This just happened. 12.5 Billion dollars apparently.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/supercharging-android-google-to-acquire.html

Motorola make shit Android software.

Google make awesome Android software.

Motorola have hardware capability.

Google have no hardware capability.

Winner!

Edit: Also bolsters Google’s patent portfolio. See the recent post on the official blog.

So we’ve reached the end of the 3-week period for the Xperia Players competition. All-in-all it’s been a fun ride. Big thanks to Dan S (for good laughs for forgetting to attach the competitions) and Daniel Y (for emailing me said attachments when Dan S forgets!) for throwing the whole contest together, to Sony Ericsson for allowing this to happen, to Optus for sponsoring the contest with a SIM with preloaded value, to my twitter followers who retweeted  all my posts (and facebook friends that shared them) and of course to my fellow contestants!

For anybody that’s been reading, the Play is a great handset - the user interface is fluid, phone build solid and the control pad is in more or less words - ‘awesome’. Think of the PLAY handset itself as a PSP running Android, with the capabilities of a smartphone, and the added benefit of being able to download games on demand! If you are a heavy gamer and looking for a new smartphone, you’ve really got no excuse not to purchase one!

I’ve compiled a little index-listing of all challenge entries below, for your viewing pleasure. Thanks for reading!

Challenge #1 (Video Game Character Lookalikes): http://reecewagner.com/post/4923366896/xperia-players-competition-1-video-game-character

Challenge #2 (Photos of everyday life): http://reecewagner.com/post/5263193966/xperia-players-challenge-2

Challenge #3 (App Review): http://reecewagner.com/post/5266005739/xperia-players-challenge-3

Challenge #4 (Capture reactions): http://reecewagner.com/post/5131764624/xperia-players-challenge-4-capture-and-share

Challenge #5 (Let’s Golf 2 character): http://reecewagner.com/post/5063443773/xperia-players-challenge-5

Challenge #6: [incomplete]

Challenge #7 (Mr Xperia): http://reecewagner.com/post/5264328139/xperia-players-mr-xperia-challenge

Challenge #8: [incomplete]

Challenge #9 (Inserting Android Mascot into interesting photos): http://reecewagner.com/post/5265093641/xperia-players-challenge-9

Challenge #10: http://reecewagner.com/post/5300772232/xperia-players-challenge-10

Challenge 3 of the contest is to demonstrate how my favorite app makes my life more easier or fun. I’ve chosen to Google Latitude as my app to review, which is essentially a live location-tracking service for Google maps. Many of my cohorts opted to make a video describing their app, but I thought a video wouldn’t be the best platform to get the word across.

Latitude looks like this:

The icon at the bottom of the screen is me, and the other icons are where my friends are at. Latitude comes included with all Android handsets, and can also be downloaded for BlackBerry OS, iPhone, Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile. Here’s some uses I have concocted for Google Latitude!

Catching your partner cheating

Suspect your partner is cheating on you? No problem! No need to hire a private investigator and pay hundreds of dollars an hour, just buy her a new Android handset outright, help her “set it up”, add yourself to her Latitude account and off you go! Real-time tracking! So when she’s staying back for work and you see that she’s actually 30km away at 28 Shifty Drive, grab your baseball bat/gun and go for a drive. You’ll have the satisfaction of bursting in on her, clubbing the other man in the face, and you’ll be saving hundreds of dollars in private investigator fees!

Tracking Pizza Delivery

Okay, this one isn’t realistic, but I did actually use it for this purpose once. I was over a mates house and waiting for his housemate (my friend too) to bring home the motherload of pizza from his shift at Domino’s. We were a little drunk and a lot hungry, and anxious to know when he’d arrive. Then I remembered I had him on latitude! So I opened latitude up and we tracked his progress, all the way up the freeway to the apartment doorstep. Maybe Dominos should look into using the Latitude API to further improve their online pizza-tracking experience?

Locating friends out and about

Newer versions of Latitude contain a “real-time updating” feature that allow you to tap on their icon to get near real-time indications of where they are at. Normally, there will be several minutes between your Latitude updates (depending on your use of the phone, settings enabled, etc), enabling this option will make it near-instant. So if you’re out and about, have agreed to meet up with Johnny X and have no idea you actually are, just hit him up on Latitude!

Better yet, you can scope out Latitude to see which of your friends are out and about on the night! 

Locating Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden recently made the mistake of accepting unitedstatesmilitary@gmail.com to his Latitude friends list. Even the world’s hide and seek champion makes mistakes every now and again..

