Android gets a big “w00t” from the UMG digital chief, Rio Caraeff, who says,

“”It’s early days on Android. There’s not that many out there on T-Mobile, but even with the small amount out there, they’re downloading and purchasing a ton of music over the air.

“We worked with Amazon to get their store integrated into the Android platform and now Amazon will tell you that Android is their single largest source of downloads from any third-party partnership that they’ve ever done.”

–Rio Caraeff, Universal Music Group digital chief

That quote was part of a message sent to the developer behind an application called WiFi Tether for Root Users, a very excellent program that basically turns your G1 into a wireless 3G hotspot.  I love my G1 insta-hotspot.

This move is about as transparent as Google can be, given the situation.  At least they agree to run the content. But I think its going to become difficult for developers (and Google) to stay up to date as more and more carriers and their terms get involved.

Hey T-Mobile: Stop, take a breath, and realized that tethering is something that you customers want. (Read: You can make money.) Spending resources resisting technology rather than providing comercial alternatives hasn’t worked out very well for the music industry. Give us an alternative that doesn’t breach our user agreements!

[via Crunchgrear]

Our engineers have been working with Adobe Flash Player since version 5 and are experts in optimizing the Embedded Flash Player for maximum performance on the most popular  embedded platforms. BSQUARE has the ability to port and integrate Adobe Flash Player and Flash Lite into a wide range of embedded devices in various industries. With its in-depth knowledge and experience with Adobe Flash Player combined with a proven history of embedded software development services, BSQUARE’s Embedded Application Group is the perfect partner for bringing embedded Flash products to market. -BSQUARE

No word on who the “global Tier 1″ provider is, and if they will have exclusivity.

If this actually happens, it could help take another chip out of the iPhones stack, which has been swf’less for 2 years now.

BSQUARE: http://www.bsquare.com/flashlite/default.asp
Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/25/flash-coming-to-android-courtesy-of-bsquare/

Polar has been working on a Bluetooth Heart Rate monitor, which just got FCC approval.  Engadget confirms rumors that the device is planned for the Nokia N79.

If only the Android Bluetooth API were released. It was yanked from the 1.0 API because the Android team didn’t feel it was ready for prime time. According to Nick Pelty, one of the Android engineers responsible for Bluetooth functionality,

“The reason is that we plain ran out of time. The Android Bluetooth API was pretty far along, but needs some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK. Keep in mind that putting it in the 1.0 SDK would have locked us into that API for years to come.”  Android Developer’s Blog

Makes sense, bad API’s suck, but then again so does having to wait for BT lovins.  For now, I guess I have time to figure out how to hack Bluetooth device’s protocol.

I’ll be posting news pertaining to the platform and probably some tutorials and other related information as I work on my own projects.

The demonstration is shown using an unmodified kernel. That’s good news!  Unfortunately, the events aren’t making it past a user-interface class in the phones Java stack.   Luke edited the class to enable the events to pass through.  The results of which can be seen in this video:

The behavior should be sufficient for most simple applications, like scaling, but there are some limitations, as the screen is not designed for multi-touch. The capacitance grid is not a 2-dimensional touch screen, but rather a “2x 1-dimensional” touch screen. Luke does a great job explaining this in the video.

Luke’s great technical writeup and source code can be found here:

http://lukehutch.wordpress.com/android-stuff/

via Gizmodo