Showing posts with label Android. Show all posts

If you’re one of those people who hear the words “Cloud Gaming” and roll your eyes like a priest is casting a demon out of you, (I know I do,) then this Sydney-based cloud computing company wants to convince you that their platform is ‘totally not going to suck, you guys!’ so before your eyes start tunneling through the back of your head and making a right turn three blocks up the road, you should probably know about this ambitious project designed to be the one-stop shop for all your videogames.

Wonder OS wants to put a controller on the market. Everything else Wonder has is just software, as far as we know.

This company called Wonder wants to take on Cloud gaming and aims to be the only platform you will ever need for every title out there.

For the past couple of years, a cloud computing company called Wonder has been promising a platform that can play just about any game released. During that period, this mysterious company promised a smartphone that would revolve around the cloud gaming platform, Wonder OS.

The Wonder OS website boasts a platform in which users can play all their games on one mobile device. The company even goes on to allege partnerships with smartphone makers, and even game developers.

No word on who exactly these developers are, and its still unclear how Wonder will manage to support multiple platforms in any licensed capacity.

What is Wonder OS?

This is what the "OS" portion of Wonder OS looks like.

Wonder OS is a custom operating system based on the open-source Android OS project. The company claims that its OS will emphasize entertainment and gaming features, such as integration with custom hardware, and the ability to dock a smartphone with its own custom device to seamlessly sync with a TV.

If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because what Wonder is setting out to achieve is similar to what Nintendo already does with the Switch. Custom controllers and docking with a television are nothing new, and the Wonder Project shares other similarities as well. Both platforms revolve around the low-voltage ARM architecture found in tablets and smartphones, and both Nintendo and Wonder’s software employs a subscription service for its multiplayer.

In an interview with The Verge last year, Wonder CEO emphasized their hardware-based projects like their Android-based "Wonder Phone". It didn't have a finalized design, but what it did have was the promise of a platform where all your games can be played on their mobile device somehow.

The Switch did a really good job starting with the idea of portability, but there’s a lot of limitations on the Switch, [...] think about building a portable gaming and entertainment type platform that can deliver any type of game.

Recently, however, the Wonder company website relaunched – making no mention of the Wonder Phone they've been talking about for over a year. Instead, Wonder is putting their weight behind their WonderOS project, allowing its platform to be installed on a wide variety of mobile devices. The idea seems to be to have a platform that can be installed on any device, and play games from other platforms like consoles and windows PCs.

Sound familiar?

No word on what the WonderDock is yet, but here's the WonderPad.

If any of this sounds familiar, that's because it's... It's the Google Stadia. That's basically exactly what this is. It may not have "Google" in the name, but the only seemingly 'different' approach the Wonder project is taking is its dedicated operating system. Sure, you have its universal controller, just like the Stadia, but the difference between the two seems to be that Wonder shifted its approach to being more hardware-focused.

Wonder dropped plans for the Wonder Phone. What now?

Wonder –despite not having a phone anymore– hasn’t given up on dedicated hardware just yet.

According to the Wonder website’s FAQ, plans for their own dedicated hardware, —like the WonderPad and WonderDock— are still a big part of the this company’s vision.

No word yet on when the wonder brand of hardware is set to be released, but Wonder seems to be making clear progress with its Wonder OS. They are currently accepting a select number of testers for its upcoming Wonder OS beta, which still doesn’t have any official release date yet.

Gamers interested in testing the Wonder OS project on their own mobile devices can sign up for the

Beta through Wonder’s website.

Wonder OS to Stream Games on your Android Smartphone and Tablet

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Ever since man dreamed up the first laptop (The Epson HX-20) in 1980, man has been trying to find new and innovative ways to make it more convenient, —and less embarrassing to use— in public. It was a long and sometimes cringe-worthy journey to what would eventually become the modern smartphone and tablet, but there was a period where we had devices somewhere in between. It had a keyboard, and even pointing device built in, and only snobby wall street executives and Mercedes Benz owners used it. It was called the PDA.

