Google Goggles: Test Drive

had some fun toying with Google Goggles this morning. Goggles uses your phone’s camera to do image-based search for products, landmarks, media, shops etc. the results I was getting for products & books are pretty accurate. most impressive: I snapped the artwork (no text, title at all) of a german, medical text-book – first result [...]

G1: the ultimate Android-app!

after handing back my evaluation SIM-card to T-Mobile earlier today, I’ve finally found G1’s real purpose: as a glorified alarm clock on my nightstand (Nightwatch is the name of the app and it even uses text2speech to tell the time).  

11 more incredible useful Android-apps can be found at Lifehacker.
PS: got a [...]

Testdrive G1: Android RC33

while most austrian G1-users are still waiting to get Android’s latest release RC33 pushed to their handsets by T-Mobile, fellow mobileblogger electrobabe found a deep link to a firmware-binary allowing to upgrade straight from RC29 (the file is about twice the size of the usual RC30->RC33 upgrade, probably because it contains both diffs). keep in mind that this [...]

Google Latitude on Android RC33

Google Latitude, which was introduced earlier this week and is expected to be rolled out (at least in the US) on Android via the RC33 upgrade (this is not cupcake!) from February 5th to 15th, might be a game changer in mobile, geo-aware social networking.  Google describes Latitude as…
…a new feature of Google Maps for mobile, as [...]

Android Cupcake screencast

while there’s still no way to get root-access  for manually upgrading the firmware of the Austrian T-Mobile G1, MobileCrunch has a promising screencast of Android’s development-branch, codenamed ‘Cupcake’. besides a large number of bugfixes, Cupcake is supposed to include essential new features like a process-manager (to kill those power-sucking background-apps), browser-extensions (improved JavaScript performance, copy&paste, [...]

Testdrive: G1 music apps

it’s been almost a week since I first started testing the G1, and so far my initial impression hasn’t really changed that much. like many of my fellow testers I’m disappointed by many aspects of both hardware and software. while the former would make me wait for a successor (I guess the G2 can’t be [...]