InformationWeek Stories by Jerry Ryan

InformationWeek Stories by Jerry Ryanhttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2012-06-27T10:35:00ZGoogle Launching Android 4.1 and Nexus 7 TabletRumors are that Google Wednesday will announce a Google-branded tablet, made by Asus, for under $200, and a new version of Android, code-named Jelly Bean, to run it. Cool as this might be, history suggests few users will enjoy Jelly Bean any time soon.http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/240002805?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSometimes it's hard to know which rumors are true and which are, well, just rumors. One thing we can be sure of is that Jelly Bean, probably a.k.a. Android 4.1, is coming any day now, because Google has installed the Jelly Bean sculpture on the front lawn of the Googleplex. History tells us that because the Jelly Bean sculpture's been placed on the lawn the Jelly Bean announcement must be coming soon. Most likely the details will be at Google I/O, starting on June 27 in San Francisco. All else is rumor, but there are many interesting rumors and leaks out there. <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/news/2012-June/android-jelly-bean-statue.jpg" /> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/240002789">Reports are circulating</a> that the first time we will see Jelly Bean is in a new tablet. Google will use Google I/O to announce the Nexus 7, a 7-inch tablet to be built by Asus--not Google's own Motorola Mobility. The device is reported to have a 1.3-Ghz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, GeForce 12-core GPU and 1GB of RAM with 8GB and 16GB of storage available. <hr style="color: #f00; background-color: #f00; height: 5px;"><blockquote>InformationWeek will be live-blogging from Google I/O today. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/240002796 ">Click here for the event which begins Wednesday at 12:06PM eastern.</a>.</blockquote><hr style="color: #f00; background-color: #f00; height: 5px;"> The new tablet also will feature near-field communications (NFC) and run Google Wallet and Android Beam. Beam lets users share contacts, directions, Web pages, apps, and other content with other NFC-equipped Android devices. The screen is an in-plane switching (IPS) display with a 178-degree viewing angle, supporting a 1280x800 resolution, and sports a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera. It won't have a rear-facing camera. Reports say battery life is nine hours. Though the device will be available in Australia first, it's believed that worldwide availability will not be too far behind. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120523PD214.html">DigiTimes claims</a> that there will be initial shipments of 600,000 units, with an expected 2 million to 2.5 million units by the end of 2012. The price of the new tablet will get a lot of attention if the rumors are true: the tablet will be available for less than $200. That puts it in direct price competition with the Kindle Fire. Fire runs a customized version of Android that runs in a locked-down environment. Will customers be attracted to a price competitive device with fewer restrictions, more available applications, a more up-to-date operating system with a more up-to-date experience, and a better screen? That's what they say Google expects, and that story certainly holds together. There's even less solid information about what will actually be in Jelly Bean. Earlier rumors that Jelly Bean would be dubbed Android 5.0 have been walked back. It now seems that Jelly Bean will be Android 4.1, a point release off of Ice Cream Sandwich as opposed to a full-out version change. This probably means that there will be only incremental changes over Ice Cream Sandwich. <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/news/2012-June/Jellly_Bean_sculputure.jpeg" /> InformationWeek reports <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/smart_phones/240002532">some information that was briefly released and then pulled by Google</a>: a new Google search bar, some user interface tweaks, some tweaks to the app launcher. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/06/this-is-googles-new-nexus-tablet-the-nexus-7/">Gizmodo speculates</a> there will be some tablet optimizations and other features such as laptop support, a file manager, and malware protection. More details, and more facts, will have to wait for the coming announcement. What does the Jelly Bean release really mean to the average Android user? There are many wish-lists out there of what people would like to see in the next Android release. We all have our favorites. It's hard to argue with some of the suggestions, particularly the notion that Chrome should be the default browser for Android phones. A world full of good ideas might not actually matter to the average user. Most users--65% as of June 1--are still on Android 2.3 (a.k.a. Gingerbread)--and 19.1% are still on Android 2.2 (Froyo)! Ice Cream Sandwich has not made it into much more than 7% of devices. Will users running Gingerbread now ever see Jelly Bean on their current devices? Ice Cream Sandwich pushes to Gingerbread devices are very far behind schedule. Will it be possible to jump from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean? Will anything but a brand-new device see Jelly Bean any time before the end of 2013? No rumors here, but the odds say no, based on the history of other upgrades. Apple has substantial control over the upgrade schedule of its own users, but in the world of Android that responsibility lies with carriers, who do not necessarily have the same interest in moving users up to new OS versions. Jelly Bean might have a lot of great new features. It probably will. However, if history is any guide, a lot of users won't see them for more than a year, unless they buy a new device.2012-06-08T14:00:00ZCamScanner Straightens, Saves SmartPhone Pics As PDFsCamScanner is a clever and useful smartphone app that lets you save and distribute photos as PDFs. Unfortunately it doesn't do optical character recognition. CamCard is a badly-flawed app for scanning and OCRing business cards.http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/240001742?