Android, Tablet Computer | featured news

Verizon and Intuit announced Thursday that they are teaming up to introduce a mobile payment system that will let customers swipe their credit cards with their smartphones. Verizon will sell the Intuit Reader smartphone accessory in its retail stores. The Reader plugs into the audio jack of most Android phones, BlackBerrys, the iPhone and the iPad.
The product rollout is intended to make it easy for small-business owners and others to process mobile payments, likely boosting sales of smartphones.

A German court said it partly lifted the preliminary injunction banning Samsung Electronics from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer in most of the EU.

In the world of tablets, some companies launch one model and stick to it (Apple). Others introduce several models and boast about their flexibility and desire to fulfill diverse customer preferences (Samsung, etc.).

The US Army is near finishing a largely successful test of smartphones on the battlefield. In an interview this week, project director Michael McCarthy told CNN the six-week trials in Fort Bliss, Texas and White Sands, New Mexico were 'encouraging' in gauging the effectiveness of Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone hardware for communicating information in the field. They had also been testing iPads as well as unspecified Dell and HP tablets.

Game company Nintendo denied reports that it was preparing apps for Android and iOS devices, telling Bloomberg that it was not changing its policy to develop software only for its own gaming devices. Pokemon, an independent Nintendo affiliate, is developing software for Apple and Google and this summer will release a game for those companies related to its popular series.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is available in stores across the country today, and it seems the company has offered the best Android tablet on the market. The hardware on the tablet is great; it’s sleek and light with a great screen and is easily the best Android tablet I’ve played with so far. But what I — and non-Apple manufacturers, apparently — keep running up against is the iPad question. With the number of applications designed for tablets on Android, there’s just no comparison.

A number of Android smartphone makers who have turned their hand to Android tablets to try cash in on the tablet PC category dominated by the iPad are said to giving up. Instead, their focus has switched back from tablets to the development of larger, high-end smartphones with 4- to 5-inch displays. According to Digitimes, only Samsung has made any significant inroads into the segment, claiming a 10% share.

Bidding to differentiate itself in the increasingly competitive tablet-computer market, Samsung Electronics plans this year to launch an Android-based tablet running on fourth-generation network technology.

In our recent detailed coverage of Asus' ever-fab, Editor's Choice-winning Eee Pad Transformer tablet, we told you that even better things lie ahead as Google rolls out their 3.1 release of Android Honeycomb.  Little did we know that roll-out would be coming sooner than later. Today, a buzzy, fuzzy little Bumble Bee floated a new Transformer...

Mike Cleron, a Google software engineer for the Android operating system, made an ambitious pronouncement onstage at the company's annual conference last week.