Androidian

They are doing it again! If you’ve been participating last years Google I/O conference in San Francsico you might remember  those loud cheers and hefty smiles after it had been announced that everyone gets a brand new Google I/O Android device. This was not the only reason to cheer during that specific keynote but it has been a nice surprise for sure.

Well, they are doing it agaqin this year but in a different way. We just received an email including those sweet words:

“As you might have guessed, Android will have a big presence at this year’s event. To make sure you’re equipped to make the most of your Android experience during Google I/O, we’d like to mail you a Nexus One before the event. “

well, guessed we have. Google gave lots of devices to participants during local shows recently and the I/O folks might also be the perfect bunch to use those devcices. The reasoning is clear: They wanted to get rid of this looooong waiting lines after the announcement. People wasted quite a while waiting in line instead of sitting in one of those high energy sessions. Those sessions are still the main reason to be there if you are interested in whatever Google is working on/with. Well done!

There will be a Google I/O app which helps planning for the event too.

Anyways, we can’t wait to be there to learn about Android plan, GWT and all the other APIs which are waiting for us. Again. Ah well, it will also be start of year two for Google Wave. What will we hear from down under?

The “unboxing” videos of new hardware seems to be of interest for a lot of geeks who like to catch at least a glimpse of the real scenario by watching how another lucky guy unboxes this new toy everyone wants to have.

Usually quite straight forward and kinda boring the Ninja unboxing of an Nexus One package is playing in another league. Just watch them 3 small Ninja’s getting to the “meat” and have fun. Oh, don’t try this at home (as long as someone watches that is).

Once in a while the SDK shows some hickups – usually easy to solve. As this one. Today i got this error message “Error generating final archive: Debug certificate expired on …” while building an apk file inside Eclipse to be run in the emulator on a machine which has not been used for a while.

If you are using IntelliJ 9 with the Android plugin the error message looks like this:

Well, the idea to just update all components to the current state and then to compile a project to check it out on this backup development system went from a 10 min cruise to the unexpected question “Whats wrong?”.

Looking at the error message it was clear that the build process wanted to use a certificate which timed out. The Android SDK is using certificates to sign all the apk files even ther files which run in the emulator (fair enough). The cert is usually valid for just 365 days which means that you get the same error next time shortly after forgetting how you’d solve it last time.

The simple solution is to just delete the file “debug.keystore” which is stored in your home directory under “~/.android” (OSX, Linux). A Windows Vista/7  user will find the file in the “C:\Users\<user<\.android folder.

After deleting the file just “clean” your project and build int from scratch and the error should be gone.

To prevent this brain training procedure for a while a decided to generate a key which lasts 1000 days instead of just the full year. Startup the OSX terminal app or the Linux terminal and go to the “.android” folder. Delete the old certificate file first. Then issue the following command from the command line:

keytool -genkey -keypass android -keystore debug.keystore -alias androiddebugkey -storepass android -validity 1000 -dname “CN=Android Debug,O=Android,C=US”

Now there should be a new certificate file sitting in the folder which lasts 1000 days – enough to really forget how you solved this issue last time around .

Today Google has started the “Near Me Now” service for mobile devices running Android and the iPhone/iPod touch devices. This service might be tough competition to Qype and Yelp in the future – the current content quality is a good start but still has some miles to go (depending on the quality of local content provided by other services). It is also not possible to write your own reviews – the Google service shows only reviews from existing online resources.

When starting the browser you will see a new tab called “local” while the current “known” location is also shown under the search text field.

If you select the “Local” tab you will get a list of categories to search for:

Inside of the category there might be more sub categories:

If you select one of the found entries you will get some more detailled information about the entry:

It is possible to change the location for upcoming search queries and to “Starr” your personal local favorites for further reference:

We went to CES in Las Vegas to check out what kind of tech toy all those companies try to sell this year. Usually the first keynote is supposed to pave the way for all the others and to give some hints. Not this time. Steve Ballmer from Microsoft had the opportunity to show the world how the mighty gigant will cope with the ever growing pressure coming from the competition called Apple, Google and the likes. They failed.

The keynote started with a power outage and this has been the best part of the event since we could talk with others about tech news (i came from a nice Samsung event with lots of sparkling ideas). After about 20 minutes Ballmer finally was able to start his keynote. And he talked about Windows 7 (the one which does what Vista was supposed to do years ago). And he’d talk about Windows Mobile (the old new and long delayed 6.5 that is). No news about Windows 7 Mobile, which is expected to be announced/showed off in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress in february.

We heard about how successful that mighty Xbox360 (some years old) is including the info that the rumored new version may be in the shops this holiday season (including the project Natal natural gesture recognition stuff which actually IS interesting). Then we saw a nice demo of a new version of Halo. We saw and heard that the good ol’ arcade games are now officially supported on the XBox and will be released in the thousands as a current stream of excitement for us arcade afficionados over the next years. Arcade games from the 80’s as the game winning idea? Gotta kidding me.

We heard about the Mediaroom software which could be used on PCs now. Capable of streaming 4 HD streams – if the streaming source could provide this feature at all.

And we could get a glimpse of a new “slate” device product family. Ballmer did not mention any activity from Microsoft directly but showed just 3 prototypes from third party devices. One from HP seems to actually work, but runs plain Windows 7 for now. He had the chance to lead the slate crowd with a real announcement including convincing ideas. Failed. Will it now be Apple with the iSlate announcement end of the month which gets the attention? We would not be surprised.

I must admit that i usually had fun watching a Microsoft keynote at CES in the recent history once in a while. I liked how Conan O’Brien has been chatting with Bill Gates some years ago for example (i remember that some demos did not work either). Or Bill doing the first Mobile/CE announcements some more years back.

This latest keynote with Ballmer has been a boring experience from start to finish. At least i was out fast catching the Monorail which got me outta there fast an easy. The power outage is the only thing people will remember.

According to an press inviation the Korean company Inbrics is about to annouce an Android based MID (Mobile Internet Device) as part of a entire media device ecosystem (IPTV, Server, PC etc.) during the upcoming CES 2010 in Las Vegas. There is a short video which shows the general idea. No further information is available currently.



The video shows the typical use cases for a “follow me” scenario with the MID being a main part of the story.

We will check out what’s going on in regards to Android during CES and post our results here.

Motorola published some technical data for the upcoming XT800 device as part of the MotoDev event which will be held in Beijing, China January 13th.

It will run on a OMAP 3430 CPU at 550 MHz (the Beagleboard an Steroids), has 256 MByte RAM and 512 MByte Flash ROM (130 MByte available for the user). The device sports a capacitive 3.7″ WVGA display at a resolution of 480×854 pixels, a 5 MPixel camera (capable of taking videos up to 720×480 pixel) and supports GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and CDMA 800/1900. According to the data sheet the device is able to render videos up to the 720p resolution.

The data connection does not seem to be too fast with EVDO Rev A. and GPRS support.

The XT800 comes initially with Android 2.0 (API level 5) according to the official information.

More info here.

Motorola has also announced the next release V 1.1 of  the Eclipse based MOTODEV Studio for Android. Information about the tool is available here. Direct download.