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsOur smartphones are music players, cameras, and GPS devices. IntSig Information Co., which specializes in pattern recognition and information processing software, wants your phone to be a scanner, too. CamScanner turns your smartphone into a fairly sophisticated stand-in for a scanner, able to upload, print, and fax the photographs you take. CamCard, a separate app, "scans" business cards and does some optical character recognition to load cards into your contacts on your phone. I tried these apps on a Droid RAZR running Android 2.3.6. They also are available for the iPhone. The short review is: get the first one, and avoid the second one. There are other scan-to-PDF products available, but IntSig's has some unique image management features as well as a breadth of upload and cloud storage options. CamScanner takes a high-resolution picture of whatever you are interested in, and then "scans" the image. Prior to scanning, you can rotate the image in 90-degree increments, and you can drag several handles to crop the image. There are controls for brightness and contrast as well as for quality of the image. The scan algorithm is very forgiving of shaky hands, or of the image being a little off center or off square. It's smart enough to turn and center the item to be scanned as part of the scanning process. The app seems to detect edges and rectangular items when it analyzes the picture that it's scanning. It assumes that the user will want to crop at the detected edges, and it places the handles for cropping along those edges. <table width="100%"><tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner1.jpeg"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner1-200.jpeg" /></a></td><td><a target="_blank" href="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner2.jpeg"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner2-200.jpeg" /></a></td><td><a target="_blank" href="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner3.jpeg"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner3-200.jpeg" /></a></td></tr></table><div style="margin:4px 0 0 0; padding:0; color:#990000; font-weight:bold;font-style: italic;text-align:right; ">Click on images for larger version</div> One very nice feature shows up when you try to crop the photo: a small close-up of the image under the cropping handle shows up in the corner of the screen, so you can have some precision in where you want the cropping done. When you're ready, touch the checkmark on the screen, and the scan begins. If you don't like what you see, you can adjust the brightness, contrast, and quality with simple slider controls. Touch the checkmark again, and you are done. I tried taking pictures at several angles to make sure the app could find the document, center it, and scan it, and it worked for me every time. You can also tell CamScanner to apply its scan algorithms to a photograph in your phone's photo gallery. Multiple page documents can be scanned in using CamScanner. The app includes the ability to reorder and rescan pages if need be. The interface is straightforward and easy to use. CamScanner allows you to assign a title to what you've scanned, and to write a page of notes to attach to the scan, which is helpful. I can see scanning receipts and making notes about them, all in one place, as a handy capability. Another capability is "tagging" a scan. From the name of this feature, I hoped that I would be able to assign an arbitrary bit of text to the scan, but it only let me select from five preset tags: Business Card, Whiteboard, PPT, Note, and ID Card. That makes the feature much less useful. All of your scans are displayed in a scrolling gallery that shows a preview page of each scan you have taken, with any name and tag you've assigned along with the scan timestamp. The gallery can be displayed as a four-row-by-three-column grid, or as a list of six items. <table width="100%"><tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner6.jpeg"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner6-200.jpeg" /></a></td><td><a target="_blank" href="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner4.jpeg"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner4-200.jpeg" /></a></td><td><a target="_blank" href="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner5.jpeg"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/reviews/2012-June/CamScanner/CamScanner5-200.jpeg" /></a></td></tr></table><div style="margin:4px 0 0 0; padding:0; color:#990000; font-weight:bold;font-style: italic;text-align:right; ">Click on images for larger version</div> Nicely integrated into the app is the ability to preview your scan as a PDF, and to transfer it off the phone in any of a number of ways. Want to transfer your PDF via Bluetooth or email? It's built in. Also built in is nice clean integration with Google Cloud Print, Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Docs. Uploads, emails, and printing all worked flawlessly for me. One thing that is lost in the upload are any notes that you might have attached to the scan; in fact, I could find no way to print or otherwise capture the notes that I typed