Over the last ten years I’ve made a few toy Android apps, mainly to see if I can, but sometimes to scratch an itch. That itch has returned, and wow, the first-time experience for getting started with Android Studio really really hasn’t gotten any better. Download and install: fine The first sample I want to try: requires a Canary version of Android Studio T...

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Android phone Android tablet iPod touch iPhone iPad 2 x laptop (Windows Vista) desktop (Ubuntu) TV (Samsung) The browser in my Nintendo DSlite and 3DS is Opera. I don’t use the desktop version of Google Talk, nor Windows Media Player so my most frequent exposure to Trident is probably via Skype. I almost f...

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At first blush I didn’t know what to make of Google’s new iOS and Android app, Currents, other than it is an almost infinitely better way to consume The Guardian than their own Android app. After a few hours I’ve got a much better idea, and broadly, I’m not impressed. No URLs, No view-source and half the content I’ve read seems to be ...

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I have a Motorola Milestone and on the whole I’ve been happy with it. There have been a few issues which affect me (all introduced by Motorola themselves) but hopefully these will get resolved with

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My phone runs an app that idenitifies the song that is currently playing on the radio and an app to then buy and download that song, or the album it’s from. The two are seamlessly linked. I am probably late to this, but listening to 6music whilst I have both Shazam and the

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Droidbox pro (a dropbox client that came out months before the official one, and still seems better) Jewellust (a bejeweled clone) BeyondPod (a podcatcher. I have stopped using this since I realised it was trashing filenames)...

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As I recently wrote, I have a new-found interest in ebooks (I also bought four new textbooks from O’Reilly using a BOGOF offer to pick up 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know, Beautiful Code and The Art of Agile Development). I mainly rea...

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I’ve now read three books on my phone (you can see which ones here). I never thought it would be possible to read on a screen that wasn’t designed for this purpose; I was sure that you’d need a Kindle or Nook-type screen to be able to read in comfort and for long periods of time.

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How hard would it be to wire up mics and speakers in every room and have them connected to an Android device (even a phone) which is permanently looking to do a voice-driven search provided there is a three second gap before the word “house” (or, y’know, HAL, Gort ...

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Just before Christmas I got a Motorola Milestone to replace my Nokia N95. At the time it was the latest and greatest Android device to be released in the UK, and it’s my first non-Nokia device in a decade. All in all, it is not the step change I was hoping for in upgrading f...

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