A bit of technology

A well known Acer Liquid community member piter1225 posted a short article on custom Acer UI and how they respect user choise by allowing to turn off their UI in phone settings.

Manufacturers want their devices to stand out from the crowd and it is understandable. Some of them, like HTC, did a good work on creating great UIs like HTC Sense. But some people like me prefer stock Android experience. And this is why I love my Acer device and Acer in general - they provide choise. It is VERY important in my opinion. This is what Android is all about for me. Take a note HTC, Samsung, LG and others.

By the way, Acer devices are also 100% unlocked. That means you don't need any dirty hacks to exploit ROM protection to be able to put some custom stuff inside your phone - just plug your USB cable and use standard Android tools like you do with everyone's favorite Nexus One. This is also great, because you lower risks of bricking your device and get full freedom for customization.

Way to go Acer! But please, provide us proper kernel sources (: That would make your devices even better!

There's a nice story on Phandroid about Spacetime Studios — creators of Pocket Legends mobile MMORPG. Their story is that they make more money from Android users then from iOS users even though there is still no in-app payments in Android world. This is rather uncommon as of today. But I think I know the answer - Android lacks high quality games. So such titles (and yes, Pocket Legends are awesome!) are rare. So they do generate a lot of money - people are hungry for hi-end entertainment here.

Thinking about making Android app? Make it REALLY hi-end! Everyone will love it!

Tablets! This is what gadgets are all about today! iPad, Streak, Galaxy Tab and tons of Chinese clones - they are everywhere! But I'm still waiting for a very special one...

It is called Adam and is made by Indian company Notion Ink. It is not yet available (they had a lot of troubles with investors), but should be soon. No release date is set, but it will come either this December or in January 2011.

So it is not available, had troubles, what's so great about it? First of all - 10.1" 1024x600 PixelQi display. Watch this video to learn why PixelQi rocks. This video is worth thousands words (:

Next its hardware is notable: NVIDIA Tegra 2 (that's dual-core, baby!), 1GB of RAM and 1GB of ROM, HDMI, USB etc. It just has all the bells and whistles. And I do care about performance, so there's no rivals for Adam.

And the last, but not least - custom software. Adam is an Android tablet, yet they've rewritten a lot of internals to make the best UI experience. And they made custom apps for everything: calendar, mail, you name it! And they all look great!

This is a short story, so I suggest you visit their CEO blog for more details. There are loads of interesting information.

A few days ago new audio player for Android was released. It is called PowerAMP. And I think it is the best out there! But why? Well...

First of all it supports tons of formats: MP3, OGG, FLAC, APE, WMA, WAV, WV and some more. That automatically makes it better then everything else, because all other players use Android's own sound sub-system which does not support lossless audio in any way. There are some players with lossless support, but they all are buggy, unstable and eat battery like Godzilla eats people.

Next major feature if equalizer and tone control with all bells and whistles. Yet again Android does not have support for EQ and every player lives with that. EQ is good and does not kill your device's performance together with battery.

And there are a lot of minor for most people features, like having both music library together with folder listing, tag editor, tag encoding chooser, widgets, lock screen, etc - lots of them!

PowerAMP has a trial version, full one costs 5$ - not much and definitely worth every penny. It works on 2.0+ devices, supports low resolution screens and works on older devices without FPU. It can be laggy and will drain battery on devices with FPU, but hey - it's the price to pay, sound processing is very resource intensive. So if You lack FPU then either upgrade your device or live with that.

All in all PowerAMP is great and there's no choise. Many people were waiting for proper audio player for years and now it is in Android Market. Grab your copy today!

Some photos and technical data surfaced about new Android-powered smartphone from Acer. New name will be Acer Liquid Metal. Sounds great! It also means that the whole body will be made from some metal (aluminium?). Technical specs leaked:

• OS: Android 2.2 Froyo with Acer Shell 4.0 (somekind of Stream?)
• CPU: Qualcomm MSM7230-1 800 MHz
• GPU: Adreno 205 (beats iPhone 4, but slower then Samsung S, has Flash and SVG hardware acceleration)
• RAM: 512MB DDR
• ROM: 512MB
• Screen: 3.61" WVGA TFT-LCD 800x480
• Touch: capacitive multi-touch
• Bluetooth 3.0
• Dolby Mobile
• Camera with flash

More photos are inside the post. Source: habrahabr.
P.S. Author of this Habra-post is Sergey Vilianov.

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