Motorola Announces ATRIX HD Smartphone Developer Edition

After 5 months after Motorola ATRIX HD hit the market, Motorola announced it would make a developer edition of the core Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon based smartphone that comes with unlockable bootloader so that developers can play around and install their own firmware. Apparently the ability to unlock the bootloader is the only extra “feature” you get with this phone. You’ll then need to use a tool to unlock the device, lose your warranty, and start creating and flashing custom ROM to your phone. There is no plan to allow this on the “standard” edition of the phone  however, and efforts by the XDA developer community to unlock the bootloader do not appear to have been successful to date, except for some some Atrix HD bought from Ebay which already came unlocked.  Motorola ATRIX HD developer edition will be available soon for an undisclosed price, and only in the US. If […]

Make Your Own Raspberry Pi Laptop With a Motorola Lapdock

There is a very interested thread over the Raspberry Pi forums started by user veryevil where he explains how he built a Raspberry Pi laptop based on Motorola Lapdock (normally used with Motorola Atrix smartphone). This is actually a real hack, because the Raspberry Pi still have to sit outside and you need to make custom cables. But the result still looks great, and veryevil claims the system runs Linux smoothly with a resolution of 1366×768 and the battery can last for hours. Some other users have joined the party, and improved on the design with shorter cables. You can check that forum post for detailed pictures of each cables. Motorola Lapdock used to be an expensive piece of equipment, but Raspberry Pi users indicated it’s currently discounted to 69.98 GBP on Amazon UK and I found it for 81 USD on Amazon US (AT&T Version) which makes it somewhat […]

CyanogenMod 7.1 Android Released

CyanogenMod Team has just released CyanogenMod 7.1 based on Android 2.3.7. The previous version (7.0.3) was released on the 6th of May 2011. CyanogenMod 7.1 Changelog Common: Android 2.3.7 (Google) Common: Bluetooth mouse support – Scott Brady Common: Improve notification swipe-to-clear – Evan Charlton Common: Improve album-artist support in media scanner – Paul Crovella Common: Profile improvements and bugfixes – Martin Long, Danny Baumann, Robert Burns Common: RTL text improvements – Eyad Aboulouz, Eran Mizrahi Common: Wake on volume key option – Sven Dawitz Common: Support for revoking application permissions – Plamen K. Kosseff Common: Latest Superuser app – ChainsDD Common: Control brightness by sliding on statusbar – Danesh M Common: Add “copy all” to context menu – Danesh M Common: Lockscreen haptic and statusbar indicators toggle – Danesh M Common: Nicer timepicker/datepicker – Jiri Tyr Common: Configuration 0/90/180/270 rotation – Jonas Larsson, Scott Brady Common: DSP Manager bugfixes and […]

Android Open Conference 2011 Schedule

O’reilly’s Android Open Conference 2011 will take place on 9-11 October 2011 in San Francisco. This is the first time this conference takes place. According to the organizers this conference will “cover the entire Android ecosystem. Whether you’re a developer, IT pro, business decision-maker, or marketer, you’ll find the latest and best information for maximizing the power of the Android platform”. There will be keynotes, practical workshops, and expert-led sessions dealing with: Building Android apps: best practices Android internals—under the hood Development tools New frameworks Alternative languages Gaming and game development Enterprise solutions and considerations Performance and security Analytics and revenue models Multiple Android markets Promotion and consumer needs and much more Please find below the schedule for the workshops (Sunday 9th October 2011) and conferences (10-11 October 2011) related to application development and platform development during the 3-day conference. Schedule on the 9th of October 2011 for Application Development […]

Android 2.3.3 Firmware for HTC, Motorola, ZTE, Samsung smartphones

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for a number of cell phones and tablets based on the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones.  People often use it because the official firmware of their phone may not get an update or because they do not like the custom Android UI of the manufacturer. The latest version is CyanogenMod 7 (11th of April 2011) with the following: Android version: 2.3.3 Kernel 2.6.37.4 with CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler) Root access BusyBox tools Apps2SD Reboot menu – options to perform a reboot, reboot into recovery, or reboot into bootloader Input settings – Haptic feedback adjustments, trackball wake, menu unlock, music controls on lock screen Performance settings – surface dithering, JIT, VM heap size, and lock messaging in memory CyanogenMod 7 also offers user interface improvement, some pre-install apps, networking support (OpenVPN, tethering, etc..), audio […]

Android Event: Android 3.0 Presentation and MarketPlace Update

Google Android Event on the 2nd of February 2011 was divided into two part a demo about Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) features on Motorola Xoom (First 30 minutes) and an update on Android market place with the new Android market Webstore. The full event (below) lasts for around 53 minutes. If you are in a hurry, you can check the summary under the video and screenshots. During the Android 3.0 presentation, they showcased some of the platform new features such as the multitask button (e.g. to show recent apps), the grid widget, the stack widget and the new notifications mechanism. They also demo’ed backward compatibility of older apps development for Android 2.x by playing Fruit Ninja game. Then the used Gmail app to show the new features of the application framework suh as fragments, drag and drop and the application bar. They spent a fair amount of time boasting 2D and […]

Setup Citrix XenDesktop for Citrix Receiver

You may have seen the Motorola Atrix 4G at CES 2011 and its ability to run Windows 7 via the Citrix Receiver installed in the smartphone and the laptop dock. This can be interesting  for small and large businesses alike since they could do with one (and more) Citrix server and a phone for each employee without the need for an extra laptop or desktop PC. Citrix does not only support Motorola Atrix 4G and you could install the receiver on your own smartphone or tablet free of charge: Windows Mobile Receiver 11.5 for Windows Mobile BlackBerry Receiver 2.0 for BlackBerry Android Receiver 2.0 for Android iPhone Receiver for iPhone iPad Receiver for iPad Today, I’ll show how to install Citrix XenDesktop (The “server” part of Citrix) in order to run Windows 7 or any other operating systems supported by Citrix. First download Citrix XenDesktop – Express Edition. The file […]

Motorola Atrix 4G: A mobile turns into a Laptop

Motorola showcased the Atrix 4g smartphone based on NVidia Tegra 2 and running Android 2.2 (upgradable to Android 2.3 gingerbread later in 2011). It can be plugged directly into an ultra-thin laptop chassis (Laptop Dock for Motorola Atrix 4G). Motorola calls that a WebTop. The dock itself has a resolution of 1366×768 but the phone can support up to 1280×1024 in Desktop Mode. Contrary to Lenovo LePad, where the dock has an Intel iCore processor, all processor is done by the smartphone. Once in the dock you’ll be able to use the keyboard and mouse to check your emails (Gmail), play videos (720p supported, but 480p is recommended for smoothness), send SMS, browse the web with Mozilla Firefox (Add-ons are also supported) and more. The smartphone has a Citrix receiver so it can run Windows XP/Vista/7 thru the Citrix server (Virtual Machine). It also is capable of docking directly into […]

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