Continue reading Box for Android updated to 1.5: adds widgets, uploading from any app, magic

Box for Android updated to 1.5: adds widgets, uploading from any app, magic originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Imagine watching professional football religiously all year long. Then imagine that it’s finally time for the Super Bowl, and, suddenly, whoever is in charge of the NFL announces that some team you forgot even existed is playing, because it won a whole other football season that was happening on the Internet. Ridiculous, right? Well, that’s what’s going on with Top Chef this season.

This week, Bravo.com premiered the first episode of Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen, an online-only series in which two chefs, eliminated from the TV show, compete head-to-head in one final challenge. The winning chef each week goes on to cook against the next eliminated chef; this proceeds until the finale, when the remaining chef will be able to rejoin the competition.

Last Chance Kitchen is fine, on a creative level — it’s a well-paced and professional package that adheres closely to the show’s format (overly dramatic music stings and all). But as a case study in integrating web content into a pre-established series, it’s a potential disaster, largely because of its distribution.

I will not make fun of the fact that the Bravo website, in lieu of embeddable video, is offering a widget to distribute Last Chance Kitchen — because I am kind, and also because the series is thankfully also available on Hulu.

But while super-fans may already be subscribed to Top Chef on Hulu or visiting Bravo.com on a daily basis, for most of the show’s 1.6 million viewers, the only way they’ll remember that Last Chance Kitchen exists is if the show uses precious ad minutes to nag them into going online and watching. As the Los Angeles Times’s John Horn complained, “you have to get up from the TV, start up your laptop and (of all the indignities!) be forced to watch the commercials.”

If Last Chance Kitchen were Hulu Plus and available on phones, tablets or other connected devices, that would be a significant improvement. Unfortunately, it’s note. In fact, Hulu’s note about Bravo programming is one of the more peculiarly-worded ones I’ve seen: “Hulu can offer a select number of full-length episodes from Bravo’s lineup each calendar month. The episodes featured and when they are posted are at Bravo’s discretion.” In short: Don’t blame us. It’s Bravo that’s being stingy.

Last Chance Kitchen also proves problematic when you consider how it changes the competition. Let’s say the winner of this first Last Chance Kitchen (no spoilers) goes on to dominate each subsequent episode — competing against chefs who were eliminated later and are thus, by the logic of the show, better chefs. While winning 12 cook-offs against arguably more talented cooks is an impressive feat, it’s an entirely different experience than the challenges the actual cheftestants will be going through — challenges meant in theory to evaluate each chef’s skill in handling a variety of situations. And so when the winner of Last Chance Kitchen re-enters the competition after not having been on television for potentially weeks, he or she will be altering the narrative of the show.

Top Chef has been nominated for Emmys for its efforts to integrate the web and TV in the past — some of the work they’ve done with online polling and Twitter is groundbreaking. In theory, this is what convergence culture creates: the blurring of lines between television and web to tell a story richer than the sum of its parts. But Last Chance Kitchen may well be a major misstep for the show.

That’s because, when creating an experience on multiple platforms, you either have to make sure that each element can be enjoyed separately with no consequences, or make sure that all elements of the experience are easily accessible. For Last Chance Kitchen, neither of these things is true.

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At a Hong Kong press event to unveil the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, Google finally shared details of Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), the next version of Android. ICS is meant to clean up the user interface found in Honeycomb, the current platform for Android tablets, and unify the platform for both smartphones and slates.

Based on the presentation I saw from Google representatives, the company appears to have done an admirable job on both counts. Here’s a look at the new platform:

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A cleaner, more consistent look and feel

The user interface is more consistent with left and right swipes a central action for managing information and applications. A new font, called Roboto, is easier on the eyes and looks great on the high-resolution screen of the Galaxy Nexus. And the useful, customizable widgets found on Android tablets make their way to the handset.

