The XPeria Play smartphone is the first Android phone from Sony to include a built-in Playstation emulator that allows you to play classic PSOne games purchased from Sony. But developer yifanlu has spent the last week or so working on a way to get the phone to run games that aren’t officially available for the phone.

People have been taking classic Playstation game discs and converting them to ISO files for use on emulators for ages. There are a handful of unofficial Playstation emulators available for Android that can already handle these files. What’s new here is that yifanlu’s tool will make it possible to run those games using Sony’s official emulator and Sony’s first so-called Playstation phone with a built-in gamepad. The combo could offer the best classic gaming experience available on an Android device.

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Say you love your iPhone or iPod touch, but you’ve always kind of wondered what it would be like to use Android instead. You could go all out and actually install Android on a jailbroken iPhone. Or you could take the easier route and simply install iAndroid, a free Android simulator available from the Cydia store.

While iAndroid won’t give you the full Android experience, it does offer a rough approximation of the Android experience. When you load iAndroid you’ll see a nice big HTC Sense-style widget with the time (although there’s no weather data). There are also icons for Settings, Phone, Twitter, Facebook, Camera, and Browser.

The phone and camera functions actually work, allowing you to make calls or take photos – although you won’t necessarily get all the bells and whistles you would with the default iOS apps. The web browser works reasonably well, but there aren’t any advanced features such as support for browser tabs or Adobe Flash (obviously).

The Twitter and Facebook apps are actually just links to the mobile web sites, but they work pretty well. Because there are no hardware buttons, an on-screen “home” button appears in most apps, allowing you to go back to the virtual home screen. There are no buttons for search or menu though.

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Google has removed some of the most popular video game console emulators from the Android Market. Developer yongzh tells Engadget that his account as been terminated and that Nesoid, Snesoid, Gensoid, N64oid, Ataroid, Gearoid, GBCoid, and Gameboid have all been pulled from the Android Market.

This comes on the heels of last month’s removal of Gensoid and the removal of psx4droid in March.

Emulators have always been on shaky ground. They don’t necessarily violate copyright law, since the code used is often reverse engineered rather than copies from original game consoles. But emulators are used almost exclusively to play games which are protected by copyright. While it’s theoretically possible to rip your own game from a cartridge or disc, it’s pretty difficult to do and most people simply download game files or ROMs from the internet illegally.

So it’s not particularly surprising that few emulators have ever been approved for sale in Apple’s iTunes App Store… and honestly it’s not shocking that Google is cracking down on emulators in the Android Market.

The good news for emulator fans is that you can install apps on most Android phones and tablets without using the Android Market. You need to jailbreak an iPhone to circumvent the App Store, but yongzh has simply moved all of his apps to SlideME, a third party app store for Android which should work with most phones except for a handful of devices on AT&T’s network which are incapable of installing non-Market apps (without at least jumping through some hoops).

All of the emulators from yongzh will be available for free for a limited time from SlideME, allowing existing users to grab the latest versions without paying twice.

It’s possible that the apps weren’t pulled simply because they allow you to run illegally downloaded games or because they violate any trademarks or copyrights though. Some folks allege that the problem may be in the way yongzh used open source software to develop his apps without complying with all the terms of the original license.

via Engadget

One issue which has reared its ugly head on most current tablet OSes is how to deal with legacy apps. For the upcoming HP TouchPad and the shiny, new webOS 3, the challenge is how to handle apps created using the older Palm Mojo SDK. As the Touchpad nears launch readiness, however, HP has finally revealed its response in the latest beta build of its tablet emulator.

Right now, Mojo apps default to running in their original resolution — a Pre-friendly 320×480. As you can see, the emulator also defaults to rendering a virtual handset around the app. HP has included a way for developers to tag their apps so as to utilize the TouchPad’s full 9.7″ display, though doing so causes the virtual gesture area to disappear. That’s not a problem if an app offers other built-in navigation options, but it could certainly cause issues in some cases.

Of course, the emulator is still in its beta form and HP has released four versions between April 12th and now. As they continue to update, the rough edges will no doubt be smoothed out.

via PreCentral

After Google pulled the psx4droid Playstation emulator from the Android Market, the developer has decided to offer the app as a free download. As long as you have a phone that lets you install non-Market apps, you can download psx4droid 3.0 and install it manually. The developer has also released the source code for the project.

Version 3.0 of the emulator is based on the open source PCSX-ReARMed emulator, and developer zodttd says it’s faster than older versions of psx4droid. Unfortunately saved game stats from previous versions won’t work with psx4droid 3.0.

Zodttd’s move to release the source code is kind of a big deal, because he’s been accused of coding apps in the past that are based on open source software licensed under the GPL, but failing to release the code for his apps — which is a violation of the GPL terms.

According to the developer, the GPL issue had nothing to do with the app being removed from the Android Market though. He says Sony asked Google to pull the app because the app’s icon included graphics that were covered by a Sony trademark.

While psx4droid was the first Playstation emulator for Android, it’s not the only game in town anymore. The popular FPse emulator was ported to Android recently and it’s available from the Android Market for just over $5.

I’ve seen software that lets you run Google Android in an emulator window on a Windows PC, but a company called BlueStacks is taking things to a much higher level. SlashGear reports that BlueStacks offers software that lets Android run on a Windows computer through virtualization, allowing you to run an Android app in one Window while Windows apps are running in other windows. You can quickly and easily flip between Android and Windows apps — and you can use your Windows drivers and utilities from the Android environment to print web pages, documents, or other items.

The system isn’t perfect. There’s no access to the Google Android Market, for instance, but BlueStacks does let users download apps from the Amazon Appstore, which is quickly becoming the biggest competitor to Google’s app marketplace.

Of course, many Android apps were designed for touch input and aren’t going to work all that well with a PC that relies on a keyboard and mouse. But if you have a Windows tablet or a desktop or laptop PC with a touchscreen display BlueStacks gives you access to thousands of touch-friendly apps without leaving Windows.

BlueStacks will be available for download later this year. The company is also working to get the software preloaded on PCs.

The first PlayStation emulator for Android devices has been pulled from the Android Market due to intellectual property issues. The psx4droid emulator has been helping bored Android users get their nostalgic gaming fix since last summer. But today the developer Tweeted that Google removed the app from the Market.

In case you’re wondering though, it’s possible that the alleged content violation likely has nothing to do with the fact that the emulator allows you to run PlayStation games. The FPSe emulator is still available for download from the Android Market. Some folks are suggesting the difference is that psx4droid is based on source from another PlayStation emulator called PCSX, but doesn’t comply with the GPL license used by that software.

If you already installed psx4droid you should be able to continue using it, and there’s nothing preventing the developer from continuing to distribute the app outside the Android Market. But psx4droid developer zodttd says he’s rather find a way to return the app to the Market than to distribute it through a different app store, because he want to make sure that customers who have already purchased the app can easily upgrade to new versions of the emulator.

Update: Android Police has another theory. Apparently Sony has a trademark on the term “PSX,” so it’s possible that zodttd could get the app back into the market with a name change. Meanwhile Engadget notes that Sony’s Xperia Play phone with support for PlayStation games is due out soon. Coincidence?

When Amazon launched its Appstore for Android last week, one of the features I was most interested in checking out was the “Test Drive” option which lets you launch apps in a browser window to try before you buy (or download). Unfortunately, at the time I couldn’t for the life of me find a single app to test drive. Even the Bubble Blaster game that was featured on Techcrunch didn’t show me a test drive button.

But this weekend Engadget ran another article on the Test Drive feature, and it looks like Amazon has seriously stepped up the number of apps that you can check out in your web browser, because I’d say that more than half of the apps I clicked on today offer a demo mode.

Basically what’s happening behind the scenes is that Amazon is loading a cloud-based Android emulator to run the application. You can test an app for up to 30 minutes at a time using the web demo. It can be a bit tricky to play a touch-based game using only a mouse pointer, but the service should give you a good idea of whether or not you want to devote precious disk space (and money) to an app before downloading it.

In fact, now that Google has reduced the refund window for Android Market purchases to 15 minutes, the Appstore for Android actually gives you more time to decide whether you really want an App than the official Android marketplace.

What’s more, you can actually exit most games and just use the Android emulator — although you won’t be able to install other apps or surf the web in the browser, since keyboard input is disabled.

The Amazon Appstore is only available for US customers at the moment, so the test drive feature won’t work outside of the US.