Adobe has increased the minimum hardware requirements for mobile devices to run Flash Player 10.1. Basically, f you’ve got a VGA display you can get by with an ARM Cortex A8 550MHz CPU, but if you have a WVGA screen you’ll need a faster, 800MHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU. Right now, Adobe Flash is only available on Android 2.2 and up, but eventually Adobe plans to offer Flash for other platforms as well.

So what does this mean in practical terms? If you’ve got a Motorola Droid, you should be fine because while the Droid originally shipped with a 550MHz clock speed and an 854 x 480 pixel display, a recent software update overclocked the device to run at 800MHz. On the other hand, if you have a Motorola Milestone, which is physically almost identical to the Droid, it sounds like you’re out of luck because that model is still running at 550MHz.

Long story short — Droid supports Flash, Milestone doesn’t. And if you buy a newer Android device such as the Motorola Droid 2 or Droid X, or the HTC Evo 4G, HTC Incredible, Samsung Galaxy S, or Samsung Epic 4G, you should be able to handle Flash without a problem, as long as you’re running Android 2.2. All of those phones have 1GHz processors.

Keep in mind, Flash on Android is still a hit or miss experience. Some Flash content loads quickly and plans smoothly. Other sites can cause the browser to hang. And Flash-based ads on web sites that are primarily text and picture driven can cause pages to load much more slowly. I highly recommend adjusting your browser settings to enable plug-ins on demand instead of always if you do decide to run Flash.

via Android Police and Droid Forums

RadioTime is an online resource for finding and listening to internet radio streams. You can do that through the RadioTime web site, using a web-based audio player. But RadioTime first came to my attention years ago because the company offered an excellent plugin for Windows Media Center which allowed you to access internet radio from a media PC using a remote control instead of a mouse and keyboard. RadioTime also has an app for Boxee, a cross-platform media center for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Scan to download

Now the company has launched a mobile app called TuneIn Radio, which brings the magic of RadioTime to Google Android. You don’t need a RadioTime account to use the free TuneIn Radio App. You can just search for radio stations by genre or location — one of RadioTime’s coolest features is that it can detect your location and find internet streams for local stations. You can also search for stations by location manually.

If you do have a RadioTime account, you can login and sync your presets, which means you can manage your presets from the RadioTime web site instead of your phone.

There are over 40,000 music, news, sports, and podcast channels available including streams available in the RadioTime directory.

TuneIn Radio is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Update: TuneIn appears to be a free, ad-supported version of the $1.99 RadioTime app which has been available in the market for a while. thanks VW!

You can find more screenshots after the break.

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Microsoft’s My Phone service for Windows Mobile lets you backup data from your phone, share photos on social networking sites, access some of you’re phone’s information from any web browser, and locate a missing phone on a map. Basically, it’s Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s MobileMe. Except it’s free.

While Microsoft is changing the name of its mobile platform from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7, the company is keeping the My Phone service. The folks at WMpoweruser have snagged a screenshot of the new web interface, which lets you find your phone’s location on a map or make the phone ring in case you simply misplaced it in your other coat pocket.

You can also lock the phone and display a message if you think you left it in a cab and are hoping the person who found it might be inclined to return it. Or if you’ve got sensitive data that shouldn’t leak into the hands of the Chinese, you can remotely wipe your phone and restore the factory settings.

via Download Squad

Google is working on a new version of the Gmail app for Android. While the company hasn’t officially released the app, the installer file has  been ripped from an unofficial Android ROM and posted online.

There are two major changes in the new Gmail app. First, you can now select text in an email message to copy and paste. Second, there’s a new floating bar that you can use to star, forward, or reply to a message without scrolling all the way to the bottom.

There’s no word on when Google will officially start offering the new Gmail app for download.

via Phandroid

The Swype software keyboard for smartphones aims to make it easier to enter text by letting you swipe your finger across the keyboard from letter to letter. The idea is you don’t have to actually stop to click on each individual letter, Swype’s text prediction technology works pretty well, although I personally prefer typing with two thumbs instead of dragging one finger across the screen.

Swype is currently available on some Windows Mobile and Android phones, including the new Samsung Galaxy S line of smartphones. The company is also beta testing a new version for Symbian, which is available for download for Nokia S60 5th Edition touch screen phones including the Nokia 5800, 5230, X6, N97, N97 mini, and C6-00.

You can find more details and a download link at Nokia’s beta labs. There’s also a demo video which you can check out after the break.

via Pocket Hacks

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I have a Google Nexus One phone on T-Mobile’s network, so I can use the handy T-Mobile MyAccount app to keep track of how many calls I’ve made during the current billing period. The app also tracks text messages and lets me pay my bill. But that doesn’t mean there’s not room on my phone for an app that provides much more information about what my phone has been up to.

Scan to download

PhoneUsage is a free utility that tracks phone calls, text messages, and data use and plots everything in a series of charts.

On the home screen, you can click the tabs for Today, This Week, last Month, or 2 Months Ago to see your information at a glance. But things get really interesting when you hit the Calls, Texts, or Data tabs. That’s where you can see detailed charts showing your incoming and outgoing calls plotted by day of month, time of day, or day of week. You can also see the top people you’ve communicated with by volume.

You can tap the “Period” button to adjust the time frame for the carts, and PhoneUsage also lets you tap on any chart to see it in full-screen, landscape mode.

My only complaint is that you have to use PhoneUsage for a little while before you’ll get the most out of this app. When I first loaded it, the app managed to track my recent phone calls, but it didn’t notice incoming and outgoing text messages or recent data usage. Once I started using 3G data after installing the app, the data chart started to fill in.

I suspect PhoneUsage also doesn’t know the difference between in-network and out-of-network calls, which means you might not want to use this app as your sole guide of whether you’re about to go over your monthly minutes. But it can definitely give you a pretty good idea of how you’re using your Android smartphone.

PhoneUsage is available as a free download from the Android Market. There’s also a Pro version that runs £1.49 (about $2.29) which will alert you when you’re about to break user-defined usage limits. The Pro version also includes Home Screen widgets.

Twitter for iPad

Twitter unleashed its official application for iPad, which is really just a rebranded version of Tweetie, a Twitter client that Twitter bought in April, 2010. When it comes to Twitter apps, there is no shortage of competition on the iOS – plus there are all kinds of web interfaces that work with Twitter. For Twitter to have an official branded application, the app better be good. As mainly a TweetDeck user myself, I quite liked what I saw from the Twitter app.

You’ll find useful options like Timeline, Mentions, and Lists on the left. The right pane displays whatever option you pick. The interface is similar in the landscape mode – the right pane just becomes a centered pane with a gutter on the right side.

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Skyfire is a mobile browser for Windows Mobile, Google Android and other platforms which promises faster browsing, and a full web experience on mobile devices. It does this by using server-side compression. In other words, you enter a URL, and the Skyfire servers will look at the page, decide whether it would look better on your device after the servers to some data crunching, and then send the results along to your mobile device. While it sounds like that would slow things down, the truth is most of the time you can’t tell the difference — and when viewing websites with a lot of Flash or other data that can tax your phone’s resources, it could speed things up.

In fact, Skyfire offers one of the best ways to view Adobe Flash content on mobile phones that don’t normally support Flash. Sure, not all Flash-based web sites work with Skyfire, but many do.

Now Skyfire wants to bring its magic to Apple’s iOS platform. On the one hand, there’s reason to think that Apple could actually approve the app. While early third party browsers were typically rejected, Apple did approve the Opera Mini browser earlier this year because unlike mobile Safari, it uses server-side compression to offer a different kind of browsing experience… much like Skyfire.

On the other hand, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made it clear repeatedly that he’s not a fan of Adobe Flash. So it’s possible Apple could reject the app simply because it doesn’t want to see Flash content on mobile devices, and instead wants to pressure web publishers to use HTML5 and other multimedia standards.

On the third hand (I’m almost done here, I promise), Skyfire essentially tanscodes Flash content into HTML5 for delivery on the iPhone, so who knows? Maybe Apple will be cool with that.

Anyway you can check out a preview of the iPhone app after the break. There’s no telling if or when it will be available for download.

via Laptop Magazine

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Live-streaming video site Justin.tv has officially launched an Android app that lets you shoot live video with your phone’s camera and stream it over the web. I’ve been testing a beta version of the app for a few weeks, and in fact I shot my unboxing video of the Augen GenTouch78 Android tablet using the Justin.tv Android app.

Scan to download

Overall, I’ve been quite impressed with the app. It’s incredibly simple to use. Just hit the record button and it will start live-streaming video from your phone. Enter your Twitter and/or Facebook credentials and it can automatically let your contacts know when you’re streaming. And you can hit the Chat button to enter text during your live-stream — although it’s probably easier just to talk into your phone’s mic.

The video quality is good, but not great. Clearly your results will vary depending on your phone’s camera and your internet connection.

If you don’t have a Justin.tv account you can sign up for one for free.

The Justin.tv Android app is available as a free download from the Android Market. The company plans to launch an iPhone version soon as well.

You can find a few more screenshots after the break.

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Transfering photos and other images from your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to another device is usually a pretty painless process. But what if you have a few HD videos that you want to send? Most email services place limits on file sizes, which means if you want to shoot a 1GB video file to your buddy, you’re going to have to find another route — like maybe using Transfer Big Files.

Transfer Big Files is a web-based service that lets you do exactly what you’d think it does. You upload files, get a link that you can share with other users, and they can download those files. The iPhone app lets you upload photos and videos from an Apple iOS device and shoot an email to your intended recipient once the files are ready to download.

The mobile app is free, and all users who register for a free account will get 2GB of online storage space. The first 100,000 people to download the mobile app and sign up for a new account will actually get 5GB of storage space. If you need more storage than that, you can pay to upgrade your account.

Transfer Big Files is available as a free download from the App Store.

via SlashGear