Matias Duarte, Android’s head of user experience (and the main designer for Palm’s webOS ), said three design principles were used for ICS because “people like Android and people need Android, but people don’t love Android.” The new edition of Android was built to be “enchanting, easy, and to make me awesome; it’s powerful and smart,” claims Duarte.

Some of that power and smartness is seen in the new notifications, which can be accessed from the lock screen. Individual notifications can be swiped away leaving only important items. And the platform now offers facial recognition to unlock the phone; if the handset recognizes you via the front camera, it unlocks.

Text input is vastly improved with an updated keyboard that uses in-line spell checking and a new cut/copy/paste method. Selected text can be copied to the clipboard or dragged and inserted on screen. Voice recognition for input is now “instant”; as Duarte spoke during a demo, the handset began typing what he said without waiting for him to finish.

Core app updates

Hugo Barra, Android’s director of product, showed off core application updates, including the browser, Gmail, Calendar, Data Usage, Photos and People. The updated web browser supports up to 16 tabs. A tab can be closed by — this should sound familiar by now — swiping it off the screen. Apps are closed the same way. Offline reading mode, incognito browsing and bookmark synching with Google Chrome on the desktop are also supported.

Gmail still doesn’t have a unified Inbox, but now has two-line previews and a contextual action bar at the bottom. Offline search is available for 30 days, but the time period is user configurable. The new Calendar looks cleaner and supports pinch-and-zoom to view event details or different time periods.

New to Android is a native data usage meter showing a graphical display of mobile broadband usage. That’s handy in light of bandwidth caps and ICS support the setting of alarms to help consumers manage their data use. Geeks will like the drill-down data usage by application where they can disable background data at the app level.

The new Photos application is revamped to make it easier and quicker to snap images. From the lock screen, the camera is accessible with one tap and the zero-shutter lag demonstration shows that ICS — on the Galaxy Nexus, at least – can take photos as fast as you can hit the button. Filters are now part of the photo app and the camera supports face detection for portraits or group shows. A new panorama mode is added as well.

People reminds me of the old webOS Synergy function: All social network connections for a given contact are integrated on their People card. Swiping right shows a contact’s aggregated social status updates. And very social ICS users will like the new Android Beam feature that works with a near-field communications (NFC) chip. Tapping two phones together beams data from one to the other: YouTube videos, People records, photos, web pages, maps and more.

I can’t pass final judgment on this version of Android until I use it myself, but based on the demonstration I saw, it’s safe to say that Ice Cream Sandwich is a large, positive step forward for Android. It removes many of the inconsistencies found in the current versions while improving and simplifying the feature set of Google’s mobile platform.

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The next U.S. version of Samsung’s Galaxy S II phone is due to arrive in AT&T stores on Sunday, so to help prepare potential buyers, we have a short video overview of a review unit. The Android 2.3.4 smartphone has a peppy dual-core processor that makes this one of the fastest Android phones yet to hit the market. But it’s more than just a phone with a speedy chip.

The 8 megapixel rear camera shoots excellent images while the front-facing 2 megapixel camera has worked well for Google Talk video chats. I had a cross-country video call with my son on the Galaxy S II and he thought I was at a computer; that’s how good the visual clarity is. You can also see in the video of how Samsung integrated movement sensors into the interface. By tapping the screen and moving the phone, you can adjust widget placement and zoom in or out of web pages or pictures.

While the Galaxy S II has the latest smartphone version of Android, a new one is coming soon. Known as Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Google’s mobile platform is meant to unify features between smartphones and tablets.

I received an invite to a Samsung event on Oct. 11 which also has Google’s logo on it. Given the expected timing of Ice Cream Sandwich, it’s likely that the new operating system will be unveiled at the event on a Samsung device; perhaps the next Nexus phone.

Early in the week, the newest Android tablet was launched, but you wouldn’t know it ran on Google’s platform. Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, a 9 slate with 7-inch screen and customized user interface that completely hides Android. With the Kindle Fire, Amazon is taking a similar approach to that of Barnes and Nobles’s Nook Color, with one huge exception: Amazon has a much broader media ecosystem for its tablet.

