T-Mobile has finally released the Android 2.1 software update for the Motorola Cliq smartphone today, meaning Android 1.5 may finally be gone.
Until this week, about 8 percent of all Android handsets available were still running 1.5, which launched in March 2009.
The update is not available OTA yet, so users will have to download it manually. The instructions link is posted at the bottom of this article as the process is somewhat complicated.
With 2.1 comes turn-by-turn navigation for Google Maps, voice search, updated Media Gallery and Connected Music Player apps, and speech-to-text.
There will now be six more home screens, widgets can be rearranged and resized, quick actions are added, and favorites can be given a space on the homepages.
The Exchange server has been updated, as well as battery-life saving widgets such as the Power Control toolbar. Users will also get a built-in Task Manager.
More importantly, Cliq users will finally be able to download most of the apps in the Android Market. There were very few still fully compatible with 1.5.
Result for: music player
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being brokered by the U.S. government on behalf of the entertainment industry has caught the attention of the European Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx. He authored an opinion paper on several topics that include ACTA, and said he was concerned that it violated the legal rights of citizens in nations across Europe.
“The EDPS strongly encourages the European Commission to establish a public and transparent dialogue on ACTA, possibly by means of a public consultation, which would also help ensuring that the measures to be adopted are compliant with EU privacy and data protection law requirements,” Hustinx writes in his opinion piece. ACTA has already found itself in the line of fire from the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for some of its provisions.
There are fears that ACTA includes measures to enable warrantless searches of citizens and destruction of devices containing potentially pirated content. Recently in the UK, Junior business minister David Lammy said documents related to ACTA will not be put in the House of Commons library, due to the desire for other countries to keep the negotiations secret.
The European Commission said recently that ACTA will not go any further than current EU policies related to copyright infringement, and dismissed fears that ACTA will lead to border searches of iPods and other gadgets in case they contain pirated multimedia content.
“EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an iPod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this,” the Commission said at the time.
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Result for: music player
So far at Apple’s media event, the company has touted its 30,000,000 iPhone sales figures, 1.8 billion apps downloads, 75,000 apps available, iTunes 9, 100 million accounts with credit cards, 8.5 billion songs sold, Home media sharing and more. One notable announcement is the current estimated share that Apple’s iPod music players have of the MP3 player market.
As things stand, Apple says it has 73.8 percent of the market, followed by 18 percent held by “other”, SanDisk at 7.2 percent and Microsoft at 1.1 percent share. Apple’s own data shows that 50 percent of new iPod sales are to new customers (didn’t previously own one) and the total number of iPod sales is closing in on 225 million units.
The fastest growing model is the iPod Touch, which has sold over 20 million units since it was unveiled two years ago by the company. This means that 40 percent of the “iPhone platform” is accounted for with the iPod Touch (20 million sales for Touch, 30 million sales for iPhone).
Apple quoted BusinessWeek as saying, “Apple could be on the cusp of claiming the crown as the world’s leading in pocket gaming,”, referring to the use of an iPod Touch as a portable games device. To emphasize the company’s point further, it touted that the PlayStation Portable has 607 games available, the Nintendo DS has 3,680 games available, and the prices of the games for both platforms are easily higher than games sold at App Store.
It then went on to point out that technically, 21,178 games are now available from the App Store.
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