Cable TV giant Comcast already offers a mobile app that lets iPhone and iPod touch users view program guides and remotely schedule recordings on their DVR. Now the company reprots that it’s also working on versions for Blackberry and Android devices.

There’s no word on the launch date, but the new versions will likely be free for existing Comcast users.

While the DVR remote scheduling function is probably one of the coolest features of the Comcast mobile app, it has other features that come into play if you’re a Comcast Digital Voice or internet subscriber. For instance, you can listen to voicemail and view phone call logs, or forward your home phone calls to your mobile phone.

The app also lets you watch movie trailers.

via Gizmodo

As much as I love the feel of holding a good book in my hand, there are a few things you can do with digital books that you can’t easily do with the old fashioned paper type of book. For instance, you can quickly search for text in the eBook, or highlight a word to look up its meaning in a dictionary. You know, assuming your eBook software lets you do that — which the Amazon Kindle app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad now does.

Here’s how it works, just fire up Amazon Kindle 2.2 on your iDevice and open a book. then press and hold any word, and a menu will pop up asking if you want to add a note or highlight the text. You should also see a definition of the word from the Oxford American Dictionary.

You can also click the Google or Wikipedia buttons to search for the word on one of those sites using the web browser. Or you can click the Full Definition button to see a more complete entry for the word from the Oxford dictionary, which has about 250,000 entries.

When you install the Kindle 2.2 app, it will automatically download the dictionary, which you can also open as a standalone eBook if you’re the sort of person who likes to read through dictionaries cover to cover in your free time.

The new app also adds the ability for searching inside of books on the iPad.

The Amazon Kindle app for iOS is available as a free download from the App Store.

The folks at LiveJournal have launched a new app that lets you post entries, read updates from your friends pages, and access personal messages from an iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

LieJournal is part blogging service and part internet forum/community. Like Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, and other online blogging services, LiveJournal provides users with a place to create a personal blog where they can share their thoughts with the world. But you can also follow friends and join communities, allowing you to see updates that others have posted on their own blogs or in community forums.

The new iOS app has a built-in text editor for writing posts, uploading pictures, formatting text, or even including polls. There’s also a tab to see updates from your friends, and another to read messages.

The only problem I’ve found is that when you click on the Journal tab to view your own site, the LiveJournal app shows you how many comments there are on each post… but it won’t let you read them without opening the web browser.

LiveJournal 0.60 for iOS is available as a free download from the App Store. The app is based on LiveJournal.app, which was originally created by CosySoftware before it was purchased by LiveJournal.

via The Blog Herald

Research in Motion has launched a beta version of BlackBerry App World 2.0. The App World is basically BlackBerry’s answer to the Apple App Store. It allows you to find and download free and paid apps directly on your phone. RIM says 25 million people downloaded the original BlackBerry App World client. Starting today, you can grab the beta of the new version from the BlackBerry Beta Zone.

Among other changes, BlackBerry App World 2.0 includes:

• Support for carrier billing and credit cards (in addition to PayPal)
• A new category for themes
• A better search function
• Info about the apps you’ve already installed in the “My World” section
• Support for QR codes, which let you scan a barcode with your camera to open the download link

You can find out more about the new BlackBerry App World at the Inside BlackBerry blog.

via Inside BlackBerry

One of the things that kind of bugs me about Google Android is the fact that you have to exit an app and go to the home screen and then the app drawer in order to launch a new app. Sure, you can long-press the home button to bring up a list of recently used apps, which makes switching between two or three running apps a bit easier. But it just takes too many clicks to launch a new app if it’s not already running.

Power Strip from intuitit is a utility that makes it easy to launch applications, shortcuts, or widgets from any screen simply by tapping your home button (or by long-pressing your search button if you’d rather play it that way).

Scan to download

The app is currently available for 99 cents from the Android Market and works with any device running Android 2.1 and up. Intuitit says the price will increase on Friday.

The Power Strip menu is customizable, allowing you to place any shortcuts you want in the docking panel. You can also add widgets, which will show up when you hit the home (or search) button. You can also rearrange shortcuts by dragging and dropping them.

As an added bonus, Power Strip has a built-in QR code generator, which means you can use i to share barcode links for the apps you’re using. No, I don’t know why an app launcher needs a QR code generator, but I suppose this way you don’t have to install two separate apps for QR codes and app launching.

via Lifehacker

Jackeey Wallpaper permission notice

Apple staffers personally comb through every app that’s submitted to the App Store before approving it. The end result is that relatively few of the apps available for iOS are outright spyware or malware. Sure, there are a lot of ridiculous apps that don’t do very much. But the theory is that they at least won’t steal your data… or show you pornography.

The Google Android Market is a much more open place for developers to share their apps with smartphone users. But every time you install an app, you’re greeted with a security note letting you know what kind of information the app will collect from your device. Download Squad has a good overview of the data that apps can collect, ranging from your location to your browser history and bookmarks and contact data.

Theoretically, if you read those notices you should be able to avoid apps that collect your personal data if you’re the sort of person who frowns upon that kind of thing. But let’s be honest. How often do you actually pay attention to these warnings? You just click OK, don’t you?

The folks at mobile security firm Lookout suggest you stop doing that and pay a little more attention.

The company launched the App Genome Project this week, which looks at hundreds of thousands of mobile application and identifies security threats and other information. One of the group’s findings concerns wallpaper apps from  Jackeey Wallpaper.They’re available in the Android Market, and the wallpaper apps have been downloaded at least a million times.

While the apps are simply designed to give you a number of wallpapers for your Android home screen, they also collected browsing history, text messages, and even information about your SIM card number and voicemail password. There’s clearly no reason a wallpaper app needs any of that information — which was all sent to a site in China.

Lookout says that about a third of the free apps available for iOS and Android can access a user’s location, while about 14% of iOS apps access contact data compared to 8% on Android. On the other hand, the group’s research shows that 47% of free Android apps have third party code, which is more than twice the number of iOS apps — although that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since third party code can include mobile advertising code.

Update: The developer of the wallpaper app in question sees things differently, and says his apps never collected the kind of data Lookout claims.

NY Times Android app (which is available for free)

There are millions of Google Android smartphone users, with Google reporting that 160,000 new handsets are activated every day. But since Google is giving away the operating system for free, you might be wondering how Google plans to make money from Android.

The most obvious thing Google is doing is creating demand for Google services including search, email, calendar, contact, and other cloud-based apps. The more you use those, the more you’ll be exposed to Google ads — if not on  your mobile device, then the next time you login to your account using a desktop web browser.

But speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested there might be another revenue stream: subscription services. For instance, if Google launched a service costing just $10 per year that lets you subscribe to premium newspaper content, Schmidt says, it could easily generate $10 billion dollars.

Of course, there is no such Google service right now. And if there were, Google would probably have to split the revenue with newspaper publishers. But you get the idea.

Oh yeah, and Google’s expected to launch a music service for Android users soon. Does anyone really think that Google isn’t going to figure out a way to make money off of the fastest growing smartphone platform around?

via Android Community

Ever wish your Android smartphone could look a bit more like your 12 year old computer when it boots up? Well your prayers have been answered. A member of the xda-developers forum has posted files that you can use to replace the default boot animation on a number of Android devices — and it should look familiar to any long time PC user.

The animation doesn’t actually check your system memory or other stats, but simply cycles through a series of images. But there are device-specific versions for the Google Nexus One, Motorola Droid and Milestone, and HTC Desire, Dream, Hero, Incredible, Magic, and Liquid.

You can find instructions for installing the boot animation at the xda-developers forum. If you don’t understand them, you probably shouldn’t bother trying.

I’m a big fan of keyboard-based app launchers such as Launchy for Windows or Quicksilver for OS X. If you have a large number of apps installed on your computer, it’s often easier to pull up the program you’re looking for by hitting a hotkey combo and then typing in the first few letters of the app than by sifting through the Windows Start Menu or OS X dock.

WiMoRun brings the same sort of experience to mobile devices running Windows Mobile 6.0 and up.

Basically, once the app is installed, you just select the Run app from the program list, and then type in the name of the app you want to launch.

Honestly, I’m not convinced that WiMoRun is much of a time saver, since it generally takes a lot longer to type using a Windows Mobile on-screen keyboard than a PC keyboard. But if you happen to have a ton of apps on your device, I suppose WiMoRun can save you a bit of scrolling.

The app also includes an auto-complete feature, and a dropdown list of available programs.

WiMoRun is available as a free download from the xda-developers forum, although you’ll need to register for an account to download the installer. You can also download it from Freeware Pocket PC, no registration required.

Campfire is a web-based app that lets you create chat rooms, share files, track transcripts, and do all sorts of other things that have made the service popular with business users and software developers. You can access Campfire using a web browser — or up until today you could use a 3rd party app called Ember for $9.99 if you were on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Actually, you can still use Ember… except today it has a new name. And it’s free. 37signals (the company behind Campfire) has announced that it’s purchased the app from Overcommitted, the company that developed it.

Now Ember has been renamed Campfire for iPhone. It lets you communicate in multiple chat rooms, share pictures, and access transcripts.

Campfire for iPhone is available as a free download from the App Store.

via Mashable