Google Earth optimized for Android-powered tablets

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

When we launched Google Earth in 2005, most of us were still using flip phones. At the time, the thought of being able to cart around 197 million square miles of Earth in your pocket was still a distant dream. Last year, that dream came to fruition for Android users when we released Google Earth for Android. With the recent release of tablets based on Android 3.0, we wanted to take full advantage of the large screens and powerful processors that this exciting new breed of tablets had to offer.

Today’s update to Google Earth for Android makes Earth look better than ever on your tablet. We’ve added support for fully textured 3D buildings, so your tour through the streets of Manhattan will look more realistic than ever. There’s also a new action bar up top, enabling easier access to search, the option to “fly to your location” and layers such as Places, Panoramio photos, Wikipedia and 3D buildings.

Moving from a mobile phone to a tablet was like going from a regular movie theatre to IMAX. We took advantage of the larger screen size, including features like content pop-ups appearing within Earth view, so you can see more information without switching back and forth between pages.

One of my favorite buildings to fly around in Google Earth has always been the Colosseum in Rome, Italy:

With the larger tablet screen, I can fly around the 3D Colosseum while also browsing user photos from Panoramio. The photos pop up within the imagery so I can interact with them without losing sight of the Colosseum and its surroundings. Also, by clicking on the layer button on the action bar, I can choose which layers I want to browse.

This version is available for devices with Android 2.1 and above. The new tablet design is available for devices with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and above. Please visit the Google Earth help center for more information.

To download or update Google Earth, head to m.google.com/earth in your device’s browser or visit Android Market. Enjoy a whole new world of Google Earth for tablets!

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9300 will come with BlackBerry OS 7

New BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 Smartphones are the Thinnest and Most Powerful BlackBerry Smartphones yet, Featuring the Renowned BlackBerry Keyboard Together with a Brilliant Touch Screen and the New BlackBerry 7 OS

Research In Motion unveiled two new BlackBerry® Bold™ smartphones. The high-performance BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones feature a stunning and iconic design that integrates an incredibly easy-to-use BlackBerry keyboard with a brilliant, high resolution, capacitive touch screen. These exceptional smartphones are built on a new, performance-driven platform powered by the BlackBerry® 7 operating system and designed to deliver the ultimate in communications, multimedia and productivity for users around the world.

"The new BlackBerry Bold smartphones and BlackBerry 7 OS are inspired by millions of customers around the world who want the ultimate combination of performance, functionality and style," said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO, Research In Motion. “These fully-loaded and beautifully crafted smartphones offer a highly refined user experience with blazingly fast performance, a brilliant touch screen and an outstanding typing experience.”

Thin, Sleek, Iconic Design

Distinguished by an iconic design and the industry's best keyboard, the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones feature the premium materials and finishes that characterize the BlackBerry Bold line. Both models have a lustrous exterior with a brushed stainless steel frame and a high-gloss glass-weave backplate. They are also the thinnest BlackBerry smartphones yet, at only 10.5mm. The quality materials and optimized design of the new BlackBerry Bold smartphones are instantly evident when held in the hand.


Performance-Driven

These BlackBerry Bold smartphones are built on a new performance-driven platform featuring a 1.2 GHz processor, Liquid Graphics™ touch screen, and support for high speed 4G/HSPA+ wide area wireless networks.

The Liquid Graphics touch screen, a key new feature powered by BlackBerry 7, delivers fast, smooth performance for highly responsive touch-based navigation, web browsing, pictures, video and graphics intensive games*. Offering up to 60 frames-per-second performance with instant UI action/response, Liquid Graphics gives customers a visually rich and immersive experience that's responsive to the touch. In addition, the smartphones feature brilliant displays with an eye-popping 287 dpi to deliver crisp, stunning visuals.

The new platform also provides support for 4G networks; the 9900 supports HSPA+ connectivity, and the 9930 supports CDMA EV-DO Rev. A and HSPA+ global roaming on GSM/UMTS networks.

NFC

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones include built-in support for NFC (Near Field Communications), a new technology that will enable many rich and exciting experiences. Through NFC, users will be able to, for example, pair the BlackBerry Bold to an accessory or read information such as a web link from smart tags by simply tapping their BlackBerry Bold to an NFC tag (eg. Smart Poster).

Augmented Reality

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones feature a built-in compass (magnetometer) to support location-based services and augmented reality. APIs will allow third party developers to take advantage of the new functionality within their applications. The new smartphones will also include Wikitude, the leader in mobile augmented reality, which overlays contextual information on what the user sees through the smartphone's camera viewfinder.

