The Tetris for Android app, normally $2.99, is free today on the Amazon Appstore as part of the online retailer’s “Free app of the day” series. Today’s free app —an iconic tile-matching puzzle video game originally released in 1984 via a range of platforms— is available to Android users in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
Google is serious about its Nexus 7. So serious that it is advertising the product on its front page—something that it rarely does for anything. The short animation appears below the search bar and tells searchers that” The Playground is open – The new $199 tablet from Google”.
Google’s Nexus 7 is now available in more countries worldwide. The ASUS-made pure Android experience launched in France, Germany, and Spain this weekend. Pricing is theoretically the same as in the United States, but it makes for a higher cost with the Euro-premium. The 8GB model is priced at €199 and the 16GB model at €249, as The Vergefirst noted.
Google updated its availability page with the change. The chart is formatted weird, for some unknown reason, but it does display the added regions:
The Nexus 7 originally launched in June in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. It saw a huge amount of pre-orders and initial sales, causing availability issues due to demand. The situation has since improved.
Amazon officially confirmed this morning that it would open its Appstore to international users for the first time since launching in the United States last year. The countries in the initial international rollout scheduled for “this summer” include the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Amazon is inviting developers to visit its developer portal to begin localizing and preparing their apps for distribution in the new countries. It also noted developers would be able to select specific countries and set prices by market, but developers will by default have their apps made available internationally.
As part of the announcement, Amazon also explained it would introduce two new changes to the Amazon Mobile App Distribution Agreement that benefit developers. Most importantly, developers will now earn 70 percent of paid app sales starting July 1.
According to a post on Google’s European Public Policy Blog, the company is forging groundbreaking partnerships with French publishers that it believes “will put France ahead of the rest of the world in bringing long lost out-of-print works back to life.” The agreements, Google claimed, will put an end to roughly six years of legal disputes with several publishers and authors in the country. The deals will also allow Google to continue ahead in its goal to bring the almost 75 percent of books that are currently out of print and unavailable to most. The result is publishers working with Google to “promote and commercialize” scanned copies of out-of-print works:
Google’s Business Photos program, which was previously only available in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and France, is now being expanded to Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands due to the service’s positive feedback.
Since April 2010, we’ve been testing and developing the Business Photos program, which gives users a virtual peek inside businesses through interactive 360-degree imagery. After hearing your positive feedback about how showing off panoramic views of your business interiors helps you attract potential customers, we’re excited to announce further expansion of this program. Starting today, in addition to the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and France, this service is now available in Canada, Ireland and the Netherlands.
LATEST UPDATE: Google’s App Status Dashboard, an official website that offers performance information for Google Apps services, claimed earlier today that Gmail’s status went down, but the problem is now resolved less than an hour later.
“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better,” contended Google.
The service interruption only affected 2 percent of Gmail’s user-base. DownRightNow, a universal monitoring service for the Web that is similar to Google’s Dashboard, described the outage as a “widespread service disruption” that started somewhere between 12:40 p.m. and 12:59 p.m. EST. The service interruption did not seem to affect mail pushing to third-party clients.
Those who tried to access Gmail.com directly found the following “Temporary Error (500)” notice with a “93” numeric technical code:
Sony plans to expand Google TV-based set-top-boxes to Europe starting this September.
According to GigaOM (via machine-translated Les Echos), Sony France Marketing Director Stephane Labrousse said a set-top box will sell in France for €200 ($266 USD) and another box with a built-in Blu-ray player will go for €300 ($399 USD).
Aside from a France launch, Les Echos indicated a simultaneous release in Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Google TV is currently only available in the United States, but Sony announced at Las Vegas’ 2012 Consumer Electronics Show that two Google TV-compatible set-top boxes would go international within the year.
The National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties announced today that Google’s new privacy policy might violate European Union law.
The allegation comes just days before the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant planned to enact the policy that unveiled last month. Google said the updated policy streamlined privacy practices for 60 different services engaged around the globe to bring transparency and clarity.
“We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read,” explained Google’s policy website.
A portion of the letter.
The French privacy agency picked a bone with the search engine’s intent and wrote a letter (PDF) to Google’s Chief Executive Officer Larry Page that painted the new rules as questionable. The central focus of the letter inquired how Google would use the reaped private data, but it is well-known the advertising firm collects personal information from tracking cookies to build targeted ads.
“Rather than promoting transparency, the terms of the new policy and the fact that Google claims publicly that it will combine data across services raises fears about Google’s actual practices,” wrote the agency, also known as CNIL, in the letter. “Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals.”
The new policy takes effect March 1, and while users’ privacy preferences remain, the new arrangement allows Google to gather and implement user data across its services. Google is charging ahead with Search plus Your World, Gmail, Picasa, YouTube, and Google+, so it is probably just connecting all the loose legal ends to make one continuous experience….
An installation like the thing depicted above, we imagine, is definitely something CNN’s Wolf Blitzer would die to use on the set of The Situation Room, his evening newscast. To mapping aficionados, it’s an absolute dream come true. Too bad this monstrosity won’t be coming to your retailer any time soon. Stemming from Google’s Liquid Galaxy project from 2009, what began as a typical 20 percent project has turned into a 40-square meter display consisting of 48 screens that render high-resolution Google Earth content in all its glory.
It serves almost a hundred million pixels, insane! And how do you control this blown up display with so high pixel count? Using four separate multitouch screens to pinch and zoom your way around, that’s how. Combined, Google explains in a blog post, the 48 screens create a stunning effect due to the sheer size of the viewable area and the fact that life-like satellite imagery is being rendered in incredibly high fidelity. If you’ve ever seen Google Earth running on a 50-inch plasma television, you’ll know what we mean.