Overall I think Latitude is a really cool concept; as more and more people start getting Android phones, the ubiquity of the application should increase. There’s great opportunity to do real-cool things with something like this, and Google has made an API interface available to the public to program with, so there’s a good chance somebody is going to make something very, very cool and exciting out of this. If you’ve got an Android handset you can access Latitude very easily by opening Google Maps, pressing the menu key on your handset, and hitting Latitude. Stalking Ahoy!

Nearing the end of the competition now! Last submissions are tomorrow night at 11.59PM (is that EST!?). Challenge number 9 entailed placing the Android mascot into into various situations (famous event, landmark, movie, etc) via image editing (or hard copy). Of course given my terrible artistic skills I chose the image editing route. We’ll call the Android mascot Andy for short!

#1 Andy invades a recent important announcement by President Obama

#2 Andy Invades an Apple Keynote!

#3 Who really shot JFK?

The description of Challenge #2 - “Capture three or more images with your Xperia PLAY showing your everyday life”. And so I did just that!

#1: Me at work, working hard (obviously!):

#2: Getting ready to go out to dinner!

#3 Me and My friends have a Tuesday weekly LAN sesh. Nerding it up!

Challenge #1 in the Xperia PLAYers competition is to find and document 5 people (anybody; people I know; celebrities; you name it) who look like video game characters. 

#5) Oprah and Birdo (Super Mario Bros 2)

‘nuff said!

#4) Amy Pond (Doctor Who) and April (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)

Okay, so this one started as a comic book, but was one of the earliest video games I can remember. As you may remember, April is the redhead friend of the Ninja Turtles. I’ve included the movie depiction of her above; the 8-bit image might not make it so easy!

#3) Hurley (from LOST) and Snorlax:

Okay, this one was taken from Smosh, but it’s absolutely uncanny. As a fan of both series, I couldn’t resist putting this one in!

#2) Jack (from Let’s Golf 2) and Brad Pitt

#1) Mario and Matt

Article number one was a photo taken roughly a year or so ago with a work colleague of mine. Short, Italian and boasting a Mustache, I couldn’t help but cut out a circle from a piece of paper, color in an “M”, stick it on the nearest red hat and take a picture of it!

This picture was the first thing that sprung to mind during the contest; and as such I’ve taken the liberty of photoshopping the picture to match that of a confusing Mario Japanese box cover!

Trivia: The cover is of the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2; which was never initially released in the west because it was deemed too hard for American Audiences. In it’s stead , Nintendo redesigned an existing Japanese game, replacing the in-game characters with characters from the Mario series and leaving the rest of the game intact otherwise; which is why Super Mario Bros 2 bears little resemblance to any other of the early Mario titles. It was later released on SNES included in Super Mario All-Stars as ”Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels”.

I get a lot of queries from people about how they can extend or otherwise save battery life on their Android handset. I just thought I’d do a quick write up ways to converse, or otherwise be smart about battery life.

The first thing that people need to get through their head is that this is a smartphone - a multifunctional device that maintains a near-constant connection to the internet. This isn’t your old Nokia 3310 - the days of charging your phone once every 3 days are long gone. It doesn’t matter if you’re using an Android handset, an iPhone or a Windows 7 phone - you simply aren’t going to get the same amount of battery life as a non-smartphone. Now with that out of the way..

There is one widget that all Android phones have access to, that is indispensable for extending battery life. It’s called the Power Control widget. To add this, you need to be on the home screen of your phone. The press the Menu key on your phone, click “Add”, click “Widgets” and then scroll down to Power Control and click on it. It’ll look something like this:

The Icons (from left to right) are as follows: Wireless Network Scan, Bluetooth, GPS, Sync Adapters, Brightness. In a situation where you want to converse as much battery as possible, you’ll want to switch all of these off (and brightness down to low). I’ll just give a little explanation on each of them:

Wireless: This icon is actually for the scanning of wireless networks - your phone will periodically scan the surrounding area to see if there’s any wireless networks around and report it to you. It’s best to turn this off unless you going to connect to a wireless network, or are actively trying to find one to connect to (e.g. strolling through the city). 

Bluetooth: Pretty self explanatory, this activates the Bluetooth radio on your phone and scans periodically for other Bluetooth users. This won’t make your phone “discoverable” (this can be done from wireless settings, and is quite an intensive process), but will still consume a small amount of battery. Again, turn it off if you aren’t using bluetooth.