HD Video

The new BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones support up to 720p HD video recording and playback. Users can easily share their videos directly from the smartphone or sync videos, as well as music and photos, to their computer using Media Sync in the BlackBerry® Desktop Software.

BlackBerry 7

The BlackBerry 7 OS is designed to power the new performance-driven BlackBerry Bold platform. It provides an easier and faster user experience with improved browsing, voice-activated searches, the ability to manage personal content separately from corporate content, as well as additional personal and productivity apps out of the box.

The BlackBerry Browser has been significantly enhanced in BlackBerry 7. In addition to the general performance gains of Liquid Graphics, which helps deliver faster rendering and seamless panning and zooming, the BlackBerry 7 browser includes a new JIT (just in time) JavaScript compiler to improve the load time speed of web pages. The new browser also includes support for additional HTML5 elements, such as HTML5 Video.

Building upon the Universal Search feature introduced in BlackBerry 6, BlackBerry 7 expands the capability to include voice-activated search. This new capability makes it even easier and more convenient to search for content on the smartphone or web.

BlackBerry 7 also integrates BlackBerry® Balance™, which separates personal content from corporate content on the smartphone, giving users the freedom and flexibility to use the handset for personal email, Facebook®, Twitter®, multimedia, games and other apps while satisfying the very real need for corporate data to be highly secure and manageable. BlackBerry Balance works in conjunction with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server 5.0.3, which provides a number of unique IT policy controls such as wiping only corporate data from the handset or blocking work related content and apps from being copied or forwarded to personal contacts.

With BlackBerry 7 on the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones, users will also get the full version of Docs To Go® with all "premium" features enabled out-of-the-box so that users can easily work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly on the smartphone. Docs To Go also includes a native PDF viewer.

BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 Specifications

• 115 x 66 x 10.5 mm, approximately 130 g
• 2.8" capacitive touch screen display – VGA (640x480), 287 dpi resolution
• Ultra-easy QWERTY keyboard, optical trackpad
• 1.2 GHz Processor, 768 MB RAM
• 8 GB on-board memory, plus microSD slot supporting up to 32 GB cards
• NFC technology
• 5.0 MP camera, supports 720p HD video recording
• Orientation Sensor (Accelerometer), Digital Compass (Magnetometer), Proximity Sensor
• Built-in GPS / aGPS
• Dual-Band Wi-Fi® - 802.11 b/g/n at 2.4 GHz and 802.11 a/n at 5 GHz
• Bluetooth® 2.1+EDR support
• Wireless Network support:
o 9900: Tri-Band HSPA+, Quad-Band GSM/EDGE
o 9930: Dual-Band CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A, Dual-Band HSPA+, Quad-Band GSM/EDGE
• 1230 mAh removable, rechargeable battery
• BlackBerry 7 OS

* Features OpenGL 2.0 support for developers.
Source: BlackBerry Official Website

Google Voice and Sprint integration is live

Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog. 

It’s official, the Google Voice integration with Sprint is now live!

As we mentioned when we first announced the integration, there are two ways to bring Google Voice to your Sprint mobile phone:

Option 1: Keep your Sprint number: Your Sprint number becomes your Google Voice number so that when people call your Sprint mobile number, it rings all the phones you want.

Option 2: Replace your Sprint number with your Google Voice number: All calls made and texts sent from your Sprint phone will display your Google Voice number.

In both cases, Google Voice replaces Sprint voicemail and international calls made from the Sprint phone will be connected by Google Voice.

For detailed instructions on how to get started with either option, visit google.com/voice/sprint.

This integration is currently only available to Sprint customers in the United States.

Posted by Patrick Moor, Software Engineer

What is Android OS and What is Android Market

What is Android?


Android is a Linux-based mobile phone Operating System developed by Google. Android is unique because Google is actively developing the platform but giving it away for free to hardware manufacturers and phone carriers who want to use Android on their devices. Android is getting most popular Smartphone Operating system these days. It comes with a range of Google features, most notably Search and Maps, installed as standard. This means you can easily search for information on the web and for directions from your phone, as you would on your computer. This is handy for checking up on things like train times and getting directions when out and about. You can also access other Google services, like Gmail, Google Earth, YouTube and Google Calendar on an Android phone.
Android supports a touch screen and is difficult to use without one. You can use a trackball for some navigation, but nearly everything is done through touch. Android also supports multi-touch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom in versions 2.1 (Eclair) and above. Android is an exciting platform for consumers and developers.

