ChasingLilly.net

*Start of epic music* *DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN*

It’s a New York Times bestselling series… It has a major motion picture on the way… With The Hunger Games growing more popular by the day, Scholastic is really trying to get the word out and get people to read the series. This includes major price cuts (great news for anyone who is still pointlessly holding out on reading the series). Basically: you have no excuse to not read it now.

Do you have one of them fancy Kindles? Well then just meander on over to Amazon and download the first book for only $4.69! (the physical copy is still $10)

The Kindle edition of the series was up for $4.38 yesterday (92% off the suggested retail price)! OR… Have one of dose hawt Android devices? They got you covered, too! Only $4.69 in the Android Market to read your future favorite book on a tiny phone screen!! In fact, most of Suzanne Collins’ books are $5-7 on the Market… which means I’m thinking about picking one of her other works sup. If I do happen to read one, I’ll let you all know what I think.

Long story short: you have no excuse not to read the series. So quit making excuses. Just. DO IT.

Believe me at all times with sincerity and respect, your faithful and obliged servant,
Samuel P. Jackson

…is the most useful device I’ve ever owned. My little Android-running Droid-X. Say what you will about Android and it’s “shortcomings”. Write all you want about fragmentation. I love it. Somehow, it fully won me over from even my obsessive-use of my iPod Touch. Sure Android needs a more consistent experience across devices! It’s be awesome if every time Google released a new OS version every phone running Android would update. But that’s certainly not the fault of Google or it’s beautiful OS, we can blame 99% of that on carriers and manufacturers.

Stupid carriers loading bloatware. NO ONE WANTS ANYTHING TO DO WITH VCAST OR A DEMO OF MADDEN/NEED FOR SPEED. Stupid manufacturers feeling the need to make custom skins and custom “user experiences” for each and every device. NO I DON’T CARE IF I HAVE A DIFFERENT LOOKING LOCK AND HOME SCREEN FROM EVERYONE ELSE. In fact I like much more the basic, clean look Google makes default on their personal Nexus phones. I even downloaded an app a few weeks ago to route around the default Motorola lock screen and get the basic Android look for my version.

I’m super excited for the Gingerbread update being pumped out to Droid-X users soon, though. It looks like Motoblur will finally have an actual reason for existing. However, once again, I could do without all this if I could just get updates sooner without having to root my phone. Android’s an open system. THAT’S GREAT! Now let’s not ruin it like you already are, carriers and manufacturers. If it weren’t for you guys Netflix could have easily rolled out a fully fledged app months ago for Android without worrying about fragmentation and copyright. Heck, iOS and WP7 have both had Netflix apps for months! I’m so utterly left out. And that shouldn’t happen.

Kotaku posted an article yesterday containing an interview with the head of the Unreal Engine team, and he said due to fragmentation he wasn’t sure they would ever be able to get Unreal Engine fully on Android, whereas he said iOS is a given. He said Google needs to be more “evil” here and be more controlling. I disagree, I think the carriers and manufacturers need to be less controlling and work towards a middle ground with a still wide range of Android devices, but mainly with the most consistent experience possible. If that means shipping basic versions of Android and the only different being device specs, so be it. Perhaps Google could provide guidelines on which manufacturers could agree upon. Maybe even guidelines they must agree upon before licensing out Android to them.

Again, I am NOT saying Google should start imposing regulations on any custom UI’s or that they should necessarily make laws to standardize the whole Android platform on one rule of chipsets (though that would be an interesting idea, it certainly works well for Apple and makes using an iPhone much more predictable). But there does need to be more consistency. Let’s learn something from Microsoft’s past with Windows and not let the manufacturers (or publishers) go crazy here.

I could go on.

Anyways, the main point of my posting was to tell you all that I am going to be posting more about Android, reviewing some apps and giving general advice to the world. Cheerio!



Happy Trails,
Sam.

First off, this is just crazy some crazy-cool news. You may or may not have heard about Google making prototype driverless cars. Well apparently they’re not only real, but they’ve been on the road for a while, and they look pretty crazy. The laser up on top of the car maps out the surrounding area in real time, and acts accordingly. Just watching it work is pretty cool:

Second, (and this is actually rather old news, but I meant to post about it earlier this month) Android is now the most popular smartphone OS! Woot!! Some of you may remember that a little bit ago I finally upgraded phones to the DROID X, and have been loving it. Before, I had a Voyager but used my iPod Touch for basically everything except phone calls/texting. So for me, it was really a switch from Apple’s iOS to the Google Android OS. And while I truly loved iOS (and sometimes miss it’s stability), the control, freedom, and open-nature of Android have since completely won me over. Plus Steve Jobs is starting to snobbishly let the spotlight get to his head, but more on that in a minute…

Lastly…

Now come on, Apple. It’s time to stop this pointless masquerade against Adobe. Flash is a necessity for web-viewing these days. Banishing Flash is pointless for a media device of any kind, detrimental to content availability, impossible to defend logically, and ludicrous from a marketing standpoint. Listen, Steve Jobs, you’ve already laid down your “reasoning” for blocking consumers from accessing the vast majority of web-content, and now it’s time to wake up to reality. You’re not the only high-end smartphone OS out there anymore. Steve can rant all he wants about how the open-ness of Android is really a big problem (Hey, it’s a pretty good disguise! Fooled me!), but Verizon, Sprint, and Google have all monopolized on the public knowledge that the iPhone OS and the App Store are obnoxiously closed systems with their Android ads. I’m sorry iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users. I was right there with ya for a while.

Which is yet another reason I love Android: Flash 10.1 support? Check “yes”. I can view full web pages and have videos running in-page at the same time, or maybe I could head over to PopCap and play some flash Bejeweled.

On a side-note, there’s been talk of Microsoft possibly acquiring Adobe sometime in the future. I hope these talks and meetings don’t actually go anywhere. I love Adobe just as they are, and even if the combination would help level the field against Apple and Google again, I think keeping Adobe independent is important to keeping their products and creativity unmatched.

Happy Trails,
Sam.



edit — I figured it would be interesting to put up an article from TechCrunch attempting to rebut claims of Android’s openness as compared to iOS. I don’t agree with the article, and it leaves out many points. In fact, it says nothing about Android and more about the carriers and their crap restrictions (which, if you’re a smart techie, you can get around ). Butttt, it’s a good read if you’re into this sort of thing: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/09/android-open/

I just yesterday finally got my new phone. It’s the Droid X by Motorola, and it’s my first 3G smart phone. I figured I would give my quick thoughts on it, and what better way to do that than using the phone itself to write this post? First off, it’s an Android phone, though as far as I am aware, the new Froyo update is not available yet for the device. Not that I really care, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyways since I just got it.

Previously I’ve only had experience with the iPhone/iTouch OS, so Android is something new for me. But back to the device…

It has a huge screen at 4.3 x 2.sumthin inches, which my abnormally large fingers love. At first my biggest concern was the fact it has no keyboard. Due to my previously mentioned fingers I usually need some sort of QWerty keyboard. However, as you can see it’s actually a bit of a non-issue because of the large screen.

The camera is 8 megapixels and takes HD video. The camera is pretty good for a phone, though I won’t be throwing out my standalone camera (if i had one).

All in all it’s pretty great, an i’m already being converted to the Android… which is saying something, cause for a long time I supported the iPhone OS. I have faith in Google and Android, and the openness of the Android OS is something I totally dig.

Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.