After a few delays, the inaugural mission of the Orbital Sciences Antares mission successfully made it into orbit on April 21st. While the mission didn’t carry the actual spacecraft Antares is designed to lift (that’s currently slated for June), it didn’t go up there empty handed. The Antares rocket safely delivered all three of NASA’s PhoneSats into their intended orbit, and [...]
Reimagining Play: Interview with PlayMG’s Taylor Cavanah
Last month, we brought you a review of the MG, an Android powered handheld gaming system designed for casual games. The combination of vanilla Android and the MG’s custom parental controls made the device a compelling option for gamers young and old alike, and its comparatively low price combined with the vast Android software library [...]
AOKP Drops SuperSU for Open Source Superuser
The Android Open Kang Project (AOKP), one of the most popular custom Android builds currently available, has just unveiled their 6th build of Jelly Bean. Along with the normal host of bug fixes and improvements, this build features an especially important addition: the removal of SuperSU in favor of Superuser. Open Source Prevails As we’ve [...]
Google Keep Cameos To Challenge Evernote, Changes Mind
Stunt or stumble? I’m gonna go ahead and file this one in the publicity stunt pile. Every time a new Google service is about to emerge, it peeks its head above water just enough for someone to take notice. And that’s what happened today with Google Keep. Earlier today, Android mega-site Android Police was able [...]
Pwnie Express Releases Pwn Pad Ahead of Schedule
The team at Pwnie Express seems to have a lot of trouble standing still, as it doesn’t seem more than a few months go by before they are talking about yet another disruptive open source product that they are about to unleash on the security community. First it was their Pwn Plug, which combined an off the shelf SheevaPlug with [...]
A New Way to Play: MG Handheld Review
We first told you about the MG back in September of 2012, when it was in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign attempting to raise a staggering $950,000. Perhaps they were inspired by the historic success of the OUYA just a few weeks prior, hoping to repeat that system’s incredible funding level on the same $950,000 [...]
STRaND-1 Satellite Preparing to Activate Onboard Nexus One
We’ve previously reported on the NASA project to base a new generation of small, cheap, spacecraft around Android phones, dubbed PhoneSat. While PhoneSat is still on track to launch in April, the British have beaten their American counterparts to the punch with the Surrey Training, Research, and Nanosatellite Demonstrator (STRaND-1) satellite, currently orbiting the Earth. [...]
Taming the Nook Simple Touch
I recently received the Android-based Noble Nook Simple Touch ebook reader as a gift, which I enjoyed very much except for one insanely annoying issue with it: the Nook comes with two “books” on how to operate the reader which apparently cannot be removed by normal means. There is no option to delete them from the Nook [...]
ODROID Boards Offer High-End Raspberry Pi Alternatives
There’s no question that the Raspberry Pi is everyone’s favorite ARM development board right now: it’s cheap, silent, and exceptionally power efficient. The Raspberry Pi makes an excellent choice for low-energy applications like personal servers, routers, firewalls, environmental monitoring setups, etc, etc. But the Raspberry Pi has one big downside, it’s a fairly slow machine. [...]
Transform Your Nexus Into A Kindle Fire
That’s right, you read this headline correctly. You can now transform your aging Samsung Nexus S into a Kindle Fire. Now you’re probably asking yourself why you would want to transform one of the best phones of 2010 into a closed platform like the Kindle Fire. We’re sure you’re just oozing to consume your vast [...]