android

With Google's future in China uncertain, Motorola and Microsoft cut a deal to put the software giant's Bing search engine on Android handsets in China.

In a statement late Wednesday, Motorola and Microsoft announced a deal to put Bing on handsets. Bing will first launch in China in the first quarter via an over-the-air update for existing handsets. New Android devices will have Bing preloaded.

The news comes as Google is nearing a decision on whether to stay in China amid security and censorship issues.

Read more of "Motorola deploys Microsoft's Bing on Android smartphones in China&… Read more

In a move to expand its franchise to a higher-end frontier of the mobile phone market, Opera Software has released a beta version of Opera Mini 5 for Android.

Opera's Mini and more feature-rich Mobile browsers are widely used in the mobile phone market, but the company faces a challenge in new smartphones using Apple's iPhone OS, Google's Android operating system, and Palm's WebOS. Those come with their own browser installed already, in those cases based on the WebKit browser project.

Mini is designed to work on less-capable phones with smaller screens, slower network connections, and … Read more

All those Android smartphone owners who have been wondering when they can ditch the outmoded Opera Mini 4.2 browser in favor of the latest beta can now unfold their pouts, stop that kicking, and remove their pounding fists from the floor. Opera Mini 5 beta for Android has arrived.

On Thursday, Opera Software pushed out the Android version of its Mini 5 browser that improves the browser experience for Java phones by leaps and bounds. The beta build is equipped with an updated interface that includes a new "speed dial" start screen featuring thumbnails of most-visited sites. … Read more

The Galaxy Spica has officially joined a handful of other Google Android handsets on Rogers Wireless. For as low as 79 Canadian dollars ($77) and a three-year commitment, customers can grab the latest Android-powered smartphone from Samsung. Featuring an 800MHz processor, a 3.2-inch 320x480-pixel AMOLED display, a 3.2 megapixel camera, GPS, and Wi-Fi, the Galaxy Spica fits in nicely with other midrange smartphones.

Keeping in line with other Samsung smartphones, the Spica, aka the i5700, offers DivX support for video playback. On the downside, the Spica is light on internal memory, leaving users up to 82MB for loading … Read more

Flixter's mobile movie-finder apps continue to dominate, providing an attractive wrapper for Flixster.com that downloads information about films, theaters, and showtimes for current and upcoming movies. Tap any entry to view a host of information, including listings times and reviews from such sites as Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, though you can also pipe in with your own. Those on a Wi-Fi network can stream quite decent full-screen previews, and if you feel no qualms purchasing tickets from a cell phone, Movies will route you to Movietickets.com for ticket sales. Movies keeps track of your ratings and movies … Read more

xScope Web File Task Browser is far from being the most beautiful mobile browser for Android. However, what it lacks in looks it makes up for in functionality. Its bundle of features includes tabbed browsing, some interesting management controls, the ability to copy text, and support for skins (you'll download the skin set separately). xScope browser tends toward flexibility, offering three ways to zoom in, open and close tabs, and switch among open tabs--including a simple finger swipe. We like the quick bookmarking, and can appreciate the task killer, even though it's not a tool we'd seek … Read more

An employee at Spanish antivirus firm Panda Security received a new Android-based Vodafone HTC Magic with malware on it, according to researchers at Panda Labs.

"Today one of our colleagues received a brand new Vodafone HTC Magic with Google's Android OS," researcher Pedro Bustamante wrote on the Panda Research Blog on Monday.

"The interesting thing is that when she plugged the phone to her PC via USB, her Panda Cloud Antivirus went off, detecting both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious," he wrote. "A quick look into the phone quickly revealed it … Read more

The European Parliament is, somewhat unexpectedly, riding to the world's rescue by demanding that the super evil ACTA agreement be negotiated in the open and that the three-strike ISP provisions be taken out. Well, hot damn! That's big news! I mean, that Cisco router is big news, too, but it just doesn't have the same sexy factor.

Cisco’s big announcement was a really fast router; AT&T has tested it http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10466043-266.html http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0594332.htm… Read more

Chinese manufacturer ZTE is prepping for the release of no less than four Android smartphones later this year. Teased last month at Mobile World Congress, the details are now starting to spill out. The handsets will be called the Blade, the Racer, the Mercury, and the Smooth. Each appears to speak to a different demographic with various form factors and specs.

First up is the Blade, which comes with a 3.5-inch touch display with an 800x480 resolution, an FM radio, Wi-Fi, GPS, and Android 1.6. The Smooth bears more than a passing resemblance to the Palm Pre and … Read more