in. CamScanner has the ability to fax items you've scanned, but it's somewhat expensive. You need to purchase the ability to fax a page from IntSig. At $.99 a page, or $8.99 for 10 pages, I decided the price wasn't worth trying the feature. I suppose in an emergency this might be worth it, but emailing an attached PDF somewhere is likely more than sufficient. There is no OCR built into this application, but I was successful importing the uploaded PDFs into Google Docs and using its OCR, so the absence bothered me only a little bit. One of IntSig's competitors, DocScanner, is beginning to offer a related application that scans business cards, recognizes the various fields on the cards, and imports them into the phone's Contacts. IntSig's offer in this space is called CamCard, and as much as I liked CamScanner, the CamCard product disappoints. I scanned 20 business cards and only managed to get two recognized with no errors. It's not fair to expect the app to recognize a company name inside a logo, but it is fair to avoid an app that generated at least three errors on more than half the cards I scanned. Perhaps these problems are the reason that CamScanner does not yet include OCR. Name: <a target="_blank" href="http://www.intsig.com/us/iphone-/53-camscanner">CamScanner from IntSig Information Co.</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/camscanner-pro/id395904807?mt=8#">iTunes Page</a>    <a target="_blank" href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intsig.camscanner&hl=en">Google Play Page</a><blockquote>CamScanner is not without flaws, but it is a clever and useful app that lets you perform many practical scanning applications with just a smart phone.</blockquote> Price: $4.99 Pros:<ul><li>Good quality scans</li><li>Impressive image management</li><li>Clean integration with email, multiple cloud storage options, and Google Cloud Print.</li></ul> Cons:<ul><li>No OCR</li><li>Notes are not uploaded or printed</li><li>"Tagging" is weak could be expanded</li><li>Faxing from the app is expensive</li></ul> Name: <a target="_blank" href="http://www.intsig.com/us/android-/51-camcard-">CamCard</a><blockquote>CamCard uses a smartphone camera to scan and OCR business cards. It doesn't work well. Stay away. <a target="_blank" href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/camcard-business-card-scanner/id347803339?mt=8">iTunes Page</a>    <a target="_blank" href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intsig.BCRLatam&feature=more_from_developer#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEwMiwiY29tLmludHNpZy5CQ1JMYXRhbSJd">Google Play Page</a></blockquote> Price: $11.99 2012-05-23T10:30:00ZThe Google/Motorola Deal is Done. What Now?Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility is complete, but there are still many unanswered questions. Will Moto's Droid phones have some home field advantage for Android? Or does the real special secret behind this deal revolve around Motorola's popular line of TV set top boxes? motorola, motorola mobility, google, android, droidhttp://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/240000845?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsNow that Google has leapt over the last hurdle on closing the deal to buy Motorola Mobility (<a target="_blank" href="http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Google-Acquires-Motorola-Mobility-3aeb.aspx">here's the press release</a>), it seems timely to take a look at why this deal is happening in the first place and what might come next. Before I take that look, it is appropriate to note that I have, or at least used to have, some skin in this game. Until late last year I was a senior software manager inside of the Mobile Devices business at what we now know as Motorola Mobility. Among other things I led the product team for the Droid2 Global and the Droid RAZR products, before being downsized out of MMI at the end of last year. While I don't think my opinions are tainted by my history, you the reader should know that history and decide for yourself. I'll also disclose that I own no MMI stock or options to buy it, in case that makes a difference. So, why DID Google buy Motorola Mobility? What's going to happen next? And, is there an interesting story here that nobody is talking about? (spoiler alert: yes, I think so). Back in April, the Wall Street Journal speculated about what Google had in mind when they decided to make this purchase. The conventional wisdom at the announcement of the deal was that the purchase of the Motorola patent portfolio would help protect Google's Android from legal assault. Very little was said, then or now, about what would happen to the people at MMI, or how much influence Google would have over decisions about hardware features going forward. If any decisions have been made on that front, nobody has been saying that I have heard. In the four years that I was at Motorola, the company transformed itself into an Android smartphone shop, largely abandoning the small, low-margin flip-phones and candy bars running BREW for a line of high margin, sophisticated smartphones running Android. As I told my coworkers as it was happening, <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Jha">Sanjay Jha</a> deserved a lot of credit for forcing those changes. I'm not sure that Motorola wouldn't have folded up shop, or at least folded up the mobile devices business, had it not made the transition. Incidentally, the same press release announcing the closing of the transaction announces Dennis Woodside, formerly President of Google's Americas region, as the new CEO of Motorola Mobility. Jha's changes came at a price, of course. There were some painful cuts. Motorola is now making