Less than a month after NewToy's purchase by social game giant Zynga, the newly re-branded Zynga New York has announced plans to bring a version of its hit iOS crossword board game Words With Friends to Android devices by the end of the month. In an announcement on the Words With Friends Facebook page, the company said the Android title would be fully compatible with the iOS version of the game, which the company said had been downloaded to over 10 million devices as of last October. Zynga released...

Google built on the buzz swirling around its forthcoming Android 3.0 operating system for tablets during an event showcasing the Honeycomb platform tailored for tablets. After a brief introduction at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., Android lead Andy Rubin passed the torch to Hugo Barra, product management director for Android, and Chris Yerga, Android engineering director for cloud services. Barra whizzed through an array of demos using Motorola's soon-to-be-launched (as in late February,...

The Dell Streak 7 is an Android tablet with an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and Android 2.2 operating system. While its little cousin, the Dell Streak 5 is basically a large smartphone that can connect to the internet over 3G and make phone calls, the Streak 7 doesn’t officially support phone functionality. Dell and T-Mobile are offering it as a standalone tablet with 3G and WiFi access. But Jenn K. Lee at StreakSmart discovered something interesting: If you tap the phone icon to open the contact manager, you get a phone-like user interface. And you can actually get it to bring up a dialer, show voicemail, and even initiate phone calls. The only problem is that calls always fail after a split second. I would be tempted to think the phone functionality was just a bit of legacy code that...

Originally posted on Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com, here: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/apple/the-apple-ios-vs-android-fight-in-2011.html. As TMCnet's Tom Keating mentions on his blog, there are many factors to consider in the fight for mobile supremecy between Apple, Google Android and yes, even Microsoft. Tom's point about Microsoft injecting itself into the Android relationship with carriers to become the defacto search engine has even happened already. But what...

In a matter of months, it appears that Google's Android Market has doubled in size. Numbers from AndroLib.com show more than 200,000 apps available in the store as of Tuesday. At the end of October, Google confirmed that the Android Market had surpassed the 100,000 app milestone. Google has yet to confirm the latest numbers. However, Apple's App store is still the largest source of apps, with more than 300,000 applications in its catalog. But with more than 2.5 billion apps downloaded from the Android Market, said AndroidLib.com, it seems Google's platform is gaining ground. The Android Market debuted in October 2008 with just 34 apps and nine games. Google started accepting priced applications from developers in the U.S. and the U.K. in February 2009. The very next month, the Android...

The Google Voice Search App for Android has been updated and lets you train the voice search software to respond to your vocals. The App now lets you set-up "personal recognition" which is found within settings and then its possible to fine tune the App to respond to your voice.   To see this in action Sony Ericsson has produced a video with Maria Sharapova using Google Voice Search.   Prior to the Google Voice Search update it was necessary for the user to adjust their voice to what the App found easy to understand. Now, once the App has been "trained" this is no longer a problem.   The Google Voice Search App for Android can be downloded from Android Market but it should be noted that the App is only currently compatible with phones running Android 2.2 and above.  ...

Announced by Google back in July, App Inventor for Android, the simple development system for Android phones, has now been made available to anybody with a Google account. Previously, interested users needed to request access by completing an online form. The system is intended to allow non-programmers easily to develop applications without having to write any code. Instead, the target phone is connected to a PC, and the user creates the application using graphical building blocks in their browser. On the Google Research blog, Karen Parker, the App Inventor Program Manager, claims that the reason for this change has been the high demand for access to the development system shown by users; she also cites a wide variety of applications developed by those users. Parker also...