Whether you consider yourself an Android enthusiast, or you’re a casual lucky enough not to have read this one really cringe CNET article, chances are you've never heard of the Gemini PDA by Planet Computers. Though the product is as rare and obscure as a Sony VAIO laptop that isn’t a piece of shit, the device was popular enough to meet and even exceed its IndieGoGo funding campaign, and be covered by websites run by irrelevant self-righteous lunatics like The Verge.

This is what the Gemini PDA looks like. It's a phone with a keyboard on it.

The Gemini PDA stands out as being one of the few Android devices that doesn’t qualify as either a tablet or a smartphone. Sure, you can take calls with it, and there is a version of the PDA that has a SIM card slot, but it’s more of a laptop the size of a phone than anything else. There is a built-in hardware keyboard, so you can’t even call it a tablet, either. It’s something in between.

What’s a PDA?

Better view of the Gemini

For those of you who weren't born in the early ‘90s, a PDA, —or Personal Data Assistant— was a tiny computer that connected to the internet, and ran apps for business people who did business things for business-ish reasons. They were the true predecessor to the modern smartphone; able to run apps, and even connect wireless to the internet using an early version of the 2G network from cellphone towers. Even though the PDA was generally marketed toward middle-aged business men with wallets the size of their mid-life crisis, there was one PDA that managed to appeal to everyone —regardless of its company’s marketing strategy— in both its price, and its appealing design. This tablet is the Psion Series 5.

British computer company Psion used to make PDAs back in the early 90’s, with its built-in keyboards. By this period, most PDAs had screens you had to stab into with a stylus shaped like a harpoon, with each individual letter on the on-screen keyboard having to be murdered with the precision of a Navy SEAL sniper at 300 yards. Psion’s innovative series 3 PDAs changed the entire PDA landscape by adding a physical keyboard with real keys on it; allowing you to just type on it like a normal person. The series 5, however, is what really gave the Psion Computer company its notoriety. It had the biggest screen, and —by extension— its biggest keyboard yet.

The Series 5’s most notable public appearance was in the film Executive Decision, starring Kurt Russel and Halle Berry. Aside from being the only movie blessed to have Steven Seagal killed off within the first 15 minutes, the inclusion of the PDA as a plot device in the film meant that pretty much everyone wanted one in 1997.

The Gemini PDA next to the Psion Series 5 PDA it was based on.

Now, if the Psion 5 and the Gemini share an uncanny similarity in their design, it isn’t a coincidence. Some of the Psion series designers are the same people who developed the Gemini PDA we’re talking about today. Martin Ridford —a former engineer at Psion computing— was the Series 3 and 5’s lead designer. He enlisted the help of several other industry pros to create a new and improved version of the old design, built to modern mobile computing standards.

System Specs:

CPU: 10 core Mediatek SOC (ARM Cortex A72) clocked at 2.4GHz

RAM: 4GB LPDDR3

Space: 64GB NAND Flash, SD Card Expansion

Screen: LCD 2160x1080 (2:1 aspect ratio)

Camera: 5MP rear camera only

Since this thing is functionally a modern cell phone, it comes with all the modern cell phone basebands, and WiFi compatibility you would expect it to. It is compatible with most MicroSim and eSIM cards, has Accelerometer, light sensor, gyro, and even a magnetic sensor.

This phone comes with Android 7.1, like most Android phones, but Planet Computers is doing something no other ARM phone maker has done yet: They’re shipping this device with dual-booting functionality. That means you get to choose between booting Android, or its pre-packaged Debian Linux build. Yes, this phone comes with a REAL desktop operating system.

Who would want this?

This is how weird you would look if you used this in a coffee shop.

This is a device mainly aimed at people who need to bring a fully functional laptop anywhere. In a coffee shop, on a train, in a taxi, or in the Taco Bell restroom while squeezing out most of your organs like everyone else who eats there.

Need to bring a computer on the go, but don’t want to drag around what is essentially a full-sized monitor with a keyboard glued at the bottom? Yeah, me either. I’d rather have a laptop I can put in my pocket, and the Planet Computers Gemini PDA would allow you and I to get some actual work done, using real programs.

Where to get it

Planet Computers had an IndieGoGo campaign completed back in 2017, and since then, has been shipping its flagship PDA to its backers. They still get backers, and they seem to still be shipping. You can buy the mini laptop for $599 for the wifi-only model, and $1000 for the Wifi+4G model. But, if you don’t want to pay a mortgage payment or sell a kidney on the dark web for the 4G model, you can always buy it on Amazon for $599.

Android featured Technology

The PDA is making a Comeback with the Gemini

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I wanted to buy a tablet as a viable alternative to a full sized laptop. I went through about 3 or 4 of them before I finally gave in and realized that Android just plain sucks when it comes to productivity. It may do very well in streamlining gaming right now, but trying to do anything serious with the OS, like using a full version of a photo editor, code making, (even for basic Markup languages like HTML,) and MIDI production all suck balls on this platform.

A large portion of the problem is the OS, (which seems to be designed around phones and not Tablets in the slightest,) but an equally large portion of the problem has to do with the hardware most tablets have, and the fact that they are just plain shit. I don't mean to say they are shit like they don't work well, even though that is the case for most android tablets, I'm saying that the way a lot of the hardware is designed isn't good enough to accommodate what most people would use them for.

This leads me to question the purpose of an android tablet entirely. What is its niche? What are they for? who are they designed to appeal to?

They suck for photo editing

Photoshop sucks ass on the Android platform right now, and the only way to get GIMP to work properly on Android is by downloading an APK bigger than most triple-A game titles on Android, and hacking a version of XFCE into the OS like an episode of Mr. Robot. Pretty much every other photo editor for android tablets is one step below Photoshop Express, which is like losing a 100 Yard dash to a 100 year-old turtle.

They suck for video editing.

I have tried like you wouldn't believe to find a decent video editor on this platform, and paid a shit ton of money unlocking them all, yet, every single one of them is complete garbage. Either you can't edit video properly, or you can edit it properly, but you can't add more than one audio track, defeating the entire purpose of video production software entirely.

All of the DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) suck huge penis.

I think the worst example of software for tablets and Smartphones is the DAWs, and how they all seem to be tailor made for only one kind of music style, and that music style is almost always Dubstep, with a hint of closet-homosexual techno music from the mid 90s. Try to make Metal, R&B, or Orchestral scrapes, and you're shit out of luck, because these programs don't support real VSTi or DXi effects & layers, and all of the effects these programs DO have are proprietary.

I almost forgot to mention the baffling lack of user friendliness of these programs that have me pulling my fucking hair out every time I try to use them. The visual literacy of most of these programs are so retarded, they make photobucket.com look absolutely flawless in comparison.

Android tablets suck for painting and drawing.

Android has some of the best apps for graphic artist of any platform outside of Adobe Photoshop. The problem is, 99% of all Android tablets lack the two most important features an artist like me would need to have to draw effectively on Android: Pressure sensitivity and palm rejection.

Pressure sensitivity is when the size of your brush gets bigger or smaller depending on how hard or soft you press on the screen. Palm rejection is when the android touch screen doesn't detect your hand or wrist leaning on the screen, yet only detects the stylus you're using to draw with. The Samsung Galaxy Note series phones have this, as well as the Samsung Note 6, and many ASUS tablets, but they all require you to use whatever proprietary stylus came with the device. iOS and Windows allow you to buy whatever Bluetooth stylus you want.

This is one of those unique cases where the only thing holding Android tablets back from being the great art platform for aspiring artists is the hardware not being universal across all Android tablets.

What android tablets are good at.

Surprisingly enough, the one thing that Android excels at seems to be gaming. Gaming just plain works across the vast majority of Android tablets, but with smartphones being able to play all the same games, tablets hardly stand out as being a good enough reason to get one, if only for a bigger screen.

To me, this is why Tablets that run Android have been steadily dropping in sales numbers the past couple of years. When you get right down to it, tablets are just one half of a laptop, so butchering the software to be more like a phone and butchering the hardware to make it less appealing to pretty much anyone is a recipe for disaster.

Android Technology

Do Android Tablets Suck for Productivity?

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Imagine not hearing any sound coming from the game while streaming. That's YouTube Gaming app.

I never liked the idea of live streaming mobile games. Partly because the logistics behind getting the stream working and functional were too complicated, and partly the fact that I wasn't interested in seeing a face-cam placed awkwardly underneath the inevitably overweight twelve year old kids nostrils during a Minecraft walkthrough.

That being said, and the current landscape of Android gaming being the spam laden micro transaction Ponzi scheme that it is, I couldn't help but try to make it work myself, using YouTube's Gaming app.

In case you've been living under a bomb shelter in a parallel universe, YouTube Gaming was a platform aiming to rip off Twitch.tv, with some of YouTube's own UI and video functions thrown in there, just to remind you of how much of a pointless re-skin this website really is, and if the Android port of YouTube's Gaming app is any indication, this whole platform is about as useful to mobile gaming as polio is to a fucking firefighter.

Opening the app for the first time clues you in on the kind of innovative ideas present during the development of this app, when you notice how it's obviously just YouTube with a darker theme, and only shows gaming related videos. It doesn't quite become a pile of shit on the corpse of a dead elephant in my mind until I realized that my stream looked like this:

By the way, that was the UNEDITED full recording of the stream, from start to finish. No, you didn't just have a stroke, that was the entire stream. Now after watching that clip, if you weren't expecting a phone call telling you that you would die in 7 days, you were probably wondering why the stream looked less like gameplay footage and more like a PowerPoint presentation. You see, streams on YouTube and elsewhere have the ability to skip parts of the video where the connection cuts off or lags.

What you just saw was a clip of footage a little over 5 minutes long, but since YouTube doesn't record lag, ended up getting chopped and cut like it was the intro to a mid 90's NuMetal soundtrack.

It doesn't take a molecular physicist to know that compared to most gaming streams involving a console or a gaming PC, this looks about as stable as the dead wife of the protagonist of the P.T. demo trying to walk down a flight of stairs.

And no, it wasn't the stream quality, because I tried the same shit using both the 1080p and 480p stream options, and they are both the fucking same when they get uploaded by YouTube after the stream ends.

And before you even say it this was attempted on at least 3 devices, two of which are Motorola phones, and one of them was a Nexus.

It's entirely possible that this type of game casting is only compatible with a handful of devices thus far, making the foray into live Streaming with the app unreliable and a freaking gamble to say the least.

I dunno.

Android Games gaming Software

YouTube Gaming App Sucks (And Here's Why)

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I know I'm going to get a lot of shit for this, so let me start off by saying that this is entirely my subjective point of view.

Considering both Apple and Samsung are easily the two biggest smartphone providers in the world right now, saying that Samsung phones suck is like kicking a hornet's nest using only your flaccid penis. Going into production of this article, I could already expect the like to dislike ratio to look like the general consensus of The Fine Brothers at this point.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the phones suck. They don't. Kyocera phones suck. I'm just saying that they aren't that fucking good. People are buying this shit like it's a fucking cure for the Ebola virus.

Here is a list of things that suck about Samsung phones.

Design.

I can honestly say that Samsung designs phones the way God designed fucking raindrops. These phones support some of the most baffling design decisions I have ever seen. Whoever decided that someones entire phone needed to be covered on all sides with smoother-than-jizz-on-a-watermelon Gorilla Glass was either higher than the Voyager 2 satellite, or wanted to design a phone that they could safely shove up their own ass, because the galaxy S5 and 6 are harder to grip without a specialized case than a bar of soap in a maximum security prison.

If that wasn't bad enough, some level 42 intellect at Samsung's design committee decided that the S6 edge, as well as both Galaxy S7s needed to round both edges of the screen, and extend the display area all the way to the very side of the phone, so that only Mutant telekinesis-experts like Gean Grey from the X-Men can use the phone without pressing shit by accident, because got forbid some fucking caveman wanted to use his own hands to hold the very phone that requires his hands to operate, am I right?

If you thought Samsung's phones being about as easy to grip as a hard boiled egg covered in duck feces was bad, just wait till you drop the thing on the ground, because for a phone covered in gorilla glass, this phone is easier to shatter than a saltine cracker if it were taking lessons in Brazilian Jui-Jitsu. These glass panels are about as strong as the teeth of the average heroine addict.

I work at a company that employ's 250 people, about 90% of whom use a Samsung Galaxy S6, and guess what? I have not seen one -not even one- screen that wasn't cracked along the edge. You know, the same edge that Samsung's brilliant superior minds felt the whole God damn screen should be, covered from top to bottom in the glass that could be shattered by peaceful thoughts, or perhaps even a slight breeze on a partly cloudy Tuesday afternoon?

Touchwiz.

I know this is going to sound like bullshit coming from the grand wizard of the#StockAndroidMasterRace, but Touchwiz; Samsung's completely unnecessary custom ROM for the galaxy series; is a glitchy, bloated, and impractical pile of shit in my opinion. I know that this is a subjective opinion and everything, but consider this: Touchwiz -in the new galaxy S7- is nearly eight fucking gigabytes all by itself. Stock android builds like what you have in the Nexus are less than half of that, yet are capable of the exact same shit. To put this in perspective, the entire internal storage capacity of my 3rd Gen Moto G is 8 gigabytes by itself, and that's running Android 6! Now I know the fanboys are going to tear me a new asshole in the comments section, but let's be honest here: Touchwiz is a custom ROM built on Android source code, so what exactly is Samsung putting in this build that justifies an 8gb build? Bloatware, redundant bullshit apps, and the morbidly obese Touchwiz OS itself.

Just so we're clear, when I talk about redundant apps, I'm talking about the fact that instead of just having a Samsung keyboard, it also has the AOSP keyboard running at the same time. Instead of just having a Samsung calendar, there is also the Stock AOSP calendar, and so on. Samsung's 300+ apps hogging a shit ton of storage, coupled with Samsung cloud services hogging system RAM as it sends usage statistics back to Samsung, which is also checking your location, and everything else a cloud service does, right along side all the Google AOSP cloud services while it does the same shit, meaning that it's using twice as much memory to do even the most basic tasks, means that its wasting resources for no good reason at all. Don't even get me started on system logging, because both the Samsung and AOSP apps log app data at the same time.

What makes this such a pain in the ass is the fact that Samsung's hardware is actually pretty good. The excellent hardware is wasted on a ROM that sucks by any metric one could use to measure it.

Over-saturation.

This may seem entirely subjective, but I feel like the way the Android market has favored Samsung Phones is not entirely Justified. In other words, I think there has been way too much hype built around a rather expensive phone that really isn't that good. There are much -much- better devices out there for the same price getting overlooked, because they are stuck in the shadow of the monster that is the Samsung Marketing machine.

This is why a have not, and WILL not buy another Samsung Galaxy. The drawbacks are just too numerous for me, when the Nexus 6P costs about the same as the Galaxy S7.

Android Technology

3 Reasons Why Samsung Galaxy Smartphones Suck

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Android gaming has come a long way since it was nothing more than a collection of games ported from iOS. Kind of a shame though, that some 5 years after Android gaming has gone mainstream, it still sucks in a lot of ways.

1. Way too many ads.

If you download a game for free, be prepared to be gang-raped in a back alley at 3AM by pop up ads that require a Bluetooth stylus and the precision of a fucking brain surgeon to close without accidentally clicking on the ad. The overwhelming majority of Google Play Games exist for the sole purpose of re-purposing a Unity source code in order to build games around spamming for ad revenue.

Allow me to ask my fellow android gamers a question: How many times have we Android gamers had to sit through -or click out of- a full screen ad after every load screen, menu transition, or even immediately following a death? How many of these games allow you the option of buying your way out of the spam, via some in-game purchases? Not that many, you're probably saying to yourself.

2. Most of the games are clones.

It's believed that at least 99.999999999% of all Google Play games were built using a source code from Unity and ported to the Android platform. This leaves you with 98,765,432.1 of the exact same fucking game, released on Google Play under dozens of different names, and with only slight variations by at least 90 different publishers.

3. Blatant Copyright Infringement.

The vast majority of runners and platformers released by Chinese publishers straight up steal intellectual property from popular North American film studios and video game designers with impunity, while profiting from it via the ad revenue they get by flooding your screen with marketing bullshit. Funny how channels on YouTube can be struck, or deleted via FALSE copyright claims, yet the developers on Google Play can freely engage in flat-out fucking THEFT without management so much as batting an eye.