fewer phones than it made in the past. Fewer people are needed to make the smaller number of those high-margin phones, and fewer people are needed to integrate Android as opposed to integrating and doing component development on other OSes. Motorola's a smaller place than it was before the transition started, and nobody is yet sure if there may be further changes, both in staff and in focus. Will Motorola Mobility abandon the hardware business completely, as some have speculated? It seems unlikely to me that this will happen, at least in the near term. With the acquisition, Google's purchased a revenue stream that they'd be loathe to surrender, and a piece of the smartphone revenue pie that is small, but that has room to grow. Can Google restructure MMI, eliminate duplicative development, make their new division more profitable, and grow that slice of the pie? I'm sure they think so, and I do too. It's not likely that Google spent all this money just for a patent portfolio -- they expect to step up to the challenge of trying to nurture and to grow this business. I think the real challenge is for Google to figure out how to make sure that other Android users won't feel like Motorola Mobility is getting some sort of Android advantage. There's going to have to be some sort of visible firewall between the Android division and the Motorola mobile devices world to make sure that other partners aren't spooked into trying other smartphone OSes, or de-emphasizing their Android commitments. Look for Google to make some public announcements of partnerships or deals that will show their commitment to keeping some neutrality in the supply of Android. Actually, I maintain that there is a big interesting thing here that nobody has talked about very much: <a target="_blank" href="http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Home-Devices/Home-Digital-Video">Motorola Mobility's set top boxes</a>. Before the announcement of the Google deal, Motorola had already been working to split itself into pieces. Motorola Mobility was to be the smartphone company, and Motorola Solutions was to be everything else. Just prior to the announcement of the Google deal, the "Home" business -- what Motorola called its set top box division -- got moved from the Solutions side to the Mobility side. Other than sparking a few jokes about working for "Mobile Home," this change didn't mean very much to those of us in Mobility at the time. When the Google deal to acquire Mobility was announced, I began to wonder if the Home business wasn't the real unappreciated bit of value in the deal, and if the move had actually been done to sweeten the deal. Think about it this way: Google's on your computer already. The name of the company is a synonym for searching for something on the Internet! Their Chrome browser is popular, and that popularity is growing. They're on your smartphone if you have any of the Android devices in the market today. And now that they have purchased the company that makes set top boxes for a lot of cable carriers. Google now has a path to get into your family room and onto your TV. Call me crazy if you like. After all, nobody else seems to be thinking or talking about this being a biggie. But I would not be surprised if my Motorola Mobility set top box got a Google flavor before too long. <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/commentary/2012-May/motorola-plus-google.jpg" /> 2012-02-21T00:00:01ZAndroid Phones And Tablets Are Mostly Running 2.x86.4% of Android users measured by Google are running Froyo or Gingerbread, showing that carriers are not yet taking chances with newer versions.http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/232601140?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors The folks at Google keep track of the version of Android that's running on every device that accesses the Android Market. Every 14 days, they calculate <a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html">a breakdown of the users by percentage of the devices running each different version of the Android API levels</a> which we mostly think of as Android versions. See the table below for specifics. As of Monday, 2/20/2012, nearly two-thirds (58.6%) the active Android devices are running Gingerbread, and almost all of those Gingerbread phones (58.1% of all Android phones) are running API Level 10, released with version 2.3.3 in February of last year. <style type="text/css"> table.androidversions { border-width: 1px; border-spacing: 2px; border-style: outset; border-color: gray; border-collapse: separate; background-color: white; } table.androidversions th { border-width: 1px; padding: 1px; border-style: inset; border-color: gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: ; } table.androidversions td { border-width: 1px; padding: 1px; border-style: inset; border-color: gray; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: ; } </style> <TABLE class="androidversions" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0> <tr><th>Platform</th><th>Codename</th><th>API Level</th><th>Distribution</th></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-1.5.html">Android 1.5</a></td><td>Cupcake</td><td>3</td><td>0.6%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-1.6.html">Android 1.6</a></td><td>Donut</td><td>4</td><td>1.0%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.1.html">Android 2.1</a></td><td>Eclair</td><td>7</td><td>7.6%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.2.html">Android 2.2</a></td><td>Froyo</td><td>8</td><td>27.8%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.3.html">Android 2.3Android 2.3.2</a></td><td rowspan=2>Gingerbread</td><td>9</td><td>0.5%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.3.3.html">Android 