What can an Android phone do?

Android phones are highly customizable and as such can be altered to suit your tastes and needs. You can check your Facebook and Twitter profiles through a variety of apps making it ideal for social networking. Through the calendar you can set reminders from your desktop or your phone and on the latest version of Android you can send links to and from your computer and vice versa. Another neat feature of Android is that it automatically backs up your contacts for you. When you set up an Android phone you’ll need to create a Google Account or sign in with an existing one. Every time you save a number to the address book of your Android phone it will be synced to your Google Account.
The benefit of this is if you lose your phone all of your numbers will be saved. The next time you get an Android phone and sign in with your Google Account, all of your contacts and friends numbers will be displayed in your new phone’s address book.



What is Android Market?

Android Market is a place (the equivalent of Apple’s iTunes App Store) where you can find thousands of applications that are made available by thousands of developers working on Android platform. The majority of Apps are downloaded from the Android Market. Most of these are free but there are some premium apps as well that you’ll have to pay for.

What application can I get on an Android phone?

There is a huge range of apps and games available to download from the Android Market. There are camera apps that allow you to take pictures with artistic effects and filters on them and music players which allow you to import MP3s from your and create playlists. You can customize the appearance of your Android phone with a number of wallpapers based on pictures you’ve taken yourself or downloaded from the web. There are also various on screen widgets to download which allow you to access and reconfigure the settings of your phone. You can pretty much create your own system of shortcuts and menus to suit you.Popular games available for Android phones now include Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Wordfeud and Drop 7.

How can I get paid apps on an Android phone?

You’ll have to set up an account with Google Checkout in order to pay for apps. You can pay either by debit or credit card. This takes less than five minutes to set up and is best done from your computer. Some developers choose to make their apps available to download freely outside the Android Market and directly from their own sites. In order to download these you’ll have to change some settings on your phone before visiting the site on your Android phone’s web browser.

Does Google make any Android phones?

Google makes the software not the hardware. One phone – the Google Nexus One - is branded as “the Google Phone” but is actually made by HTC, who make other Android phones such as the HTC Desire and HTC Legend. It is considered to be the flagship Android phone, even though some Android phones have bigger screens and better cameras. Of all of the Android phones, the Google Nexus One is currently always the first to receive new Android updates.

Are there any updates available for Android OS?

Google is constantly working on new versions of the Android software. These releases are infrequent; at the moment they normally come out every six months or so, but Google is looking to slow this down to once a year. Versions usually come with a numerical code and a codename that’s so far been named after a type of dessert; e.g. Android 1.5/Cupcake, Android 2.1/Eclair and the most recent edition Android 2.2/Froyo. The next expected edition of Android is version 2.3 and is codenamed Gingerbread. The dessert names of the releases are in alphabetical order. The next update is expected to be called Honeycomb and the one after that Ice Cream.

What do these updates do? Do they cost anything?

Android updates are free. The updates bring a number of new features and changes to Android each time. Generally with each update the speed and performance of Android is improved upon. Most of the high-end Android phones are scheduled to receive updates first. Most Android phones will have at least one update during their life cycle, with some having two.

Referances:

http://google.about.com/od/socialtoolsfromgoogle/p/android_what_is.htm

http://recombu.com/news/what-is-android-and-what-is-an-android-phone_M12615.html

Pakistan Nokia Mobile Phone Prices for May 2011

Nokia is the most popular mobile brands in Pakistan. Nokia mobiles are light weight, full of functionality and are cheaper in prices. They have nice after sale service and re-sale value. That's why it is among top seller mobile brand in Pakistan. Here I am sharing the latest prices for Nokia Mobile Phones. These prices are collected from Central Punjab cities and you will find a little variation in the prices when you actually go to buy them. Although these prices change every week and in the busy markets every day too. But this is the price range for month of May 2011.

So here it is.

