The default web browser on Android phones and tablets uses the same WebKit rendering engine as the Google Chrome web browser for desktop and laptop computers. But it’s not Chrome.

But today Google has launched the first version of Chrome for Android. It looks like the desktop version of Chrome and features the same omnibox that lets you enter a URL or a search query — with suggestions popping up as you type.

When you sign in with your Google account you’ll automatically be able to access your bookmarks, search history, and other data from the desktop version of Chrome.

There’s also an option to view browser tabs that are open on other devices. If you’re signed into Chrome on your desktop, you can fire up Chrome on your mobile device and quickly open the pages you were just reading on your PC.

Google Chrome requires Android 4.0 or higher to run. I took it for a spin on my HP TouchPad today, and it feels ridiculously fast — especially when visiting pages that it can preload in the background.

Chrome also makes it easy to open an incognito window when you don’t want sites you visit to be saved to you history.

Aviary offers a popular free, web-based photo editor, as well as apps for editing your photos on Facebook or on an iOS device. Now the company has also launched a free Android app.

The Aviary Android app behaves in an unusual way — it doesn’t show up on your list of apps. Instead, you open it by firing up the Gallery app (or any other photo app), finding a picture you want to edit, an then “sharing” it with Aviary Editor.

Once you do that you can apply a number of digital effects, crop, resize, or adjust colors, or make other changes. Out of the box, Aviary includes a decent number of basic tools — but you can also buy additional effects through in-app purchases.

Aviary is available for Android 2.2 and up.

via Android Police

Mint has brought its tablet-friendly personal finance app to Android tablets. Mint is a free service from Intuit which makes it easy to track your income and spending, set budgets, and view pretty (and useful) graphics which help you figure out where you’re money’s going and how you can use it more wisely.

The company has offered a mobile app for Android for a while, but up until now it’s been optimized for phones. Now Mint has released a new version which looks great on tablets running Android 3.0 and up. It’s available as a free download from the Android Market.

While the tablet-friendly app is new to Android, it actually looks a lot like the iPad app Mint released late last year.

The new app makes better use of the screen real estate on tablets, offering some of the attractive graphics that you can find on the website but which aren’t available in Mint’s smartphone app. There’s also a whole lot more information viewable on a single screen — but in a way that doesn’t look cluttered.

I’ve been a Mint user for over a year, and the smartphone app is great for adding transactions on the go. But the tablet app is a whole lot prettier.

There are hundreds of thousands of free and paid apps available in the Google Android Market. It’s easy to download and install any of them with just a few clicks — but Google doesn’t provide an easy way to bookmark apps that you might want to install later.

That’s where a free app called MarketMarks comes in. It can act as a sort of shopping list for Android apps.

Once MarketMarks is installed, just browse the Android Market and click the share icon anytime you find an app you might want to download in the future. Then choose MarketMarks from the share menu.

MarketMarks will create a list of apps you’ve saved. You can then tap any app in that list to bring up the Android Market page.

You can also organize multiple lists by placing them in folders, delete apps from your list from a long-press context menu, or move apps between lists.

MarketMarks can come in handy if you’re not sure whether you want to spend money on an app but you don’t want to forget about it. You can also use the app to bookmark apps that you don’t want to download over 3G so you can easily find them again when you get back to your WiFi network, or if you want to wait until you’ve cleared up some space on your device before downloading a new app.

via reddit

As promised, Koushik Dutta has released the first touchscreen-friendly version of his popular ClockworkMod Recovery utility. A public beta is available for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus or Samsung Nexus S smartphones.

Update: Touch Recovery is now available for a number of additional phones.

The custom recovery app allows you to backup or restore your device, wipe data, or flash (install) custom software. Eventually it will likely be available for additional phones and tablets.

In order to ClockworkMod Touch Recovery you’ll need to use fastboot and adb to push the app from your computer to your phone. You may want to install the Android SDK in order to use these tools, although strictly speaking you don’t necessarily need the entire Android SDK if all you want to do is access fastboot and adb.

If you know your way around adb already, you can find some basic instructions for installing the new custom recovery at Droid-Life.

ClockworkMod Recovery is a utility that can be used on Android devices to backup, restore, or wipe data on your phone or tablet, and to flash new software. For instance you need a custom recovery tool like ClockworkMod to install CyanogenMod or MIUI versions of Android.

Up until now ClockworkMod has relied on the volume, power, and home buttons on most devices for navigation, since it doesn’t include touchscreen support. That’s made the popular utility difficult to use on devices that don’t have all of those buttons, including the Amazon Kindle Fire. That’s one of the reasons the touch-based TWRP 2.0 recovery software has proven popular with Kindle Fire users.

But ClockworkMod developer Koushik Dutta is showing off a new version of his utility that will work with touchscreens. This will allow ClockworkMod Recovery to work on the Kindle Fire, and it will also allow users to navigate through various menus more quickly even on devices that do have volume, home, and power buttons.

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Google has updated the Music Manager for its cloud-based music service. While you could previously use the manager to upload as many as 20,000 songs to Google Music or to download tracks you’d purchased from the service — now you can use it to download the songs you’ve uploaded.

In other words, you can use Google Music to backup your music library, stream it to any computer with a web browser or to your Android phone or tablet, and download your music to a PC.

So you can create a backup of your music collection using Google Music and re-download it if your hard drive crashes, you laptop is stolen, or you buy a new PC.

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to download just a few songs at a time using the music manager. What happens when you click the “Download my library” button is that Google asks you what folder you’d like to store your music in, and then is starts to download all of your songs.

But you can download individual tracks or albums from the Google Music website.

This weekend the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team released tools to jailbreak the iPhone 4s and iPad 2 running iOS 5.0.1. And it turns out an awful lot of people were waiting to do just that.

Just three days after the jailbreak utilities were first released, the iPhone Dev Team reports that nearly half a million iPhone 4S devices have been jailbroken. The iPad 2 numbers are a little funkier, with about 300,000 new iPad 2 jailbreaks and around 150,000 people who had jailbroken their iPads while running iOS 4.x now upgrading to iOS 5.0.1 and jailbreaking again.

The stats are compiled from the number of new devices pinging the server for the Cydia store for jailbroken devices. Cydia is installed when you jailbreak your iDevice.

In addition to enabling support for apps that aren’t available from the App Store, jailbreaking allows you to access hidden files and settings on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and make changes to the look and feel of the operating system.

Up until recently it was easy to jailbreak an iPad 1, iPhone 4, or earlier devices including all iPod touch models. But the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 both have new hardware that had proven more difficult to crack… until now.