Daily News Courier

What Sinofsky

Microsoft risks damaging the Windows ecosystem at the very moment it needs to leverage it.

Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft

Say Hello, or ??, to China

YuDian, dubbed the Chinese Siri, is available to anyone with a mobile phone in China.

You might not have heard of iFlyTek. The company is hardly a household name in its domestic market of China, either. But it has a vice-like grip on over 80 percent of the speech technology market in the People

Underwater museum in Cancun

One man’s artistic vision is distracting divers from Cancun’s threatened underwater ecosystem.

HTC Sync Manager for Mac updated

HTC offers desktop software for folks who aren't just quite ready to rely completely on the cloud for backup and file management. Its software Sync Manager, which has clients for both Windows and Mac, has just been updated for users of the latter.

Sync Manager lets you backup and manage your photos, video, music, contacts, calendar and more all on your computer — then sync with your device(s). For those of you who are more into HTC's ecosystem with this information than Google's, the source links below are likely worth a look.

Source: HTC; via: Twitter

AT&T Bets that an Ecosystem Will Innovate

To compete in the app economy, the giant telecommunications company is opening up its data to outside software developers.

To create an app that allows deaf people to use smartphones, entrepreneur Kunal Batra needed software that could turn speech into text. There was no way his startup, General Machines, would want to develop such complicated software from scratch.

Android After Dark: Sex, booze and other things we’re not supposed to talk about

It's a big world out there, and it's not all Rated G. Welcome to Android Central's NSFW section – home to sex, booze and other stories of an adult nature.

"The Android phone is for porn." Remember that? Android has at times been chastised for its open nature, allowing the big bad world to sneak in (through the front door) and appear on our smartphones.

The horror. 

But the world is not Rated G. Adults use smartphones. And adults can use smartphones for adult-type things. Sex (as it so often is) is the first thing to come to mind. From the time the first WAP browser reached a two-inch display, low-resolution naked people appeared on tiny screens. Contrary to popular belief, smartphone cameras have always been used to take more than just pictures of food. Candid photography, if you will.

Sex is just one aspect, of course. There are others. The Android ecosystem has always been open to nearly any kind of app. So we, too, won't shy away from that. This page is your portal to those stories at Android Central. Some may hit the home page. Some might not. Some might offend you. And that's OK, too. You don't have to read them.

So click with care. Read on if you like. Welcome to another side of Android, where few dare to show their faces. That's a shame. We're all adults here.

read more

Google Play Books launches in France, raises Euro bookworm tally to 5

Google announced today that it is now able to hock eBooks for customers in France, instantly opening up a new storefront with millions of books to read though the Google Play Store.

Books in Google Play were previously unavailable in France because of licensing and commercial concerns with publishers in the country. But with a lengthy legal dispute now settled, Google is able to sell digital books, including bestsellers and classics from French authors like Antonin Varenne and Dominique Sylvain.

The inclusion of France increases the ranks of European countries with access to Google Books to five (Germany, Italy, Spain, UK). It’s been an incredibly drawn out process to get more content available globally, but Google is starting to trickle out in more places this year. Though the U.S. is still the only place with complete access to apps, movies, music, and magazines in Google Play, at least one country is one step closer to getting a complete ecosystem.

The Google Play Android app should be updated shortly to reflect the new store, if it hasn’t already. French users can also head to the online version of Google Play to begin browsing and buying books, which should be readable within the Play Books app on Android phones and tablets (also readable online).

Related Stories

• Google Play has the Nexus 7 8GB model in stock, delivered in 3-5 days
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus now in stock and shipping from Google Play Store
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus now available for purchase in Play Store, ships in 2-3 weeks

Nexus 7 Review: $199 and worth every penny

The tablet market has been a difficult realm for Google to conquer. While the iPad remains the immovable king, Amazon and Barnes & Noble usurped Google by delivering successful mini tablets that rely on Android as a foundation but not an ecosystem. Even Samsung, Google’s most prolific and commercially successful partner, has expressed disappointment in its tablet efforts.

The Nexus 7 probably won

Google ‘accelerating’ development of its own voice assistant, WSJ reports

There's no denying that iOS's Siri has been a huge success for Apple, usability issues aside.  And it's no real secret that Google's been working on its own voice assistant tech at its top-secret Google X Lab for some time. So today's report that Google is reportedly speeding up work on its own interactive assistant will make for interesting, if unsurprising reading.

Near the end of a The Wall Street Journal article examining the state of the smartphone ecosystem is the news that Google is "accelerating plans to launch its own Siri competitor" for Android devices. The WSJ reports that, naturally, Google's assistant would work on Android devices, citing "people familiar with the matter."

While major mobile platforms borrowing each others' features is to be expected (hey there, S Voice), rumors surrounding Google's "Assistant" project have hinted at more than a mere aping of Siri's functionality. Google's ultimate goal, it's been reported, is more akin to the Star Trek computer than an app for looking up weather forecasts and setting reminders.

As with all developing Google technologies, there's a chance we may see something of Google's Assistant tech at Google IO next week, however we think this one's probably going to be a slower burn, even if the pace of development has quickened. Perhaps something for Android 5.0 or beyond?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

ASUS Nexus 7 tablet photo samples pop-up on Picasa ahead of Google I/O

It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re going to hear, see, and maybe even touch a Nexus 7 tablet when Google I/O 2012 kicks off next week. Supposedly, we don’t even have to wait until then to see what kind of camera that new Android tablet will sport.

An image posted to Picasa contains EXIF data containing “Nexus 7″ in the model field. No big deal; EXIF data could be faked and used to troll a bunch of snoopy tech bloggers, right? Sure, but that’s probably not what’s happening here. The data also shows that it was built by ASUS and the photo was taken at Building 44, the office on Google’s campus that houses the Android team. Somit has blocked showing who has him in Google+ Circles, but TheVerge reports seeing “people seemingly affiliated with Google” previously.

Somit’s posts since last year have all been teasing photos taken with devices, so perhaps this all an elaborate game he’s playing with us. Either way, all will be revealed within the next 12 days. That’s when we’ll find out how much truth there is to the rumors that Google has tapped ASUS to produce a low-cost tablet that still has very respectable specs. The device, which is designed to compete with the Kindle Fire and introduce more customers to the Android ecosystem through tablets, will reportedly cost $199 or less. It will have an NVIDIA Tegra quad-core processor based on NVIDIA’s Kai reference platform.

Be sure to follow Androinica on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and YouTube because we’ll be camped out at Moscone covering this and other news stories that break at I/O.

+Somit Bh via HD Blog

Related Stories

• The elusive Google Nexus Tablet will reportedly launch in July
• Recent benchmark results confirms a 7 inch Google Nexus Tablet with Android 4.1
• ASUS Transformer AiO dual-boots Windows 8 and Android on 18-inch screen.