App developer The Astonishing Tribe is currently developing an intriguing app called Recognizr, an augmented reality app that utilizes your phone’s camera to identify your friends via facial recognition and then display both their contact information and a variety of social networking services they are connected to. The head of user experience research at The Astonishing Tribe, Dan Gärdenfors, demonstrated Recognizr at the Mobile World Congress and indicated that the app would make its way to the Android Market within the next few months.
In addition to recognizing your friends and displaying their contact information and social networking habits, you can use Recognizr to upload their picture to Facebook and it can automatically tag everyone in the photo based on Recognizr profiles. This app seems like it will be a lot of fun and could prove to be very useful, although some may see it as a potential invasion of privacy. What do you think?
source: phandroid
Gameloft is a big name in mobile app development, so when they have something to say about developing for Android, it may be worth a listen. According to Gameloft, their iPhone apps sales outpaces Android app sales 400 to 1. Consequently, they have chosen to scale back on Android app development. From Gameloft:
Slacker Radio announces that their free app is now available in the Android Market, ready for download on Android handsets like the Motorola DROID and Eris. Slacker Radio offers up a library of millions of songs for Android users to listen to their heart’s content. According to Slacker:
The Android-powered HTC Hero is finally available in the U.S. via Sprint and their “Now Network.” For $179.99 and a two-year contract, you can take this little wonder home and enjoy some eye-pleasing home screen widgets, a 5.0-megapixel camera, and plenty of apps in the Android Market.
Due to the addition of a Judging app in the Android Market, now YOU can judge apps submitted for the Android Developers Challenge Part Deux. The ADC2 Judging app is now updated and ready to go – simply download it onto your Android device and you will be notified of new apps ready for your rating. Open the app, try it out, then return to the Judging app and rate the app based on these categories:
Are you still carrying around scraps of paper with reminders and to-do’s written on them? If you have an Android phone, there’s no reason to carry around the paper scraps when you can go digital – with Remember The Milk (RTM) from the Remember The Milk Blog. RTM is a way to manage your to-do lists from multiple locations: your Android handset, desktop or notebook web browser, or even by adding new to-do items via email.
Long awaited and anticipated by Android-toting Facebook fans, the official Facebook app is now available in the Android Market. The Android version has fewer features than it’s recently updated iPhone counterpart, but it does include features like status updates, commenting, and wall access. According to Facebook: “Facebook for Android™ makes it easy to stay connected and share information with friends. You can share status updates from your home screen, check out your news feed, look at your friends’ walls and user info. Share photos from your phone and can even look up up to 125 friends’ phone numbers from the home screen.” Head over to the Android Market and download the Facebook app to your Android handset, then please comment on your experience with it.
A couple of screenshots that seem to be the updated Android Market have appeared on cnet’s Android Atlas, and although there is no guarantee that it’s the finished product, we like what we see. Tabs appear along the top to view “Top paid”, “Top free”, and “Just in” for new arrivals. You may also notice a magnifying glass at the upper right of the screen for searching. It seems the changes are mainly aesthetic – placing buttons on the front for functions that previously required pressing the Menu button and drilling down. Hopefully we will see these changes soon. The Android Market is about to get better-looking. Do you like it as much as we do?
Google Labs has been hard at work and their newest creation is Listen, an app for U.S.-based Android handset users that “…quickly finds podcasts and web audio relevant to your searches, lets you stream over-the-air or download for later, and subscribe to fresh content from your favorite feeds and searches.” In essence, Listen is an app for searching audio files.