2.3.3Android 2.3.7</a></td><td>10</td><td>58.1%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-3.0.html">Android 3.0</a></td><td rowspan=3>Honeycomb</td><td>11</td><td>0.1%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-3.1.html">Android 3.1</a></td><td>12</td><td>1.4%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-3.2.html">Android 3.2</a></td><td>13</td><td>1.9%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0.html">Android 4.0Android 4.0.2</a></td><td rowspan=2>Ice Cream Sandwich</td><td>14</td><td>0.3%</td></tr> <tr><td><a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0.3.html">Android 4.0.3</a></td><td>15</td><td>0.7%</td></tr></table> There are seven different platform names, from Cupcake to Ice Cream Sandwich, and there are 11 different API levels over those platforms. Earlier versions of Gingerbread (prior to the 2.3.3 release in February of 2011) had a different API Level than all subsequent Gingerbread releases. Honeycomb's actually had three separate platform releases with an update to the API Level on each one. The second largest share is the 27.8% of devices running Froyo, first introduced in May of 2010. Over 86% of devices are running either Froyo or Gingerbread. According to a graph of historical distribution of versions available with the Android report, there was a fairly rapid switchover from Froyo to Gingerbread. Last August, only about 25% of devices were running Gingerbread, and more than 50% were running Froyo. By about the middle of November, Gingerbread crossed the 50% mark. It's almost never users who decide which version to run, but the carrier from whom they buy their phone. There are several likely explanations for the time lag between the release of a newer version of the platform and its broad appearance in the field. It may take the network providers some time between receiving a release of Android and the time to integrate the provider's code into a releasable product (<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/reviews/personal-tech/smart-phones/232600815">Motorola's claimed that reasoning for the delay in releasing Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades for new Droid4</a>). Ice Cream Sandwich is better-suited than earlier versions to both phones and tablets, but is too new to show any significant market share. Because the raw data are not made available, it's difficult to tell how much of the change comes from the release of new phones running Gingerbread, and which portion came from Froyo-to-Gingerbread upgrades. I suspect that the raw data that we would need to say for certain are proprietary to carriers. It's also interesting to note that only about 3.4% of all Android devices are running Honeycomb, and that that's been the percentage since about mid-November. Ice Cream Sandwich appears on only 1% of devices. Of course, the information only tracks users of Android Marketplace, however it's hard to imagine that someone would go to the trouble and expense of getting an Android smartphone and never use Marketplace. In fact, given automatic checks to make sure that various apps are up to date, it may be impossible! The percentages are probably an accurate look at active devices on Marketplace. However, it would be interesting to know if there's any way for the data to include counts of devices like the Amazon Kindle Fire , which uses a custom version of Android 2.3, or of Android devices sold in China which aren't allowed access to Marketplace at all. Based on the data that I can see from <a target="_blank" href="https://market.android.com/">market.android.com</a> when I look at my account, Google knows all of the devices that I have ever used Marketplace with, and knows when they were each last active. There are probably interesting reports on that sort of data that might let you know how many older phones were activated but went dormant for some reason or another... for Android's sake, one hopes for an upgrade! The API level in the table above identifies the version of the framework API that is issued with the Android release on the device. The framework API is what any app developer would use to get access to the underlying features and capabilities of the Android system. Among other things, it consists of a set of packages and classes, as well as XML elements for declaring and accessing resources and permissions that apps are allowed to request. Updates to the API are designed to be compatible with all earlier versions of the API. <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/news/2012-February/androidversions450.png" /> An example may help: Android has provided a <a target="_blank" href="http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/SlidingDrawer.html">SlidingDrawer widget</a> since Cupcake and API Level 3 (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q6x9za4MZY">click here to see a simple example in action</a>). Every app developer that wants to provide a draggable handle to display or hide content can use SlidingDrawer, and every subsequent API release will support SlidingDrawer. An app developer that wants to use SIP would need to use the android.net.sip API, which was not introduced until the first release of Gingerbread and API Level 9. The app would want to include an indicator that it's compatible with API Level 9; all later versions of the API would support the app, but earlier versions of Android would know that the app requires some functionality from the API that is not supported in the earlier version. [Motorola's new Droid 4 phone comes with Android 2.3, but will be upgraded to 4.0. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/reviews/personal-tech/smart-phones/232600815">Click here to read BYTE's review</a>.] While the report is designed to show app developers the percentage of devices that they can be compatible with based on which version of the API that they decide to develop with, the data give a nice at-a-glance view of the penetration of different Android versions.2012-02-19T08:30:00ZSlick Android Tablet Keyboard Is Cool, Has ProblemsThe A.I.type Float-N-Split Tablet Keyboard offers awesome keyboard splits, transparency, and prediction, plus some bugs.http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/232601111?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors I'm a huge fan of Android touchscreen keyboards, so I was very interested in trying the new Float-N-Split Tablet Keyboard app from <a target="_blank" href="http://www.aitype.com/">A.I.type</a>. I downloaded and installed the Float-N-Split app onto my Motorola Xoom running Android 3.2.2. When launched the first time, the app starts its Activation Wizard, which does a very nice job of helping a new user set up the application and enable it as the active input method on the tablet. Part of the wizard lets you try the keyboard for the first time. First impression? Nice! Later impressions? Not so much. The application displays the keyboard, which includes several buttons to access preferences and to change modes, and a strip along the top that displays the words that the app's "smart prediction" algorithms suggest might be the next word that you'd like to type. If the app displays a suggestion that you'd like, just touch the word instead of typing it and you are done. As you type a word, the app tries to predict what you're typing and shows you various guesses it's made. If it thinks you made a spelling error, it will show you a suggested correct spelling for the word it guesses you are typing. Again, you can just touch a word on the bar and the app will insert the entire word where you are typing. <iframe width="600" height="437" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6TP65ssJXes" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> The keyboard works quickly and easily, without any pauses or delays. Visual and audio feedback makes for a high-quality experience for the user. As you might guess from the name of the company and the information on its website, this smart prediction algorithm is A.I.type's secret sauce, and it is very, very impressive. More than once, I smiled thinking that the prediction was performing so well, it must be reading my mind. The predictions come quickly, and they are very, very good. The keyboard has three modes: full, split, and float-and-split. Full mode sits across the bottom of the screen, and can be easily resized by dragging a handle on the upper right corner of the keyboard to change how much of the screen it covers. Split mode divides the keyboard in the middle and moves the keys over to either side of the screen for thumb typing. This keyboard can also change height with the drag of a finger. Float-and-split detaches the two halves of the keyboard and allows them to float freely and independently anywhere on the screen with a simple drag of the finger. You can resize one side of the keyboard, and the other side automatically resizes. You can move the two pieces together, or you can move them separately. The three buttons that control the resizing and moving are unobtrusive but intuitive, and I mastered their operation without needing to read any instructions. The user can control the transparency of the keyboard in float-and-split mode, so you can put the pieces of the keyboard on top of your text and see right through it. One key on the lower right side of the keyboard allows you to cycle through these three modes. The settings give you a lot of control over just about every piece of the keyboard, including deciding if you want to use "cloud based prediction"--presumably this provides some network-resident functionality or data for the prediction code. My device told me it was talking to a server in the Middle East, but there was no latency in the performance of the keyboard--very nice. You can set a keyboard theme and make your keyboard look like an iPad if you like, and you have control over fonts, background images, and colors of everything--keys, characters, predicted words, corrected words. There are several language settings, including character sets from all over the world, and downloadable language packs, some of which are marked "coming soon". I'm unfortunately not fluent enough to do justice to a review of the predictive power of the keyboard in any other language than English. There are some oddities. The app asks you to choose a keyboard theme in two separate places. It also makes the odd choice of grouping the control over the setting for the opacity of the floating keyboard under the Fun Factory settings, such as colors and fonts, instead of under Appearance, where I would have expected to find it. There were also a few glitchy things about the basic keyboard modes that reflect either odd design choices or poorly thought out implementation, or maybe both. You can, for example, resize the keyboard to the size of the entire screen, covering the input area, which seems like a mistake. Another oddity is more of a missed opportunity: the split mode keyboard does not include the ability to set its transparency; therefore, when you use split mode, there is a large area of wasted gray space in the center of the tablet screen. It would be nice to have the option of making that section transparent. I encountered more serious glitches as I dived further into the app. I used the keyboard with the Mail application on my Xoom and was incredibly impressed by how well it worked. I decided that I would write this review in Google Docs on my Xoom, using the app, and suddenly my predictive text bar was gray, blank, and unusable. It turns out that the keyboard queries text fields to determine content and cursor position. According to A.I.type, some applications return non-standard results to the keyboard app, and "when our keyboard reacts to this wrong information, the results are poor". Kudos to the vendor for immediately acknowledging this known problem in response to an email, and sending me a test version of the .apk. The test version fixed the Google Docs issue, but I had to force close it at one point when I stepped out of Docs. The vendor said it would be deploying a hot fix for the Google Docs issue and other issues in a matter of days. Let's hope the force close issue is fixed there as well. I also learned that the vendor made a design choice to turn off the predictive algorithms when working inside single line fields in a browser in order to make sure that they are not processing user passwords. An understandable choice, but it ought to have been explained somewhere. This isn't the first split keyboard for Android we've seen. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/232400220">At CES last month we saw the TouchPal Input Suite</a> which has many of the features of the Float-N-Split and is free. So, what's the bottom line? The A.I.type Float-N-Split keyboard's predictive algorithm is excellent. The keyboard is easy to configure and use. I would have designed the app a little differently in some places. But the vendor was responsive to problems that were reported and fixed them quickly. I like it, and I'll keep using it, but I'll watch for fixes and updates. Name: <a target="_blank" href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.aitype.android.tablet.p">A.I.Type Float-N-Split Tablet Keyboard</a><blockquote>This alternative keyboard app for Android tablets offers impressive predictive text and correction as well as many options for controlling size, shape, color and background. It works extremely well with several apps, such as Mail, but its behavior with some other apps needs work.</blockquote> Price: $5.99 Pro:<ul><li>Top-notch predictive text features.</li><li>Lots of options to control appearance and behavior.</li><li>Works smoothly and quickly.</li></ul> Con:<ul><li>Does not work with every application.</li><li>A little glitchy.</li></ul>2012-02-14T04:00:00ZDon't Panic: Android's Not Dropping CDMA SupportA minor code comment in Google's source tree could lead to some drastically wrong conclusions about Android's future support for CDMA.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232600753?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors It's a little one liner buried on the Android source code web pages. If you're reading quickly, you might miss it there on <a href="http://source.android.com/source/building-devices.html" target="_blank">http://source.android.com/source/building-devices.html</a>: "No CDMA devices are supported." Wait, what? Excuse me? <div style="text-align: center; padding-bottom: 10px; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; width: 210px; padding-right: 10px; float: right; padding-top: 0px"><img border="0" hspace="0" alt="Android" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/news/2012-February/droid450.jpg" width="200"></div>When the first Android code was released, there was no support for CDMA. The first CDMA implementations were not far behind, though, and vendors contributed code to the Android open source code base. Android phones on the Verizon CDMA network were popular and did very well; in fact, they continue to do quite well. Why in the world would Google suddenly abandon CDMA? Is Google going to orphan all those carriers? What is Verizon going to do for its newer phones? If my current Droid RAZR is in an area will poor or absent 4G LTE coverage, it fails over to 3G CDMA. Will future phones not be able to do that? Are we gaining insight into how things will go at Motorola Mobility once the soon-to-be-completed Google acquisition closes, any day now? Will a new Google-run Motorola no longer make CDMA devices? Stop the (digital) presses! CDMA is getting demoted to cellular second class citizen! A vast sea change in the cellular business is upon us! Or... not. Unfortunately for those that enjoy the dramatic, the reality of this bit of news seems to be considerably more mundane. The above one-liner really says that the Android CDMA support is no longer in the open source domain. This isn't much of a surprise when you come right down to it, and it actually makes perfect sense. Inside of the Android architecture is a block called the RIL, or Radio Interface Layer. Each network provider has to implement an RIL daemon and a vendor RIL library to implement vendor-specific (read: network-specific) plumbing to make a phone both work and play well on a particular network. So why would you put code specific to just one vendor into the open source domain? Is it code that can't be used in other networks? Code that might be proprietary? According to a source inside a US-based producer of cell phones that is about to be acquired by Google: "You wouldn't." The code base mentioned in source.android.com is perfectly capable of being used on CDMA, as long as the individual vendor adds their own code for CDMA support. The LTE-enabled Motorola XOOM and the WiFi-only Motorola XOOM, for example, are definitely not two completely different implementations. The LTE version includes Motorola code to implement the LTE and CDMA capable RILs -- code that is, again, not in the open source domain. CDMA still lives on Android. Conclusion: Nothing to see here, folks. Move along...