Mobile

If you're a regular reader of this column, you may remember that I recently took a look at Cloud TV's HD Widgets, an app for creating your own elegant, translucent widgets to replace ugly stock widgets that appear to permeate today's Android phones -- Motorola, I'm referring to you mainly. I've had ...

I picked a beautiful day to road-test Earth's WeatherBug Elite app. It was a late-summer day on which the National Weather Service had just issued a Red Flag fire weather warning for my brush-fire-prone, tinder-dry neighborhood. Android weather app WeatherBug provides a set of current conditions, fo...

With ubiquitous Google Maps installed as standard on smartphone OS market leader Android's devices, why anyone would need anything else? Well, the principal benefit of an app like BackCountry Navigator Pro GPS is that it provides offline access to topographic maps, which represent terrain using grap...

IP Cam Viewer Pro lets you view and control an Internet protocol camera through Android OS on a phone or tablet. App features include SSL encryption, pan tilt and zoom, relays for lights and garage doors, and recording functions. DVRs and network video recorders also can be controlled. Included are...

Instapaper is finally available on the Android platform. If you're unfamiliar with the iPhone-originating app, it's an offline reader with a difference. I've always had a problem with offline readers. Offline readers, like the good-looking Pulse, function by pulling in XML feeds online. They are es...

It wasn't too long ago that you'd have to pore over shortwave radio schedule listings, cross referencing time of day, with frequency in kilohertz, in order to listen to long range, overseas broadcasts -- picking out the words from the spooky radio harmonics. Then along came the Internet, which allow...

HP brought Enyo -- the open source object-oriented JavaScript framework for webOS -- out of beta this week, six months after the ill-fated operating system was contributed to the open source community. Enyo 2.0 now has a community of developers, a broad set of cross-platform user interface widgets, ...

"My esteemed colleague, it is with much reverence that I am humbly, yet secretly, contacting you to tell you of great fortune that has come my way. My most honorable relative has kindly left me, in his will, eighty gold bars. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, I have to regretfully sell on the ...

The latest version of Google's Android mobile operating system, Jelly Bean, is much harder to hack than its predecessors, according to research from Duo Security. Google beefed up security for Jelly Bean significantly, said Jon Oberheide, security researcher at Duo. The OS will come with an updated ...

Here's a likely familiar summer scenario for many Americans: You've been driving all day, and it's getting late. You're tired. You're ready for a hotel bed in an unknown town coming up ahead. My modus operandi has always been to watch for billboards advertising upcoming motels with rates. Or, I mig...

For the last decade, the battle for supremacy in the video game arena has been waged by three players -- Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. These are companies with long track records, numerous successes, some setbacks and failures -- but most importantly, deep pockets and experience in the marketplace.

MeeGo, the ill-fated Nokia mobile operating system project that had the plug pulled on it earlier this year, is being revived. JollaMobile, a company consisting of former Nokia executives and techies, has announced that it will release a new MeeGo smartphone later this year. That goal is reachable, ...

If you've been getting into flashing ROMs on your devices, you're familiar with the palava that goes with it: booting to recovery, swapping cards, adb, fastboot, renaming zip files, and the rest of it. ROM Manager, from ClockworkMod, the recovery software maker, claims to largely alleviate the kerfu...

An international botnet could be using infected Android handsets to send out massive amounts of spam, said Microsoft antispam engineer Terry Zink. He reportedly identified the botnet and its Google Android connection by examining the headers of spam that included the signature "Sent from Yahoo! Mail...

Plex is a good looking media platform for running media files on Google TV, tablets, phones and so on. Online channels include Hulu, Vimeo and more. On looks and apparent tight integration between my existing Android-based devices, I decided to check out Plex's two Android apps. I was interested in...