection.

Speed Test is available for free in the Android Market. An iPhone version is also available.

We’re all used to tech-blog posts from either side of the iPhone / Android debate which are less than objective. It goes with the territory and it’s fair enough – personal blogs are personal.

Is it too much to ask that the mainstream media educate themselves a bit and don’t just focus on the iPhone though? Don’t know what I mean? Then just check out this prime example spotted in the Daily Telegraph (a ‘quality’ British national paper) the other day.

The article’s title, ‘I’ve seen the future of shopping and it cost me £1.19′ refers to the purchase by the author of Red Laser, an iPhone app which does much the same as Shop Savvy for Android. Except it doesn’t include a database of physical shops, just online prices. So it’s not free, it’s not as functional and it arrived on the market months after the Android offering – and yet the writer nearly wets himself with excitement. Here’s a particularly irritating passage:

What would be really good would be a high street version which can compare prices in physical stores. For the moment though, this will do very nicely indeed.

Well duh!

Unfortunately, this kind of thing is pretty common but hopefully as Android market share grows we’ll see it less. At least some of the comments at the end of the article set the author straight. Maybe he’ll read them.

British gadget magazine Stuff named the HTC Hero which runs the Android operating system as their gadget of the year at their annual awards show this week. Surprising, perhaps, since the shortlist also contained the iPhone 3G S but it sounds like the Hero got the nod as much as for its innovation as anything else – and as a reward for being the first true rival to the iPhone.

It’s worth noting that the Palm Pre isn’t yet available in the UK so couldn’t figure in the results.

Here’s what the judging panel said about their decision:

No smartphone floored us in the way the Hero did this year. It transformed Google’s Android 
OS from also-ran into genuine contender, and proved its mettle by squaring up to the iPhone 3GS without the slightest whimper.

Sure, the iPhone may have sold by the tankerload and wowed us with its apps, but it was an evolution of an already excellent gadget. Conversely, 
our Hero came from nowhere with its social networking integration, its multi-touch interface and superior multimedia skills. It’s the only mobile we’d consider getting over an iPhone 
– and that’s really saying something.

Slightly bizarrely the iPhone did pick up phone of the year – work that one out… Slightly less surprisingly, it also won readers’ gadget of the year.

Here’s a link to the Stuff magazine awards mini site.

Motorola officially revealed their first Android powered phone recently, known as the Cliq in the States and Dext in the UK.

You could argue that as more and more Android phones are released each one becomes less significant. True enough, but there are a couple of things about the Cliq which make it particularly worthy of note.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

So you’re at a BBQ or other outdoor night time based event with mixed male and female company and you’ve been wondering all night how to impress the foxy blonde chick/himbo quiet introverted type in the corner.

Here’s what to do: Sneak into the kitchen and download Google’s Sky Map app to your Android phone, fire it up and learn the location of a couple of constellations/planets/stars and you’ll be in the perfect position to strike up a romantic conversation with your chosen target.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Remember a couple of weeks ago our post reviewing some of the web sites offering downloads of Android apps outside of the official Market? If not, you can read the post here.

Anyway, it turns out there’s another web site which is also worth checking out if you’re in the market (as it were) for apps. It’s called Mobango.com and concentrates on free apps for multiple platforms. A quick search for G1 compatible applications reveals over 400 in the database so a pretty good inventory then.

Here’s a screen grab.

Mobango. Free apps a-plenty

We reviewed Documents to Go a while back and thought it was a great product. At the time, Dataviz were working on PDF and PowerPoint modules for the product to go with the existing Microsoft Word and Excel support. Today we received an email from Dataviz to alert us that version 2.0 of Documents to Go for Android has just been released which includes this functionality (and additional enhancements) and that it’s available for download in the Android Market.

Now with PDF & PPT!

PDF reader. Nifty.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Let’s face it, if you’re an early Android adopter you’re probably a bit of a geek. I know I am. It follows then that you’re a fan of xkcd, Randall Munroe’s ‘webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language’. If so, you’ll be wanting gkcd, an Android app which serves xkcd to your phone.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

The most obvious way to get your hands on third party apps for Android phones is to use the official Android Market application. That’s fine except for 3 things.

• The Market isn’t available on all phones or in all territories
• Not all apps are available through it
• The on-phone Market application isn’t the easiest to navigate

Here’s a quick rundown of some (but not all) alternatives.

[Read the rest of this entry...]