Six months after its release, Google’s Android 4.x (Ice Cream Sandwich) only accounts for 2.9% of the devices that access the Google Play store. Toss in the popular Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Color, which do not touch Play at all, and ICS probably accounts for only 1% of all Android devices. And, yet, Time Warner’s anxiously awaited TWC TV update that adds live TV streaming to the Android app only provides that streaming on ICS devices – the 1%. What’s up with that?
I ran into the Kindle app registration limit the other day. This is the result of using it on a number of devices over the years. Some of those devices are no longer in use or were test devices loaned to me. So, it was time to clean house and deregister Kindle apps on those devices. Amazon provides a landing page to do this and more Kindle devices and apps. You can find it at:
Thirty-nine (39) apps were updated for my iPhone or iPad in the past week. Here’s information about some of the more interesting updated apps.
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I was surprised to see this “news” item appear in ZDNet a few days ago: iPads go black in portrait mode with polarized sunglasses. This problem has existed since the first iPad launched in 2010. You can see a video demo of the problem that I posted back on June 5, 2010. What is surprising, however, is that Apple never fixed the problem in the next two iPad generations.
Sometime yesterday, I hit a Fitbit milestone: 3000+ miles logged on my Fitbit activity monitor.
The Bloomberg Businessweek+ app, which just passed the 100,000 subscriber mark among iPad users, officially launches for the iPhone and iPod touch tomorrow (April 11, 2012).
The app breaks the magazine replica format used by most e-magazines by providing a web-like navigation experience on the iPhone. The tabbed categories seen in the iPad version of the app is not available on the smaller iPhone display. However, the navigation system brought over from the iPad makes it fast and easy to select an article within a topic category. The content of a single article is viewed vertically. Moving to another article within a topic category is down by swiping left or right. This eliminates the need to go back up a hierarchical tree to find another article in the same category. I prefer this break away from the paper magazine replica approach. It provides faster navigation and a better reading experience.
The developers managed to keep the content download time way under typical magazine downloads I’ve experienced. They claim that an issue can be downloaded in about three minutes over a typical 3G connection. I downloaded an issue over WiFi and found it ready to read in about a minute.