Of course, this doesn't apply to all Android games, and the ones that don't suck ass usually get the most attention, but it cannot be denied that there is just way too much fucking garbage on Google Play right now.

4. Pay-To-Win Micro-transactions.

This pay-to-win bullshit is when a game developer strategically designs a game with the intent of making it discouraging, or even downright fucking impossible to win without forking over real cash in order to gain a fair, or even mild advantage. Games like Robots and Mobile Strike sometimes make it a requirement to fork over real cash for certain items and weapons, regardless of the progress you make in the game to earn them.

I am not entirely apposed to micro-transactions, but I feel there is a right and WRONG way to go about them. This sort of think should be used as a way to enhance the game play, not become a barrier to it, and the ladder happens WAY too often. This type of bullshit is mirrored in the console and PC mainstream, where pay-to-win DLC is used to patch a partially completed game that you would ordinarily have to pay $60 for anyway.

5. Vast majority of games don't support gamepads.

Point and click gaming may comprise the vast majority of the Android gaming platform, and probably don't need controllers, but games that very OBVIOUSLY DO need gamepad support, such as Racing, Fighting, and even some third-person action games should be fucking REQUIRED to integrate support for a peripheral like that, yet the overwhelming majority don't have that option, leaving you to play games that obviously weren't ideal for touch-screen controls, to be played with nearly %30 of your screen to be covered up by your own thumbs, in a slippery, awkward fucking mess of an experience.

I had recently reviewed The King of Fighters 2015 A for Android on RageFor.com, and I was shocked and baffled to find that It didn't even have basic support for peripherals like game pads or joysticks. KOF was a franchise developed more than 15 years ago by SNK, and they haven't figured out how to get basic Gamepad support for a 15 Year old fighting game? Are you shitting me? SNK is selling the entire NEO*GEO fighting game library for 4.99 a pop already! Are you telling me they couldn't figure this shit out for those games either?!

Android Games gaming Technology

5 Reasons Android Games Suck.

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I decided to write this post in regards to a problem I've been trying to wrap my mind around for a year now. As time consuming and all encompassing as blogging is, the process of staying active on my own websites is made all the more irritating when trying to balance blogging frequently with a full time job. I could probably manage to do it during a lunch break, but unfortunately, Android versions of the Blogger app suck balls.

Yes, it's not just the original blogger app on Google play, either; most of the aftermarket apps tend to lack even the most basic common sense features you would find in the dashboard of the website.

1. Can only add one picture.
This is the single stupidest god damn thing I have ever seen. You can only add one, you can't decide where it will be, what its orientation on the page will be, or any thing else. It gives you the option for either uploading from your phone or tablet or taking a photo with a camera, just in case that one mentally challenged extra terrestrial wanted to take a duck face photo to go with every poorly punctuated article, on its inevitably horrible looking blog that looks like it was designed using a template from Yahoo GeoCities back in 1998.

To make matters worse, it isn't integrated with Google Photos, so if you have a pic on another device, or the cloud, you're pretty much screwed.

2. It doesn't know how to highlight, italicize, or bold text.
These text formatting conventions were pioneered by softwares like Corel WordPerfect and Apple MacWrite way back in the mid to late 80's, and this app is such a piece of shit, it can't even compete with software that's over 30 years old. I didn't even talk about the lack of paragraph formatting, or the fact that you can't magnet link shit; all of which you can do easily in the browser.

3. it doesn't know what the fuck to do with a draft.
If I'm writing an article at work or on the go, and I want to save it as a draft so I can continue my work on a laptop or something, my draft is going to be stuck in my mobile device, meaning I either have to keep writing the article on my phone, or end up starting the fuck over. This defeats the entire purpose of a draft in the first place.

The blogger app has been available for android for a little over five years, and the developers have done precisely jack and shit to improve upon it. I ended up going through a few apps to substitute the official one until finally settling for Blogaway Pro. Kinda ridiculous that out of all the third party aftermarket apps for this platform, the worst one out of all of them is the one developed by the Google Devs.
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