Prices

Nokia Mobile Phone Prices in Pakistan
Mobile Picture	Model No.	Price in Pak Ruppee
	Nokia 1280	Rs 1800
	Nokia 1616	Rs 2100
	Nokia 1800	Rs 2350
	Nokia 2220	Rs 3930
	Nokia 5030	Rs 2850
	Nokia 2690	Rs 4999
	Nokia 2700	Rs 6050
	Nokia 2730	Rs 6700
	Nokia 5130	Rs 7200

Prices

Mobile Picture	Model No.	Price in Pak Ruppee
	Nokia C1-00	Rs 2330
	Nokia C1-01	Rs 3950
	Nokia C2-01	Rs 6775
	Nokia C3	Rs 9650
	Nokia C3-01	Rs 13350
	Nokia C5	Rs 12575
	Nokia C5-03	Rs 16224
	Nokia C6	Rs 21020
	Nokia C7	Rs 27750

Prices

Mobile Picture	Model No.	Price in Pak Ruppee
	Nokia X2	Rs 8250
	Nokia X2-01	Rs 7000
	Nokia X3	Rs 10750
	Nokia X3-02	Rs 11900
	Nokia X6 (8GB)	Rs 21900
	Nokia X6 (16GB)	Rs 28000
	Nokia 5230	Rs 12850
	Nokia 5233	Rs 11050
	Nokia 5250	Rs 10360
	Nokia E5	Rs 15750
	Nokia E7	Rs 47800
	Nokia E52	Rs 19000
	Nokia E63	Rs 14100
	Nokia E66	Rs 19200
	Nokia E71	Rs 20100
	Nokia E72	Rs 23500
	Nokia N8	Rs 35400
	Nokia N97 mini	Rs 28320
	Nokia 5800 Xpress Music	Rs 19650
	Nokia 6303i	Rs 10200
	Nokia 6600i	Rs 17175
	Nokia 6600 Slide	Rs 18900
	Nokia 6700 Classic	Rs 17950
	Nokia 6700 Slide	Rs 14100

Dell Studio 1569

Dell Studio 1569 laptop will continue as a member of Studio style presentation. Studio 1569 provide a simple and aesthetic feeling of the experience. Meanwhile, sports Studio 1569 laptop Core i5 450 processor and ATI Mobility Radeon HD5470 and 4GB of DDR3 1333 and 500 GB hard drive. Dell Studio 1569 laptop with a standard ABS plastic casing and matt finished design. It is not easy to leave

Video Chat on Your Android Phone

Sometimes, the expressions on a person's face can mean much more than what they say. To help you stay in touch with your friends and family, we’re launching Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones.

You can now video or voice chat with your friends, family and colleagues right from your Android phone, whether they’re on their compatible Android tablet or phone, or using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer. You can make calls over a 3G or 4G data network (if your carrier supports it) or over Wi-Fi.

  

In your Google Talk friends list, a video or voice chat button will appear next to your contacts and you can simply touch the button to connect with them. Any text chats from the person you’re talking with will be overlaid on your phone’s screen so you can read them without having to leave the video. And, if you need to check something else, the video pauses automatically so you can go back to your phone’s home screen or another app. The audio will keep going even though the video has paused. Check out how this works:




Google Talk with video and voice chat will gradually roll out to Nexus S devices in the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update and will launch on other Android 2.3+ devices in the future. To learn more about using video and voice chat, check out our Help Center.


Post content Posted by Colin Gibbs, Product Manager and Wei Huang, Tech Lead

Introducing the new Google Docs app for Android

(Cross posted on the Google Docs Blog, and Google Enterprise Blog)

Increasingly, people are using mobile phones to access information -- from email to web browsing to editing documents. Part of getting work done on the go is being able to easily access, edit and share content, which is why we’re happy to announce the new Google Docs app for Android.

With this new app it’s easy to filter and search for your content across any Google account, then jump straight into editing docs using the online mobile editors. The app also allows you to easily share items with contacts on your phone, right from within the app.

The Docs app also allows you to upload content from your phone and open documents directly from Gmail. You can also add a widget to your home screen for easy access to three core tasks: jumping to your starred documents, taking a photo to upload, or creating a new document with one tap.


And my favorite feature: Using the app and your phone’s camera, you can turn photos with text into editable Google documents with the power of optical character recognition (OCR). Just create a new ‘Document from Photo' or select the camera icon from the widget, and your converted document will appear in your documents list shortly after you snap the picture. You can also convert photos already stored on your phone by sharing them with the Google Docs app. OCR does a pretty good job capturing unformatted text in English but won't recognize handwriting or some fonts - stay tuned, it will get better over time!


The Google Docs app is currently available in English and works on Android 2.1+ phones. Try it out by scanning the QR code below or by visiting Android Market.


Let us know what you think of the new Google Docs Android app in our forum.



Posted by Reuben Kan, Software Engineer