Google Android News Android Forums |
- Mystery ASUS K009 unit shows up at the FCC doorstep, tries its best to hide its Nexus 7 colors in the process
- 30 seconds not long enough? How to create a longer HTC Video Highlight
- TalkAndroid Daily Dose for June 13, 2013
- Google Gesture Search update gets multilingual
- EU committee investigates Google’s alleged anticompetitive tactics to boost Android’s market share
- Sony now allowing 3rd party firmware for their SmartWatch platform
- Be part of Chrome’s latest experiment with Cube Slam
- Google Music app updated and brings forth some nice improvements
- Google+ app for Android receives a fairly huge update
| Posted: 14 Jun 2013 01:32 PM PDT
It’s no secret that while many of us out there REALLY don’t like custom Android skins, most (if not all) of the major prominent Android manufacturers continue to churn out devices with skins featuring pretty colors and flashy features— that is, unless you’re Acer of course. The manufacturer recently took some time to highlight why it takes the Android platform and decides to add few sprinkles, rather than go all out with a “unique” experience for its various devices. As highlighted in an interview with TechRadar, Acer’s global smartphone division president S T Liew asserts that:
So in essence, Acer believes that the core platform is fine as it is. Naturally there’s always room for improvement, especially with Android’s openness— so Acer decides to put touch on some of the lesser-tier items like the camera apps or implementing cool and unique widgets to differentiate itself from the likes of say, Samsung (which often is in Apple’s doghouse and all). And naturally, this is win-win for both the manufacturing giant and consumers at the same time. The end effects are not only prompt updates for its devices— which results in happy device owners, but also allows Acer to save a buck or two by not having to spend extraordinary resources trying to rewrite the Android code and all. Sounds like some pretty fair and welcome thinking to us. source: TechRadar Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| Posted: 14 Jun 2013 12:35 PM PDT
You know what they say gang: when there’s smoke, there’s probably a fire. So it’s only fitting that we get more details about another version of the Nexus 7 refresh that we’ve been hearing so much about lately. A mystery ASUS K009 unit recently passed through the FCC testing labs and highlights a bunch of really interesting features of the device including a sweet quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro (APQ-8064) processor, a 4,000mAh Li-ion battery and some welcomed 4G LTE radio frequencies on-board. So all in all, this device looks to be another version of the refreshed tablet that’s on the way. Of course the same unit is listed for “marketing purposes”, but the hope is that we are getting our first glimpse of what should be another variant of the new Nexus 7 models.
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| 30 seconds not long enough? How to create a longer HTC Video Highlight Posted: 14 Jun 2013 08:07 AM PDT
Have you ever found yourself in a situation in which you have too many Zoes and pictures for the HTC Highlight Video? 30 seconds is a decent amount of time for most circumstances, but not always. There are many times in which you might have more than ten Zoes along with videos and other pictures. 30 seconds isn’t going to cut it so I came up with a very simple way to make sure you are able to capture all the memories that you want using HTC’s amazing Video Highlights feature. Of course, if you have a desktop with video editing software, you can do just about anything you want, but most people don’t have the time to fool around with that stuff. Just head on past the break for two very simple methods to get the job done. I will show you how to make a 60-second version, but you can apply these concepts to make any length as long they are in 30 second increments.
Option 1 – Using your phone**If you would rather watch how this is done, skip to the video below. Split your event Since the HTC Video Highlight feature cannot make a 60-second (or longer) clip, you need to make two 30-second clips. You can’t just make two 30 second clips from the same event because chances are that you will have too much overlap and you will still have a hard time getting all your clips in the final product. So the first thing you want to do is create two separate events. If you need to make a longer video, you can split your clips into more events. Just go to the Events folder in your Gallery and long press on the Event in question. Select “Split to” and choose the clips you want to move. I usually select about half of the clips (assuming you want to do a 60-second video). After you have selected your clips, just tap “SPLIT” at the bottom right, and you will return to the event page. Just hit the plus sign at the top right to create your new event. Name the event the same name, but add a “2″ to it. So if your original event was “Rob’s Birthday Party”, just make this new event “Rob’s Birthday Party 2″ so it’s easy to keep track. Now you have two events and each event will produce an automatic Highlight Video using different clips with no overlap. After you have completed this guide, you can combine the clips again by long pressing the new event that you just created and select “Merge to”. Note: HTC has a better way to do this (instead of splitting events), but unfortunately it isn’t working at the time of this post. When playing a Video Highlight, you can tap the three dot menu at the top right and choose “Select Content”. You can choose the clips that you want to use for the video highlight, but unfortunately there is some sort of bug and it doesn’t work. HTC is fixing this with an update. Depending on when you’re reading this post, you might be able to use this method if you received the update. Save each video highlight as a separate mp4 Now we need to save the Video Highlight created from each Event. I am assuming if you are reading this guide, you know how to get to your video highlights and make adjustments. If not, see our previous guide. Go to the first event and make any changes you want to the Video Highlight in terms of effects and/or shuffling to your satisfaction. Once you have decided on a Video Highlight that you like, hit the three dot menu at the top right while the video is playing, tap save, name the file to whatever you want (or keep their default), and tap OK. After about 30 seconds, the video will be saved to your gallery in the “Video Highlight” folder under “Albums”. You need to do this for the 2nd Event that you created as well. Assuming you titled the events the way I instructed, you should be able to keep the defaults names. Note: You can either choose the same effect for both Video Highlights or choose a different effect for each. Cut the portion of the your chosen song Since HTC doesn’t offer longer versions of their jingles, you will most likely need to use any other song you want. You could leave HTC’s music, but you will find that it might not transition properly between the two 30 second clips. It’s not that hard to use your own song, and we already did a guide on it. The below information is directly from that guide with the only exception being the length of the song you need to cut. The song you want to use needs to be on your HTC One. You want to grab a free app from the Play Store called ringPod, which edits mp3 files for ringtones. I know these apps are a dime a dozen, but I prefer this one because it has an easy option to fade the last few seconds of the song, which is important. Open ringPod and select the song you want to use for your video. You will then see the first 15 seconds of the song already highlighted. What you want to do is tap the box next to “End” (at the bottom) for the end time and change it to 62.00 for 62 seconds. The selected area will now change showing 0 to 62 seconds. You can now hit play and listen to this “selected area”. If you want another area of the song, slide the selected area over different parts of the song keeping the 62-second limit. I should also point out that the highlight video will show as 60 seconds, but definitely make your song 62 seconds to make sure the video editor doesn’t try to loop it. If you are going to join 3 or more highlight videos, you will need to adjust the length accordingly. After you are happy with the chosen part of the song, hit the three dot menu at the top right and select “Fade and Volume”. In rare instances, you can skip this step if the song sounds right, but most of the time you will want to add the number of seconds for a “Fade Out”. I have been using 4 seconds, but you can play with it and decide what you like. By using 4 seconds, it will start fading right when the HTC Ad appears at the end of the video. Now all you have to do is save the selected area as a new song. After tapping the disk icon at the top, you can choose either alarm, music, ringtone, or notification for the type. It really doesn’t matter what you choose, but I use “music”. This way all of my edited songs will be in the “music” folder. Name the file whatever you want and tap “Save”. Don’t worry, your original song will still be intact. Now you have two videos (or more) and a song. The only thing left is to join them all in holy matrimony. Combine the Video Highlights and the Music I recently reviewed WeVideo, which is a video editor. There are a number of video editors, so you can try whatever you want, but I found WeVideo to have all the features needed to make this simple and painless. If there is one issue in using WeVideo, it’s the fact that it will downgrade your video to 720p, but I don’t consider that a big deal at all. If you really want a 1080p version, you can pay 99-cents for it. You can refer to my review of WeVideo for more information, but we are going to keep things very simple for this application. Since WeVideo is a cloud solution, you will need to create an account. You can simply log in with your Gmail account, Facebook, or another email address. After you are set up, the first thing you want to do is start a project and name it. You are then given the opportunity to add videos, images, and music to your project, but we are only going to add two (or more) videos and one song. Before you do anything, tap on the title box that is already in the timeline. Check, “NO TITLE FOR MY VIDEO” and tap “Done”. Ultimately you can leave the title in place, but it will add to the length of your video, which means you would need to make the appropriate adjustment to your song. I choose to go without the title in order to preserve what HTC is doing. Next up is to insert the two (or more) Video Highlights (mp4) that you saved earlier into the timeline. Just drag them into the timeline below. You can also change the order of the videos by sliding them. Once you have decided on which video is going to be first, you need to tap it (within the timeline) to adjust the clip. Under the Trim tab, you will see left and right controls for the length of the video with the left control being at 00:00 and the right control at 00:32. You want to slide the right control to the left to 00:28. This eliminates the HTC ad that shows up at the end of the video. You only need to do this for the first video assuming you are doing a 60-second movie. If you are doing a longer movie, then you need to do this on every video, but the last one. If you want to remove it from the last video, you will need to adjust your music since my instructions are based on the ad showing up at the end of the last video. As far as I am concerned, HTC has done a fantastic job with Video Highlights and deserves the advertisement. I didn’t create the videos, they did. Assuming you are going to use your own song, you also need to tap on the “Volume” tab and slide the volume down to zero. This will eliminate HTC”s song. If you want to try and use HTC’s music, you can skip this for now and preview the entire video. If you then decide to use your own song, you can go back and change the volume afterwards. Make sure to tap “Done” to ensure your changes for the clip and volume (if you changed it) are saved. If you didn’t change the volume of the video clip, you can now hit the Play icon at the bottom left to see if you like your video with HTC’s music. If you don’t like it, just tap on the first video again (within the timeline) and tap the “Volume” tab and slide the volume to zero. If you do like how HTC’s music sounds, then skip on to the publish section. Now tap the second video (within the timeline) and tap on the “Volume” tab and move the slider down to zero just like you did with the first video. This needs to be applied to all videos if you are using your own music. Swipe over to the Audio section and select the song that you made with ringPod. It should be easy to find since “ringPod” will be the artist for all songs that you edit. Just tap on the song and you are good to go. The next step is to preview your work of art. Just hit the play button at the bottom left to watch the video with your song. At this point, you should be happy with the result, but if there is anything that is unsatisfactory, it will mostly likely be the song. You can still go back to ringPod and make another adjustment and swap the song clip. Publish your video Assuming you like everything, just tap “Publish” at the bottom right. You can check “Save a local copy” to save the video to your phone, and if you added your YouTube and Facebook accounts, you can automatically upload the finished product to those sites as well. Once you have decided on these options, just tap “Publish” again. Your video and music will be uploaded to and rendered at the WeVideo site. It can take as much as 10 to 20 minutes to complete, but it all happens in the background, so you can do other things. Once your video is completed and/or uploaded to your social sites, you will get a notification and an email letting you know. If you chose to “Save a local copy”, you will find your video in the gallery in the “Movies” folder under “Albums”. It will be an mp4 file so you can do whatever you want with it. You can save it in Dropbox and/or upload it to any site you want. If you ever want to change it to another song, you will be able to easily since your projects will be saved in WeVideo. You can also go to the WeVideo website and edit via your chosen browser if you so wish. You can also pay for a 1080p version using your desktop as well. Sometimes reading the instructions can be grueling so I put together this hands on video showing you each and every step. Trust me, this is very easy. Click here to view the embedded video. Note: By using copyrighted songs, you could run into a problem with YouTube even though you aren’t using it for commercial purposes. Most of the time, YouTube will only ban your video from certain countries, but if this is an issue, you can search for various royalty free music online that you can use. If YouTube is going to be your main area for sharing, you might want to take a look at option 2 below. Option 2If you don’t mind using your desktop and you plan on using your video on YouTube, you can easily combine videos and change the music by using the YouTube Editor. There are a couple of drawbacks. One is that you can only use the music that is partnered with YouTube and the second is that you can’t apply a fade. On the plus side, you will be able to retain your 1080p video quality and you don’t have to worry about YouTube taking your video down. Just upload both videos to YouTube and set them as private. Go into the YouTube Editor. You can combine both (or more) videos and clip the HTC ad from all the videos other than the last one. You can leave HTC’s music in place or select audio and select any song from the YouTube library. Unfortunately, it isn’t so easy to find songs, but it is an avenue that works and is quite simple. If you want to see our other guides regarding the HTC One, click here.
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| TalkAndroid Daily Dose for June 13, 2013 Posted: 13 Jun 2013 08:01 PM PDT
With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!! Guides Best Android apps for monitoring data usage [June 2013] Reviews Featured Android Game Review: Dawn of the Dragons [Arcade & Action] Apps Google+ app for Android receives a fairly huge update Google Music app updated and brings forth some nice improvements Google Gesture Search update gets multilingual
Be part of Chrome's latest experiment with Cube Slam EU committee investigates Google's alleged anticompetitive tactics to boost Android's market share Phones More screenshots of HTC's Butterfly S; Will feature front speakers with "BoomSound" Samsung shows us how much stress the Galaxy S 4 can handle Samsung Galaxy S 4 smartphone "selling well", despite lowered expectations by analysts AT&T announces the Samsung Galaxy S 4 Active, available June 21 for $199 Samsung releases short video showing off Galaxy S 4 Zoom features Sony's Xperia ZU slated for June 25th announcement, specs revealed early Smartwatches Sony now allowing 3rd party firmware for their SmartWatch platform Tablets Updated Nexus 7 to be priced at $229 Miscellaneous Leaked images of Samsung's Galaxy NX Android Camera surface
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| Google Gesture Search update gets multilingual Posted: 13 Jun 2013 07:53 PM PDT
Continuing with a batch of Google Android app updates today, like Google+ and Google Music, Google’s Gesture Search app also received a major update. The new version adds support for 40+ languages, although no list of exactly which languages are now supported is readily available. The app lets users draw letters or numbers on the screen and as they do so, the app starts searching through contacts, bookmarks, music, and other information to help the user find the information for which they are searching. With the addition of new languages, users can now write in their native language. This includes languages like Chinese and their extensive characters. Google indicates the app supports the entry of Pinyin initials to find results in traditional Chinese. Gesture Search also supports transliteration between all of the supported languages so a search written out in one language should yield results from other languages. If you want to check out the free app, you can download it using one of the apps below. You may find it to be a useful way to conduct a device-wide search.
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| EU committee investigates Google’s alleged anticompetitive tactics to boost Android’s market share Posted: 13 Jun 2013 07:31 PM PDT
Just as the European Commission’s investigation into Google’s search engine wraps up, the European Union’s antitrust watchdog is reportedly investigating claims that Google used anticompetitive tactics improve Android’s market share. According to allegations from Microsoft and Nokia, Google has been licensing their Android operating system to manufacturers below cost, making them the obvious choice for device manufacturers over competing operating systems. Google is also being accused of requesting manufacturers to cancel and/or delay the launch of devices running competing operating systems. The complaint goes on to state that Google uses Android “as a deceptive way to build advantages for key Google apps in 70 percent of the smartphones shipped today.” While Android is open source, competitors say that Google uses the platform to push services like Youtube, bringing in a considerable amount of ad revenue for the company. Google have responded to the accusations saying, "Android is an open platform that fosters competition. Handset makers, carriers and consumers can decide how to use Android, including which applications they want to use." Regardless of the accuracy of these allegations, if the European Commission finds anything circumstantial it could easily turn into a full blown investigation. Source: All Things Digital
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| Sony now allowing 3rd party firmware for their SmartWatch platform Posted: 13 Jun 2013 07:10 PM PDT
Lately Sony has been very “developer friendly” with their Android devices such as the Xperia Z, and that trend won’t stop as Sony recently fully opened up their SmartWatch platform to all developers. Per Sony:
Doing so does come with some limitations as you will no longer be able to use SmartConnect or any compatible SmartWatch app that’s available in the Google Play Store. So keep that in mind. For more info, hit the source link! source: Sony
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| Be part of Chrome’s latest experiment with Cube Slam Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:39 PM PDT
Google sure loves to give their users that good old nostalgic feeling pretty often don’t they? This time it’s classic Pong in the form of Cube Slam. The Chrome team always finds nice and fun ways to have their users test out Chrome with these fun old-style games. The game can use your webcam to take a picture and can be used as your avatar/backdrop and vise-versa if you’re playing against a friend. Controls are simple as it’s just classic Pong. Hit the break for a video and let us know your experience with it.
Click here to view the embedded video. source: Cube Slam
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| Google Music app updated and brings forth some nice improvements Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:34 PM PDT
Google has updated their Google Music app and brings forth some great improvements for their All Access users. One of my main gripes about All Access was how ridiculously long it took for songs to be downloaded onto your device no matter what the connection speed was. Thankfully Google has fixed that and songs, even albums, are downloading at a much faster and more dependable rate. Another problem a lot of people were having is that music streaming using All Access was taking up a lot of their bandwidth, and it looks like Google is trying to fix that problem as this update ensures less data usage. Along with this update are improvements to the search function and overall speed of the app. How are you enjoying All Access? With the 30 day trial soon ending for the early adopters (such as myself), will you be continuing your subscription or will you be cancelling it and use something else like Spotify? Let me know in the comment section! Links to the app after the break!
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| Google+ app for Android receives a fairly huge update Posted: 13 Jun 2013 06:24 PM PDT
Today Google updated their Google+ app for Android and gave it some pretty cool new features. First off, notifications are now systemwide, thus when you swipe away a notification or access it, it won’t be repeated on another device that you may own. I know how annoying that can get for some. They’ve also changed the look of notifications by giving you a bell icon if there’s a new notification that needs to be attended to. Along with the update is also a revamped notification tray to match Google’s other apps. For a complete changelog, hit the break!
As for iOS users, this update will come to you as well in due time. source: +Vic Gundotra
Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Android News, Rumours, and Updates To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment