Archive for January, 2010

Developer Labs World Tour in your City?

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Android Developer Labs
Hi Android programming folks,

Perhaps you already read this notification on the Android Blog about the Android Developer Labs World Tour. Google’s Android team will go on a trip and tour the world and host developing sessions in quite some cities all over the world. So if you are interested to get direct info from the Android team and your hands on new hardware (probably the Nexus One) just register at the end of this article.

Share your Developer Labs Tour with us!

If you are participating in one of these sessions would you mind taking one or two photos and share them with us? I am sure, that there are quite some developers out here who are not living in one of the mentioned cities and cannot go to such sessions. I will be attending one at least will share my shots with you guys. So if you would like to share yours as well, check out the following short instructions on how to let me know of your shots.

How to submit photos:

  1. Upload your photos to flickr or Picasa.
  2. Tag them with www.androiddevelopment.org

I will then put them up here on the blog so everyone can take a look how your session looked like! :)

Developer Labs World Tour Schedule

North America

  • Austin, Texas – Feb 4
  • Seattle, Washington – Feb 8
  • Waterloo, Ontario, Canada – Feb 8
  • Washington, D.C. – Feb 9
  • Mountain View, California – Feb 10
  • Cambridge, Massachusetts – Feb 11
  • New York, New York – Feb 12

Europe

  • London, UK – Feb 2
  • Paris, France – Feb 8
  • Berlin, Germany – Feb 10
  • Zurich, Switzerland – Feb 13
  • Madrid, Spain – Feb 13

Asia

  • Singapore – Feb 28
  • Taipei, Taiwan – March 3
  • Hong Kong – March 4

Register for Developer Labs in your City!

Nexus One – Unboxing Photos

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Nexus One - Unboxing
Like mentioned before, I ordered a Nexus One. Just 5 days after ordering the phone, it arrived here (in Hong Kong). The phone’s box looks kind of like an Apple product box. Plain white, not much written on there and a bit stylish. However, it doesn’t reach the Apple “stylishness”.

It still looks nice and delivery via DHL was no problem at all. I could track the package since it started shipping from the US. Google Checkout showed that the package was sent out from “Google Phone Webstore” and then the DHL tracking stepped in and everything was easy going. Anyway, I hope the phone is charged soon so I can start playing around with it :)

Here are some unboxing photos in chronological order:


Nexus One - Unboxing

Nexus One - Unboxing

Nexus One - Unboxing

Nexus One - Unboxing

Nexus One - Unboxing

Nexus One - Unboxing

Nexus One - Unboxing

As you can see, the phone comes with:

  • Battery
  • US Power Cord
  • Micro-USB cable
  • Phone bag with little Android

From the last picture you can see that there are three little contacts. Though there is no docking station delivered with the device I guess this is for a future docking station (probably provided by HTC or other accessories manufacturers).

Nexus One

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

Nexus One

IMHO, this is quite chic. I have to say that I am kind of surprised by the design. While the OS itself is pretty much the same on all devices; we distinguish Android phones more by their design and usability. Respectively, reviews say that the phone feels very fast – faster than all other Android phones on the market. Well, the huge processor must be there for something. But despite that the Nexus One just looks cool. I think I have to get one for “testing purposes” … :) No seriously, this is one of the pretty phones I have seen so far. Not just Android phones, I am talking about all smartphones you can compare the Nexus with. Well, the iPhone still looks great and I am actually loving the design of the new BlackBerry Bold 9700 as well.

The best thing is that you can get it unlocked without any SIM card limitation for just US$529 directly from Google. That is exactly what the developer community needs. A quasi standard phone for cheap which can be used for developing anywhere. They tried that already with the G1 for Developers but that didn’t work that well. For example, I was not able to order one because they could not ship to my country or whatever. Anyway, the Nexus One seems to be great and it will kick off the Android developer community as we get a great phone for less money!

Technical Specs

Power and battery

  • Removable 1400 mAH battery
  • Charges at 480mA from USB, at 980mA from supplied charger
  • Talk time: Up to 10 hours on 2G; Up to 7 hours on 3G
  • Standby time: Up to 290 hours on 2G; Up to 250 hours on 3G
  • Internet use: Up to 5 hours on 3G; Up to 6.5 hours on Wi-Fi
  • Video playback: Up to 7 hours
  • Audio playback: Up to 20 hours

Processor

  • Qualcomm QSD 8250 1 GHz

Operating system

  • Android Mobile Technology Platform 2.1 (Eclair)

Capacity

  • 512MB Flash
  • 512MB RAM
  • 4GB Micro SD Card (Expandable to 32 GB)

Location

  • Assisted global positioning system (AGPS) receiver
  • Cell tower and Wi-Fi positioning
  • Digital compass
  • Accelerometer

Size and weight

  • Height: 119mm
  • Width: 59.8mm
  • Depth: 11.5mm
  • Weight: 130 grams w/battery; 100g w/o battery

Display

  • 3.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen WVGA AMOLED touchscreen
  • 800 x 480 pixels
  • 100,000:1 typical contrast ratio
  • 1ms typical response rate

Camera & Flash

  • 5 megapixels
  • Autofocus from 6cm to infinity
  • 2X digital zoom
  • LED flash
  • User can include location of photos from phone’s AGPS receiver
  • Video captured at 720×480 pixels at 20 frames per second or higher, depending on lighting conditions

Cellular & Wireless

  • UMTS Band 1/4/8 (2100/AWS/900)
  • HSDPA 7.2Mbps
  • HSUPA 2Mbps
  • GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
  • Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n)
  • Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
  • A2DP stereo Bluetooth

Nexus One Landscape

While the technical specs are interesting but not that astonishing let’s take a closer look to the supported formats:

Image

  • JPEG (encode and decode), GIF, PNG, BMP

Video

  • H.263 (encode and decode) MPEG-4 SP (encode and decode) H.264 AVC (decode)

Audio encoders

  • AMR-NB 4.75 to 12.2 kbps sampled @ 8kHz

Audio decoders

  • AAC LC/LTP, HE-AACv1 (AAC+), HE-AACv2 (enhanced AAC+) Mono/Stereo standard bit rates up to 160 kbps and sampling rates from 8 to 48kHz, AMR-NB 4.75 to 12.2 kbps sampled @ 8kHz, AMR-WB 9 rates from 6.60 kbit/s to 23.85 kbit/s sampled @ 16kHz., MP3 Mono/Stereo 8-320Kbps constant (CBR) or variable bit-rate (VBR), MIDI SMF (Type 0 and 1), DLS Version 1 and 2, XMF/Mobile XMF, RTTTL/RTX, OTA, iMelody, Ogg Vorbis, WAVE (8-bit and 16-bit PCM)

Well, not much new in here too as those formats are supported by Android already. Still, I like the phone though. Well done Google!

More about the Google Nexus One: