Oft rumored but never officiated, the Galaxy Tab Wifi-Only could’ve been a easy sell at only $350. However, this isn’t 2010 and only now going on sale this Sunday (April 10th) for $350, Samsung really missed the train in my opinion. With no official Honeycomb update even rumored, the Tab seems like the red headed step child of the Galaxy Class. Tough luck too cause it has decent hardware with an Adreno 200 GPU and that 1ghz Hummingbird CPU powering a unremarkable 7″ 1024×600 screen. All those specs remain intact for the Wifi-only model, but it appears only a white backed Tab will be shipping. Sounds pretty decent for that price, especially if you’re willing to get your feet wet in the wonderful wide world of custom ROMs on the Tab. Got some hankering for some Honeycomb? XDA-developers has your back. It’s quite risky and not entirely useful, but there is in fact an Android 3.0 port already in Alpha ready for you to give it a shot. $350 for a 7″ Honeycomb Tablet? Sounds like heaven to a lot of people, I’m sure. Here’s to the vibrant Android dev community! Keep it coming!
The new house is officially ours for the next year! Internet is a low priority for now, but thankfully we’re still covered in free city-wide WiFi. I have to applaud the government on getting this one right. Since we live close to a street corner I’m pulling in 5 bars of 2mbps connection! Depressing for gaming and streaming, yes, but the ability to pay the bills post on my blog is invaluable. Therefore, I bid you welcome to ADB 2.0 with an all new color scheme and focus. I can’t wait to have more free time to post here and in preparation of that I’m going to be starting a new series of “My First Blank” and then replace “blank” with some various device or experience with some prominent software. I think it’ll be easier to be more consistent about the posting for it. Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Until next time,
You stay classy, World Wide Web.
Songbird has long been one of my favorite opensource media players, specifically in the music library management segment, and somehow I missed the Android release of their source. It’s pretty snazzy, and if you don’t mind the dark purple theme, Songbird for Android has proven to be speedy, lightweight, and stable. I don’t like how it doesn’t support landscape, but aside from that it brings a lot of missing features to the Android platform. Music playback is one area I believe Google just keeps skipping over (not that big a deal as the rest of the OS continues to be enhanced excellently) and Songbird is just one of many apps vying to fill the gap.
There’s a lot that music apps need to pull off, especially with iPhone users touting their fantastic built in iPod integration. Appearance, speed, ease of use and a quick access widget are essential in my eyes. The lockscreen widget didn’t work out so well on my unofficial Android release, but it’s a common problem I’ve had on most ROMs. Lockscreen widgets, aside from Ultimate Droid’s implementation, never really work out. The quick pull up for the Now Playing is cool, but it feels less like a music player and more like a music browser. I’m not sure how to describe it. I like PlayerPro’s fullscreen option, making it feel more like an MP3 player and the like. Navigation is lightening quick in the app, zero lag. This could also be due to the fact that it didn’t load any of my album/artist art from the ID3 tags and failed to pull any in over WiFi. It did, however, pull up a Photostream for common artists (Strongbad apparently not in that list). This was cool, but probably not functional. I hate to bring it up again, but PlayerPro does a great job of caching both artist and album art. Both work fantastic and don’t use any more bandwidth than you need versus the pretty much wifi only option in Songbird. The “Like” button is cool for sharing songs on Facebook and I’m sure a lot of users will be excited by that.
Overall, there’s not much to critique except for the picky things I like from other apps. This is app is fast, stable, and decent looking. I’d highly recommend it as a jumping off point for new Android users. Using this app for syncing between your Android handset and the desktop Songbird should help ease the transition for a lot of (former) iPhone users.
Oft rumored but never officiated, the Galaxy Tab Wifi-Only could’ve been a easy sell at only $350. However, this isn’t 2010 and only now going on sale this Sunday (April 10th) for $350, Samsung really missed the train in my opinion. With no official Honeycomb update even rumored, the Tab seems like the red headed step child of the Galaxy Class. Tough luck too cause it has decent hardware with an Adreno 200 GPU and that 1ghz Hummingbird CPU powering a unremarkable 7″ 1024×600 screen. All those specs remain intact for the Wifi-only model, but it appears only a white backed Tab will be shipping. Sounds pretty decent for that price, especially if you’re willing to get your feet wet in the wonderful wide world of custom ROMs on the Tab. Got some hankering for some Honeycomb? XDA-developers has your back. It’s quite risky and not entirely useful, but there is in fact an Android 3.0 port already in Alpha ready for you to give it a shot. $350 for a 7″ Honeycomb Tablet? Sounds like heaven to a lot of people, I’m sure. Here’s to the vibrant Android dev community! Keep it coming!
adroidblog 