The Kindle Fire is focused on Amazon’s content libraries for e-books, magazines, movies, television shows, and music. The Fire also comes with an email client and access to Amazon’s AppStore, which is a curated store of third-party Android applications. A Wi-Fi-only device, the Fire also has a hybrid web browser called Amazon Silk that works with Amazon Web Services to deliver content faster.

Android purists may opt for full-featured Google tablets, but for the mainstream audience, the Fire looks compelling. It delivers most of the functionality that consumers want in a small, portable device and does so at a far lower price than most competitors. See our first look video here from the Kindle Fire launch.

But there’s potentially good news for those that want a traditional tablet. Priced at 9, the Fire may put pressure on tablet makers to build devices that sell in the 0 to 0 range, instead of 9 as we’ve seen in the recent past. The HTC Flyer received a permanent 0 price cut that starts today: The capable 7-inch slate now costs 9; just days after Amazon announced its 9 Kindle Fire.

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The FunBox is a bedside alarm clock but it’s also a widget-running Chumby, which means it’ll let you check your twitter feeds, load up a track on Pandora or do other inappropriately stimulating activities right before catching some Zs. The device has just passed through the FCC and its paperwork reveals a 3.5-inch (possibly resistive) touch screen, a 454MHz processor, 1GB DDR memory, SD card slot and a USB port for an external drive. We couldn’t tell you price or availability at this stage, but with top smartphones increasingly coming with night dock accessories the FunBox is hardly likely to find a guaranteed perch beside our pillow.

Still awake? There’s a Chumby FunBox app for that originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When the Fanhattan iPad app launched in early June, the idea was to help viewers access the movies and TV shows they wanted to watch across a number of video services available on the Apple tablet. With a unified search function and access to advanced metadata, as well as a smart navigation system, Fanhattan delivered an easy way to find their favorite content wherever it was. The one thing it lacked was a social discovery and recommendations mechanism. That’s been corrected in the latest update, which went live Tuesday.

Fanhattan is betting big on integrating social networks — especially Facebook — which will not only provide more interesting content for users to watch, but will allow them to share their own interests with friends. Once signed in to Facebook on the app, Fanhattan users will be able to get recommendations from their social graph, including movies and TV shows that their friends have liked on the social network.

Users can also “Like” content of their own on Fanhattan, which serves a couple of purposes. First off, liking a piece of content will help Fanhattan recognize what types of movies and TV shows a user is interested in, which will eventually help build its recommendations system. Secondly, the Like function allows users to share their interests with their friends, giving others an idea of what they’re watching.

Liking a show also helps surface posts about related movies, shows and actors on user Facebook walls. As part of the integration, the company has introduced a Fanhattan widget for Facebook, which posts likes to user’s Facebook walls and appears in their friends’ news feeds. When a user likes a piece of content in the app, the widget will let their friends see where they can watch those videos.

But the social elements don’t end with Facebook — Fanhattan has also added Twitter integration to let users participate in conversations around their favorite TV series or movies. Users can now directly follow conversations from within the app, without having to go to Twitter.

Finally, Fanhattan has added support for Vudu, adding a whole new source of streaming content that can be watched on the iPad. The app already let users search between native apps from Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes and ABC. By adding Vudu, Fanhattan will, for the first time, also surface content from within the iPad’s Safari browser. That’s because, rather than introducing an app, Vudu is making its streaming video-on-demand service available via a mobile website.

Fanhattan is just the latest video discovery company to embrace social networks for finding out about new videos. Apps like Boxee, as well as web experiences from startups like VHX.tv enable viewers to connect with their friends on social networks and see what they’re watching and sharing. But Fanhattan is the first to get integrated with premium content apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus, which lets them link back directly to Hollywood studio and broadcast TV content.

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