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Sneak Peak At Android Apps Out of MIT

A class at MIT built some mobile apps for Google’s Android operating system and presented them today. CrunchGear’s own superblogger Doug Aamoth reports on the seven apps—loco, Flare, GeoLife, Re:public, Locale, Kei, and snap—that he saw. Below is a slightly edited version of the original post:

loco

loco

Loco is a mobile social network built on top an Android phone’s contact manager, so anyone in your contacts is already your friend, so to speak. You’ll be able to view and track where your friends are located using Google Maps and real-time geolocation.

So, in essence, you can check out the scene at a few places before you commit to going all the way across town. I’m done with “scenes” since I’m now married, but this would have been cool for College Doug. He was a pretty awesome dude.

flare Flare

Flare is a geolocation tracking system aimed at small business owners who want to keep tabs on their employees. The demonstration given was that of a pizza delivery boy who has five pizzas to deliver. If a couple of customers call up to ask why they haven’t gotten their pizza yet, the delivery guy’s manager can use any web-based system to check out the location of his driver.

What’s more, he can give an ID number and PIN code to the customers, which the customers can then use to track the pizza guy themselves. Thankfully, that PIN code can be set to expire after a certain amount of time and/or each customer’s specific tracking privileges can be cut off by the manager or the driver himself.

geolife GeoLife

GeoLife is basically your to-do list on top of Google Maps. When you get within a certain range of something you need to pick up, it alerts you.

It also works as a traditional to-do list for things that aren’t location-based. The team that put this together is also working on a route-creation system wherein you could pick a few important items from your list and then have a route plotted out for you to follow that day.

RE:Public

republic I thought that RE:Public was a brilliantly funny idea. It’s basically a location-based social networking service for finding new friends once you get tired of your old ones. You connect locally based on a radius that you feed into the program and meet people based on dovetailing interests.

The real brilliance lies in the fact that you can rate and tag each friend and the system automatically updates each friend’s score based on how much time you spend near each other. So after a while, you can see who your “top friends” are.

Tags that are given to people on the network can be voted up and down by other users, so if one person tags me as “jerk”, all my real friends can vote that tag far enough down that it eventually disappears. That, or I’ll find out that my friends actually think I’m a jerk and I can start finding new friends. It’s the circle of life!

locale Locale (winner of the Android Project - top 50)

Locale actually just finished in the top 50 applications for Google’s Android Project competition, so congratulations to the team. Nice work, indeed.

Locale is a dynamic settings manager. You set up different settings for your phone based on time and location. So when you’re at home, you can automatically have all your calls forwarded to your home phone line. When you’re at work, you can have your phone set to silent mode and have your phone’s background screen set to a constantly updating work chart. That kind of stuff.

There’s already an API available for other developers to tap into Locale to set up profiles and settings for events and itineraries.

kei KEI

KEI has been a dream of mine for some time. It’s basically a Bluetooth key for all your stuff. In this early version, it was demonstrated as an automatic car starter and unlocker so you don’t have to try to find your car keys all the time.

It’s built so that multiple people can control the same car and/or multiple cars can be controlled by a single phone. Security is handled via 128-bit encryption and there will be an administrative interface so you can cut your ex-lover’s access off when the two of you break up.

snap snap

Snap is kind of like Digg on a map. People can tag certain places and then other users can vote that particular attraction up or down.

So if you’re in a new city, you can pull up your current location and find things around you that other people think are interesting.

If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool.

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GPhone Prototype Debuts At Mobile World Congress

gphone.jpg
The first official prototype of a phone running Google’s Android platform has debuted at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today. Upstaging the usually quick blog media, AP captured the first shot (above), left of picture we’ve blown up the phone for a closer look.

Samsung said yesterday that it won’t debut an Android powered phone until 2009, and AP reports that the first Android powered phones are due for a second quarter release, so despite earlier rumors of a February launch date, the world will have to wait for its GPhones.

Tune into CrunchGear for all the latest news from the Mobile World Congress.

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Google’s Android Is Already Delayed

android-logo.pngGoogle’s Android mobile operating system is already hitting snags. It is not even out of the gate yet, and the software development kit that programmers need to create applications for Android is being pushed back a few weeks. Because of this delay, the deadline for the $10 million Android Developer’s Challenge is also being pushed back a month from March 3 to April 14. In the meantime, here are some technical details on Android from one developer who got a sneak peak.

Letting its first deadline slip after so much initial fanfare is not the best way to create momentum around Android, especially as Apple is preparing to release its own software development kit for the iPhone. If you are a developer with limited time and resources, which one would you choose to create an app for? The iPhone, which is already in millions of people’s hands, or Android, which is still vaporware?

I am beginning to have a hard time telling the difference between Google and Microsoft.

(via mocoNews. Here is CrunchGear’s take.)

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I, For One, Welcome Our Android Overlords

As we reported yesterday, Google has released the software development kit for its Android operating system for mobile phones.

The above video accompanies the launch and the $10 million apps contest.

Admittedly Sergey Brin is soo wooden he might be trying to impersonate an android, but ignore the intro and look at the demonstrations of what Android can already do. Now pretend the iPhone didn’t exist. Cool, right?

Scoble thinks it’s rubbish and I don’t agree. Sure, it’s not an iPhone, but how quickly we all forget life before Apple entered the cell phone market. The combination of touch screen and key stroke makes for an interesting experience, and the graphics and interface are a generation ahead of the ever reliable but archaic interface of the last 5 Nokia’s I have owned.

What do you think? Is Android lame or are we seeing a possible competitor to the iPhone. Remember that competition is always good, even if it’s still being worked on.

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