Website called mobile.nu discovered what appears to be “internal documents” on what looks to be Sony Ericsson’s forthcoming Android-powered phone, an XPERIA codenamed Rachael. Rachael is rumored to sport a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, HSPA & 8MPcamera. The screen size is uknown – but looks like it could be anywhere from 3.5 to 4.1-inch and yes there’s a there is a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Rachael looks like it’s an all-touch device without a physical QWERTY-keyboard.
[Via egether]
The vOICe for Android translates live camera views into sound that you hear via your phone’s speaker or headset, thus targeting augmented reality for the totally blind through sensory substitution and synthetic vision. The vOICe uses pitch for height and loudness for brightness in a left to right scan of any view. Includes a talking color identifier, talking compass and talking locator.
China Mobile isn’t projected to offer an App Store to its nearly 500 million subscribers until September, but the Mobile App Store website (mmarket.com) was found up and running today. Mostly with broken links, sure - but the implications are humongous.
China Mobile is launching their “OPhone” later this year which is slated to be an extremely customized version of Android. While HTC Sense takes Android and gives it a next gen “TouchFlo 3D” feel, OPhone gives Android a very iPhone look - at least that is how the previews appear.
Also on the site is a link for Android Market. Considering China’s censorship of the web via government, I’m wondering what type of implications this will have on the OPhone and Android Market in China. Any way you look at it, offering Android to 500 million people will certainly increase adoption dramatically.
Developers might not be all that happy as local sources are saying China Mobile will take a whopping 50% of all paid applications purchased. We’ll keep our eyes on the China Mobile App Store, OPhone and Android Market for sure.
[Via PCWorld]
Secrets for Android is an application to securely store and manage passwords and secrets on your Android phone. It uses techniques like strong encryption and auto-logout to help ensure that your secrets remain safe (assuming you use a good password!). Context-sensitive tips guide you along through its operation, making it easy to use.
Enabling the Ecosystem is a series of interviews with those people and firms that are helping to build the overall Android ecosystem.
Today we wrap up the interview with Rick Pierson of ABBYY’s Mobility Group.
AG: How accurate are the recognitions?
RP: The accuracy rate depends on two factors; the camera and the photographer. The camera has to have autofocus if you want to OCR magazine and business card sized print, the megapixels are not as important as the autofocus. ABBYY does recommend a 2+ megapixel camera with autofocus.
The person taking the photograph does have to take a good quality picture, the better the photo the higher the OCR accuracy.
When I’m demoing one of ABBYY’s applications like business card reader on a Nokia n-95 (5 megapixels with autofocus) my recognition is usually 99% or better.
AG: How fast are those recognitions? After all, mobile phones do not have screaming-fast CPUs.
RP: This depends on the size of the image being OCR’ed and the quality of the picture. On a Nokia N-95 it takes about 12 seconds once the photograph has been take to OCR the card, parse the information from the card and place it into the correct field in the handset contact list. The OCR engine running on the handset was designed for smaller OCR applications; business card reader, poster, placard, paragraph from a magazine, etc.
ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine is a flexible and convenient technology that allows you to change its setting depending on the objective and the set of goals. You can select one of the two mobile recognition modes:
The applications that will use the mobile OCR are not targeted for multiple full page OCR applications, if you want to build an application for that then we strongly suggest using ABBYY’s server based OCR solutions.
AG: If a developer wanted to deploy MOCR in their application, how much of a footprint will it require?
RP: The ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine is a compact code OCR technology and is optimized to work with small memory size systems such as mobile phones:
Exact memory requirements vary depending on the operating system and specific recognition tasks (e.g. multilingual recognition requires more memory).
We have a new algorithm for memory management which allows the system to determine the exact memory size required to process an image. This eliminates the necessity to allocate significant memory segments in advance, which has an impact on the recognition speed and the application’s capability to work reliably, ensuring efficiency and fast performance speed.
AG: Is it truly standalone, working on a disconnected device? Or does it communicate back to a server to perform the actual OCR function?
RP: The ABBYY Mobile OCR engine does the OCR on the handset without any connection to a network, it is truly stand alone. ABBYY does however also offer a server based OCR solution, this is our “full” OCR engine called FineReader 9. FineReader has more functionality however it is also 10 times the size of the Mobile version.
Illusion Labs has announced the full version of their popular Labyrinth game with over 1,000 levels. Also available is a feature that gives users the ability to create custom levels using an online level editor.
The free version of the classic wooden maze game involving balls, holes, and tons of frustration has been downloaded over over 500,000 times from the Android Market. It has been among the most popular titles in the market since its release. The game comes in both 2D and 3D flavors so players can choose which version they like best.
Ever been in an uncomfortable situation or with someone who talks your ear off? Now you can politely excuse yourself with Call Faker - just set the contact, time, and ringtone, and the phone will ring, allowing you to escape!
K9 is an experimental fork of the core android POP/IMAP client.
Primarily, K9 is focused on making it easy to chew through large volumes of email. It’s our hope that K9 leads to improvements in the core Android mail client.
Automatically share your pics and videos to Shutterfly, PhotoBucket, SmugMug, Facebook, Gallery, Picasa and Flickr.
No need to manually upload! PicPush takes care of it all while you click away to your heart’s content!!
Pics uploaded automatically when you take them (15 min delay)
ConnectBot is a Secure Shell (SSH) client for the Android platform. Its ultimate goal is to create a secure connection through which you can use a shell on a remote machine and transfer files back and forth to your phone.