GPS: Having GPS active will give any applications that use your network location access to the GPS. This means you can turn it on but not actually be constantly connected to GPS. Despite this, your phone will likely still check GPS location periodically (especially if you use something like Latitude), so it’s also a good idea to turn this off unless you actually intend on using GPS.

Sync Adapters: This is a big one. It’s also the hardest to explain. When sync adapters are enabled, your phone’s “push” notification will be active. This means your phone will maintain a weak, but constant connection to various servers. Examples of this are your Gmail, Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc (although the last 3 can be disabled easily from inside the application). By disabling sync adapters, you will save a lot of battery life. I’ve estimated in the past nearly double, but it’s probably slightly less than this. Just be aware that you won’t be notified of any new emails, posts, etc. I usually leave this off unless I’m anticipating receiving important email(s) (or just bored and with access to a charger).

Brightness: This one is also pretty substantial. What you set this to really depends on the environment you are using your phone in (e.g. in sunlight vs. indoors, daytime vs. night time), and also how desperate you are to save battery. I know first-hand that having brightness on low makes it nearly impossible to see the screen in some conditions, whereas in other situations it’s completely fine - for example I usually turn it to low at the movies so I can check my phone and not piss people off too much. Some phones will also have an “automatic” brightness setting, that users the phone’s light sensor to detect what level the brightness should be at. It looks like this:

This is a pretty useful setting, so set it to automatic (with the “a”) if you aren’t sure what to set the brightness to.

Background data

This is the hugest one of them all. This will turn your smartphone into a dumbphone, but you should definitely get around twice your normal use with this disabled. Background data deals with your phone’s actual connection to Google’s servers - this includes things like use of Google Talk (chat), access to Android Market. This is essentially an extension of the Sync Adapters talked about above, and disabling background data will also disable sync adapters. I turned this off last night and was surprised to find the battery-near full this morning (after some twitter/facebook/foursquare usage). To disable this, go into Settings > Accounts & sync > and untick “Background data” (pictured below).

Applications that use Background data will generally prompt you to turn it on if you try to use them, so it’s safe to untick this.

(Note: Some of the following may not be an option, or not apply to your phone. It depends on the manufacturer and Android version. The wording may also not be exactly right from manufacturer to manufacturer - use your common sense!).

Live Wallpapers

This one’s a given; if you are using live wallpapers (any sort of interactive, flashy wallpaper on your home screen); it’s going to be using more battery. Switch to a normal wallpaper.

Use only 2G networks

This one can be reached from Settings > Wireless & Network Settings > Mobile Networks > Untick “Use only 2G networks”. This will mean your phone only connects to the slower 2G networks (which usually appear as a “G” icon in your status bar). Again, this depends on how desperate you are.

Data enabled

This is accessible from the same menu as use only 2G networks. This disables all mobile network data. I’ve never actually used this to converse battery, so I can’t comment on how much it saves, but it would be a lot. This is the ultimate way to “dumb” down your smartphone; turning this off will disable anything that uses the internet. A handy use for this is if you are travelling overseas - you better untick the box, or you’ll get hefty roaming charges from your phone using your connection. 

And so that’s it. Disable anything you read about in the article that you don’t use, and it should help your battery life substantially. Personally I charge my phone every night and only disable the aforementioned if I know the phone isn’t going to last and I need to use it later, or in more dire situations where i’ll need to use it at the end of the day (e.g. at concerts). It’s really about adapting to your needs at the given time and thinking ahead a little.

Challenge 5 of the Xperia Players competition is to get stuck into Let’s Golf 2 by Gameloft, and unlock character costumes and customizations. Gameloft would select the most entertaining character at the end of the challenge period.

So after a lot of playing time, I’ve finally unlocked EVERY costume. Before posting my actual entry to the challenge, I thought I’d pay reps to the actual character costume I’ve been using throughout the entire game (didn’t want to change because I’d already leveled this character up significantly):

Now my actual entry - the most “entertaining” character I could come up with is the final unlockable character - a sort of old golf veteran style dude. I’ve got him wearing a crazy knight-style hat and caesar style robe. To top it off, he’s holding a pink golf club ;) 

Couldn’t help but post this one. I think this is one only the PLAYer contestants will get, Jack (one of the unlockable characters) and Brad Pitt. Seems almost to me like they’ve modeled him on Brad Pitt! (Sorry for Blurrycam).

#2) Jack (from Let’s Golf 2) and Brad Pitt

#1) Mario and Matt