Android

CyanogenMod—which is probably the most well-known fork of Android—lets users customize their phone beyond what Google intends, and touts having as many as 12 million active installs across a variety of devices. But the company behind the famed alternative operating system is reportedly getting a lot of attention, notably from companies that would consider themselves some of Google’s biggest rivals.

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Motorola recently concluded a giveaway for its upcoming Moto 360. The giveaway was a collaboration between Motorola and Yo app which was announced yesterday with a very simple rule. First, download and install Yo on your device, then send Motorola a Yo and wait until Aug. 28, 2014 at 3:00 p.m. CT. Easy enough, right?

Motorola would then send a Yo link to all entrants and the first 20 people to click the link would win a Moto 360. Well, that’s kind of how it seemed, but that wasn’t actually the case. Motorola successfully sent a Yo link to all who initially entered, but it was a bit more complicated than just clicking a link.

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Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage mobile app received an update today across multiple platforms. The Android flavor of the new software push mixes work with play, giving users access to their personal and business files at the same time without having to switch accounts.

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Today, Sprint announced a new international WiFi calling option that lets its customers place calls to the US, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands from over 100 countries at no additional charge. The new feature is now available to Samsung Galaxy S4 owners via an over-the-air software update, however Sprint says that support will come to other devices throughout the year.

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If you want to learn what happened behind the scenes in the tumultuous world of Motorola in the past decade, Chicago Mag does an excellent in-depth feature of the company that is awaiting approval of its sale from Google to Lenovo. Some excellent bits:

Meanwhile, in arguably one of the worst decisions ever made by a major corporate CEO, Zander struck a deal with his Silicon Valley friend Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple. Together their companies created a Motorola iTunes phone, the first phone connected to Apple’s music store. “We can’t think of a more natural partnership than this one with Apple,” Zander said at the time. Named the Rokr, the phone launched in the fall of 2005. Jobs, who introduced it, called it “an iPod Shuffle right on your phone.”

Ouch, a Shuffle…
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Sprint announced today that it’s rolling out an enhanced visual voicemail feature to select Android devices that introduces avatars for “personalized voice messages that feature talking characters (including animals, aliens, zombies and sock puppets), scenic backgrounds and voice effects.” The feature will also be available to Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA customers.
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Huawei is set to unveil its new Ascend Mate 7 next week during IFA in Berlin, however the unreleased phone appears to have been spotted in the wild prior to its big showing. A device referred to as the Chinese phone maker’s next handset recently made a cameo appearance on the Asian microblogging site Weibo, revealing a phone that is somewhat reminiscent of the HTC One Max.

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kajjMuZx8nY]

It’s no great surprise that Sony is now teasing three new Xperia 3 devices in a short video on its YouTube channel, pointing to their official announcement at the IFA next week … 
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Just a little more than a week ahead of Motorola’s press event for the Moto 360, LG tonight has officially unveiled the G Watch R. The company has been teasing the circular Android Wear device heavily for the past week, but only tonight has it become official.

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Let’s be clear off the top: there is no Instagram for Android Wear. At least, not yet. But if you are curious what it might look like, interaction designer Aleksandar Nikcevic has created a beautiful mockup of what could be Instagram for Android Wear on a Moto 360 smartwatch. 
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Motorola is expected to finally unveil its circular Moto 360 smartwatch at a press event on September 4th. We already know a lot about the device, but two key details that are missing are the price and release date. This afternoon, however, the company announced that it is giving 20 people an early chance at winning a Moto 360.

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HTC is mostly known for its high-end devices that are built with premium materials, however the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer is starting to make a splash in the mid-range smartphone space. Today, the company announced the launch of the Desire 510, a new budget-friendly LTE-capable phone that’s coming to Sprint, Cricket, Virgin and Boost Mobile in the coming months.

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Pandora Internet Radio is the latest service to bring its product over to the Google Glass world. The music streaming service’s Glassware app came out of their Hack-a-thon from earlier in the spring, Pandora says, and was good enough to share with Google and ship.

The Pandora Radio app for Google Glass gives users access to stations with the ability to control them with voice commands or the touchpad. Pandora says the voice commands allow you to select existing stations or even create new stations. Actions including music controls like play and pause require using the touchpad; favoriting and dismissing a track also requires using the touchpad for now.

Users can find the Pandora Internet Radio app on the Google’s Glassware section, and Pandora has more instructions below:
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After announcing earlier this summer that its developers conference would return for a second year in November, Samsung announced today that registration for the event is now open.
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Dropbox has today slashed its pricing and doubled the maximum storage space from 500GB to 1TB. Up until yesterday, you’d have been paying $500/year for 500GB; today you can pay just $120/year (or $99/year when paying annually) for a terabyte.

The new deal finally brings Dropbox into line with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, with Apple’s new iCloud pricing – which includes iCloud Drive – also looking to be broadly similar … 
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_I4Ab_LdxQ]

Samsung has put together a blog post extolling the virtues of the metal frame, curved corners and finish of the handset it created to go head-to-head with Apple’s iPhone, the Galaxy Alpha. It follows an earlier post on the making of the phone.

The prose is best described as stilted, but the general idea is that every element of the design has a reason behind it. Metal, we are told, offers “thinness, style and a comfortable grip.” And just in case anyone should accuse them of copying the iPhone in switching from plastic to metal, Samsung is quick to point out it started making metal phones back in 2006 – a year before the first iPhone … 
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“Know your competition, but don’t copy it.” Those words of wisdom come from the image above accompanying a message put on the entirely original – not a copy of Facebook – Google+ by Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt is promoting his new book with Jonathan Rosenberg called How Google Works due out next month where the billionaire lays out the principles that made Google what it is today.

Included with the lemonade stand image and ‘don’t copy’ caption is another Schmidt line on originality and competition. “Playing catch-up with the competition will never help you get ahead by creating something new,” Schmidt says. Google would be the “hard” boozy lemonade to the competitions’ fresh lemonade. In the case of Google Plus, the booze could be the hangouts or perhaps the photo editing features or integration with other Google products.

Now picture this tidbit from Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs:

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

It’s hard to deny that Android started looking a lot more like iOS after the iPhone’s introduction, and iOS has clearly borrowed its fair share of features from Google’s mobile operating system, but there’s no denying that Schmidt’s message could be challenged. File this one with the rest under Talking Schmidt.