Dec 7, 2010

Netflix caused a lot of head scratching in October when it started rolling out its new, disc-free Netflix experience for the PS3. Namely, different people were getting a different UI, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the differentiation. Well, it turns out Netflix was flexing a bit of its HTML5 muscle, rapidly testing different...

Dec 7, 2010

You can have your doubts about when your phone maker will finally get around to delivering an Android 2.3 update (March if you’re with HTC, June if Samsung, 2017 if you’re unfortunate enough to own a Sony Ericsson), but the smartphone dev community doesn’t work that slowly. The guys who build custom ROMs just for the sheer pride of it have...

Dec 7, 2010

You may not be able to get Android 2.3 loaded in any official capacity on your Nexus One yet — or any other phone, for that matter — but Google’s 2.3 SDK is now available, which means there’s an emulator attached, too. As with most development emulators, this one’s a stripped-down subset of the apps and settings you’d see on...

Dec 6, 2010

Why look at static images when you can get a more 3D view of the urban scene? Google’s Maps for Mobile 5 just got previewed on stage by Andy Rubin at D: Dive Into Mobile — with a prototype Motorola Honeycomb tablet, no less! The biggest visual change is dynamic map drawing: vectors instead of flat images that scale without render hiccups and will...

Dec 6, 2010

Hard to say why this here fad is just now catching on — after all, select studios warmed to the idea of putting their content onto portable flash storage years ago. That said, we’ve seen both Flix on Stix and this here contraption surface within the same month, but honestly, we’re having a hard time believing that it’s a niche waiting to...

Dec 6, 2010

Google’s really been big today on emphasizing that Gingerbread is better than ever for game development, and that’s already bearing itself out thanks to a page culled from the Android 2.3 SDK where we see a handful of new keycodes in the system clearly targeted for gaming: L1, L2, R1, R2, Select, Start, and so on. Does it have anything to do with the...