This new product from Google is quite stunning. The android app is available as we speak and analyzes a picture you take with your phone to perform a search on it. Basically it has some shape recognition algorithm that will either recognize special shapes (a book, the eiffel tower, a bridge) and some OCR algorithms to read what’s written on the object, and search for it.

Hilarious teaser from Verizon which will obviously be releasing Android-based phones in November.
Quite a good reminder to all those iPhone fans out there about why they are feeling frustrated with their device – used to be my case and then Android appeared !

Speed Forge 3D looks like one of the first serious indie game out there for Android. Very alike WipeOut, this blazing fast futuristic racing games really shows up the potential of 3D OpenGL on Android platform. Only availabl at SlideMe yet

I love to see project going forward in the right direction. Quite a few people were skeptical about Android, I wasn’t, and every month since the first ADP1 Android device was released has proven me I’m right to believe in this OS as it has got one step closer to what the perfect mobile OS should be.
The latest 1.6 release brings a few novelties amongst which:

• Mutlitouch through “gesture API”
• Fine battery management (i.e. now you can track which process slow down your droid and are eating up the battery)
• Improved Android Market now getting closer to the best-in-class Apple appstore
• Quick serch on both local content and the Internet

All those come with dedicated APIs enabling apps to really take advantage of every new feature the OS is proposing. This is the kind of open approach I love and which will make Android a market leader. We’re now just missing the gorgeous piece of hardware that can compete with the iPhone in terms of design and we’ll get the next-gen mass market phone !

That’s really big news, Flash 10 is coming for real on Android mobile phones. The HTC Hero will be the first one featuring a native Flash Player 10. I’m pretty anxious to see how it’s really going to come out, and especially hot the tons of flash content such as rich websites or casual games are going to adapt and feel like on a mobile. HTC Hero is due July 15th.
Check out the video below to see the official Adobe announce.

This is also big news as it waves goodbye to the Flash Lite initiative Adobe kinda failed at delivering (outside of Japan at least) which was supposed to be a mobilized and light version of Flash. Now they seem to be willing to focus on providing native deep integration of their player within their OS. How it’s going to impact application development is yet another question but if they can bring the Air framework along this is really going to change the face of the market…
Last but not least, it’s now official, Android gets multitouch!

Amazing application – I especially love the “offline” mode where you can pin content to your mobile for further use, cant’ wait to have that on my iPhone or BlackBerry !

Daniel a former student of mine in entrepreneurship courses at Telecom Paris launched its first venture : it’s called “SlashWars” and is a location-based role playing game in a very funny environment and leveraging on the built-in accelerometer to let you slash your opponents (see the screencast video below). With his team they built a complete universe and the result is really amazing.
Kudos to them!
They submitted their work to the SFR JTD contest due last week, wish their good luck !

Announced today, the i7500 will be the first Samsung Android phone in the market, with a release date set in June for most EU Operators. Its main features, apart from a splendid design are :

• 11.9-mm slim
• quad-band GSM, tri-band 7.2Mbps HSDPA (900/1700/2100MHz)
• 3.2-inch, 320 x 480 pixel AMOLED touchscreen
• WiFi, GPS
• 5 megapixel camera with Power LED
• 1,500mAh battery
• 8GB of storage (plus MicroSD expansion for up to 32GB more)
• standard 3.5mm heasdset jack

No real keyboard on that one but hey it looks gorgeous, and the AMOLED display (Active Matrix OLED) is supposedly ultra-sharp and very low-power – hopefully will give an autonomy boost to the smartphone. Can’t way…

That’s a milestone worth mentioning – starts giving some real weight to the user base.
The G1 was put on sale on October’08 and if you consider that T-Mobile is one of the smallest carrier in the US that’s quite an achievement. Add to that the developer phones (ADP1) and the derivatives of the G1 being sold recently by other operators such as Orange and you’ll get a pretty nice start for Android!

Some of you might have heard it from me but I’m back in the mobile business. As such got new toys to play with ! Over the last 6 months I used as a personal phone an iPhone then and HTC Android G1 (ADP1) and finally a Blackberry Bold and I wanted to share with you my views on those devices.

Just to get an understanding on what’s important for me : I have 4 main email accounts all on Google Apps and I extensively use the specific GMail features such as Archiving and only keep on my inbox what needs to be processed. I never erase emails from the server and always deletes them from my mail clients inbox as they are being processed.
All my contacts and calendar are being pushed to my main GMail account and I expect this to be the center of my PIM Life.
I’m totally not into the music things and rarely store content on my phone, but I’m totally into IM (especially Gtalk) and using my mobile as a way of continuing the services I use on my desktop environment. As such here are my views on those 3 devices

iPhone Pros:

• Amazing app store – totally game changing in the mobile world
• Multitouch is perfect for maps and web navigation
• Amazing games
• Support for word and pdf files preview

iPhone Cons:

• No Push email except with mobile Me
• Can’t type on the soft keyboard – useless…
• no bg process (coming in 3.0) and no IM … totally unacceptable to have to wait 2 years for this to come
• Camera is a joke (totally useless…)

Conclusion : can’t use iPhone as a productivity tool – an iPod Touch would probably better

Android g1 Pros:

• Splendid Gmail support (push)
• Applications are really nice and android market has a lot of potential
• Lots of apps can run simultaneously without harming the device performances
• the keyboard is amazing
• Has a compass, the streetview demo rocks thanks to that
• Decent 2D/3D performances (not too many games here though)
• Touchscreen & Trackball support

Android g1 Cons:

• Only one gmail account supported – to get the others you need download an email client that has limited GMail support and polls the network killing your battery
• no multitouch support
• What’s with the USB headset plug !? HTC get real ! Use jack !
• The plastics doesn’t seem really solid, seeing baby open/close the keyboard always tends to stress me
• No native support for neither office files nor PDF files
• my ADP1 is banned from accessing most marketplace applications – Google guys find a solution ! can’t ban developers from getting their own apps !!!

Conclusion : almost there ! A few more releases and a phone made with better materials would make my day !

Blackberry Bold Pros :

• The push email works flawlessly in multiple accounts – the BB backend server is doing a fantastic job
• Keyboard is fine (though smaller than G1’s)
• Device design is amazing – it really feels good when holding it
• GMail and Google Sync support works flawlessly
• Plenty of apps polling the network in parallel don’t kill the device performance and life-span
• Out of the box support for all office files ( and ppt files look great on this)

Blackberry Bold Cons :

• No touchscreen (feels weird)
• Third party applications look really old and badly designed – not up to the level of iPhone and Android
• Keyboard lock process is complicated and unnatural if you’re not using the holster – which thickens considerably the already thick device

Conclusion : Probably the best productivity tool yet – lets me spend the week end without turning on the laptop and yet keeping the needed responsiveness. Would have loved touchscreen though and some better third party apps…