“We believe this to be the largest screen showing Google Earth to date”, the company wrote in the post. These are not your ma and pa’s maps, folks, though you can always try out a pedestrian version by loading this KML file in Google Earth on your computer and pretending you were at an NSA briefing in the White House situation room. Oh yes, Google will be open sourcing the Liquid Galaxy project soon and releasing the graphical interface “over the next few months”.
Remember how Samsung threatened to ban sales of Apple’s next iPhone the second it becomes official? They are keeping good on that promise by filing two separate motions for preliminary injunctions in Paris and Milan in an attempt to bar sales of the iPhone 4S in France and Italy. From Samsung’s corporate blog:
Samsung Electronics will file separate preliminary injunction motions in Paris, France and Milano, Italy on October 5 local time requesting the courts block the sale of Apple’s iPhone 4S in the respective markets.
Samsung’s preliminary injunction requests in France and Italy will each cite two patent infringements related to wireless telecommunications technology, specifically Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) standards for 3G mobile handsets.
The infringed technology is essential to the reliable functioning of telecom networks and devices and Samsung believes that Apple’s violation as being too severe and that the iPhone 4S should be barred from sales.
Apple has continued to flagrantly violate our intellectual property rights and free ride on our technology. We believe it is now necessary to take legal action to protect our innovation.
Samsung plans to file preliminary injunctions in other countries after further review.
In addition to mapping and navigation, the ability to control your handset with voice commands is another treat that sets Android apart from the crowd, even if other phones had voice commands before Google’s software. Pity than that Android Voice Actions were introduced last year to the U.S. audience only.
Well, Android fans overseas can breathe a collective sigh of relieve because Google announced that Voice Actions are now available to users in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. Even better, non-English speakers are able to issue Voice Actions in British English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. There are three ways to invoking Voice Commands on your Android 2.2+ smartphone or tablet:
tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen,
open the Voice Search app,
or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the “Speak Now” screen
Some of the supported Voice Actions: send text to [contact] [message]; call [business]; call [contact]; go to [website]; navigate to [location/business name]; directions to [location/business name]; map of [location].
You can get a better idea about the usefulness of Voice Actions by spending less than two minutes of your time sitting through Google’s video tour embedded right above.
This is a Samsung-branded Windows 8 tablet Microsoft is giving away to BUILD attendees today. Wanna take bets on possible actions from Apple? Go past the break for unboxing clips. Image courtesy of MobileTechWorld
The latest in the ongoing patent saga involving Apple, Google, Motorola and Samsung includes an unexpected twist as Samsung goes after iPhone and iPad with a complaint filed before a Paris district court in July. The filing alleges infringement of Samsung’s three technology patents, reportsAFP. The first hearing is expected in December of this year.
Meanwhile, patent expert Florian Müller notes on his blog FOSSPatents that Apple has filed motions to temporarily halt two Motorola lawsuits until Google completes its $12.5 billion acquisition, which shook the technology world last month. Put simply, Apple argues Motorola waived its rights to sue when it transferred patents to Google. Apple wrote:
To further its pending acquisition by Google, Motorola has surrendered critical rights in the patents-in-suit, such that Motorola no longer has prudential standing to pursue this action. According to the publicly-filed Merger Agreement, Motorola has ceded control of the most basic rights regarding the patents-in-suit
As you know, Google has transferred some of the Motorola patents to HTC, in addition to the ones acquired from Palm and Openwave Systems. HTC then used those patents to counter-sue Apple. Back to Apple vs. Samsung…
Financial Timestoday opined that Samsung needs to hit the reset button, predicting a licensing agreement of sorts provided Apple succeeds in blocking Galaxy products in the U.S. next month. Contrary to the reports, the publication thinks “Apple is restricted from taking its chip business to Samsung’s rivals in Taiwan because Samsung offers a complete package of components that other firms cannot match”. However, there are indications that Apple’s been lowering Samsung orders for some time and it’s widely believed the company is eager to take its silicon business to TSMC beginning next year.
Nearly three-quarters of Android sales in Britain during a twelve-week period ended June 12 came from people upgrading from so-called feature phones to their first smartphone. In addition, only 1.8 percent of new Android sales came from iOS users jumping ship, a Kantar Woldpanel ComTech survey reveals. The research didn’t take into account corporate sales or contracts and was based on extensive interviews with up to one million consumers in Europe alone.
Android has grown its share of total US handset market to 9.2 percent in June of this year, up over just one percent a year ago. The platform had a 45.20 percent share of the entire smartphone market in the country, while iOS fell from 30.6 percent share in June 2010 to 18.3 percent share in June 2011. A big part of this was price: Apple’s is among the priciest consumer smartphones and only 45 percent contracts offer the device for free versus 90 percent for Android phones.
The fall of iOS came as a result of the overall UK market growing at a faster pace than iPhone sales, which have been overshadowed for the past two months as Samsung’s Galaxy S II smartphone emerged as the best-selling smartphone. In the US, Android and iOS had 57 percent and 28.7 percent market share last month, respectively. Android is clearly victorious in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and Japan, where the platform enjoys a whopping 64.7 percent share of the smartphone market versus 27.7 percent for iOS.
Kantar analysts predict that by this time next year smartphones would account for nearly 50 percent of the overall handset market, thanks to more and more feature phone owners dumping their devices for smartphones. This is not unexpected because trends hint that eventually all phones will become smartphones. Other phone vendors are experiencing sharp declines around the world, especially Symbian which has been bleeding share as Nokia fights for survival.
