Google Gesture does not work on my Android phone

Posted by BA on Mar 9, 2010 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

If you’ve been reading about Google Gesture, the new hand-writing based search mechanism on android phones and have not been able to find it to download, there is nothing to worry about. If  you have any OS version that is lower than 2.0, the app will neither install nor will show up in your Android market. Similarly, if you are outside US, the app is expected not to work.

So if I use the QR code on my good old G1 with an older OS, the QR code and URL is recognized but no download is available for my phone. Time to buy a new android phone?

This fact is also confirmed on the discussion groups here on Google Gesture’s own discussion forums. 

If you have a device with 2.0 OS and you are in US, you can download the software from http://gesturesearch.googlelabs.com/download.html .

Google search has 4 out of 5 senses if you are on Android

Posted by BA on Mar 8, 2010 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

You can touch, you can see, you can hear when you are searching Google on Android phones. Human beings are said to have 5 senses including touch, see, hear, smell and taste and then some of them have a sixth sense too.

Android phones can search based on what they see through their camera, what they hear from their microphone and what do they feel when the user touches them on the touchscreen. To see all these three in action, grab a Google Android phone and start using Google Search for mobile on that.

I’ve already discussed how Google search responds to the two senses i.e “hear” and “see” in my earlier article “Google gives eyes and ears to mobile“. Today I will also mention the sense of touch. All android touchscreens are quite brilliant and here is an application that gives the sense of touch to the android phones.

Google Gestures allows you to search using the written gestures. The app comes from Google labs and is available for Google Android platform only. Here is the official announcement of the availability of the Google Gestures and you can download the application from to Google market or here from the Google Labs page.

You must be wondering, if touch, see and hear are the three senses, where is the 4th sense that Google has given to its search on Android phones? Well, every search that happens has a background knowledge of you and your location. GPS in the phone tells your location and your search trend and surfing history tells about your interests and eventually this helps refining the search to a big extent. I take that as the 4th sense of Google search on android phones

Admob.com is down. First time since Google took it over

Posted by BA on Dec 9, 2009 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Admob is the popular ads site for Mobile applications and websites. Admob.com is experiencing an outage and is not allowing users to log on to the system. This is the first time I’ve experienced this since Google has taken over the company. This is only the outage on the website. Ads are being served fine both on sites as well as apps.

Lets see how long they stay offline. Do post if you have any related updates.

Get Google-Voice app for your Phone-Now!

Posted by BA on Jul 20, 2009 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Google has recently started giving Google Voice accounts through invites. Google voice allows you to have one Google-Voice-Number and associate all your other phone numbers to this global number. Then you can receive and make calls using this number without letting your callers worry, where you are calling from. You have more control over your number, you get a big bundle of other features including conference calling, call forwarding, conference call and the list is never ending. You can check out the list of fetures at Google Voice Website.

Now Google has also released a mobile-app for BlackBerry and Android handsets that allows you to make and receive calls, check your voice mail and do a lot more. You can download the mobile app from http://m.google.com/voice.

Rhodes, for all your mobile app development needs

Posted by BA on Mar 31, 2009 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

I’m really surprised and excited at the same time to see this mobile based open micro-framework for mobile phone development named Rhodes. Rhomobile has launched this open framework that claims to allow developers to write an app once and port it easily run on iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows mobile and even Android.

The platform allows users to write code in Ruby and is available here for download. I did’nt get much time to explore this but you can simply read the tutorial or can watch following video to get yourself oriented with this very promising tool. I’ll share my findings as soon as I find some time to work on it.

Last but not least. There’s a Rhodes app development contest going on on their site that can win you $10,000. I wish you luck. Happy coding !