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

This is one of those fun little news bits where we don’t have a phone to display – that’s right, it’s pure vaporware at this point – but INQ Mobile has announced that they will use the Android OS as their platform for some new smartphone offerings on their network. INQ is known for creating a social networking-centric experience on their mobile phones, namely with Facebook.

In a recent interview with PCMag.com, INQ CEO Frank Meehan indicated that a highly-customized Facebook smartphone, based on Android, would be offered in 2010. How much will these phones cost? Mr. Meehan is quoted as saying that the pricing range should be around $79-99-199 on two-year-contract range.” Android is a stable, inexpensive, and customizable platform for INQ to take advantage of for their new smartphones. Hopefully we will see something solid soon, and when we do, we’ll report on it right here.

source: Android Authority

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.

source: Talk android

Ah, Facebook – the phenomenon of social sites that has brought family members, old friends, and co-workers together from all over the globe. Finally, Facebook is about to launch their official app for the Android platform, and although more limited than the iPhone version, it is a welcome addition to the Android Market. It will utilize their new Stream API, providing both stream and status updates. Given the intense rivalry between Facebook and Google, it’s great to see that the rivalry did not preclude a little bit of working together to make Facebook on Android a reality. With so many Android handsets about to roll out, it’s a good move by the folks at Facebook to develop for this up-and-coming platform and hopefully more functionality will come in the future. Allegedly the app will be available as soon as the end of this week.

Source: TechCrunch