SwitchMe lets Android users switch User accounts, Profiles just like they can do it on a Windows, Mac OS X PC. SwitchMe allows users to create profiles specific to their needs. Those profiles are saved, can be loaded whenever and users can create new profiles that are on whole new installations on Android.

SwitchMe is a unique application for root users that allows you to log in and out of multiple installations of Android just as you would on a desktop computer. The technology behind SwitchMe saves all of your applications and data, protects it and stores it as a file in memory. You can then log out of an account and log into a fresh installation of Android or another account with its own unique content.

You may create as many profiles as the memory is capable of holding. Some of these may require very little free memory because they contain few apps, others will be larger as they contain many applications and lots of cache and data.
The uses for such an app are plentiful, as ftgg99 explains:

Privacy – the most obvious benefit is that you can securely share one device among multiple users, which gives you privacy and peace of mind.

Testing – if you are a developer, you can use profiles as clean sandboxes to test your applications and their interaction with the system.

Gaming – with multiple installations of Android on a single device, you can now play online MMOs as different characters.

Speed – the games your kids play slow down your tablet, but with SwitchMe you can easily create profiles without games or instant messengers.

Battery life – when the battery is low but there are important emails or documents to edit later, switch to a profile which only contains these essentials.

You can download it from Android Market for free. Checkout XDA forum for further details.

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Of course it’s from the Siri founders, it would be the best one out there on Android.

Dragon Go is not exactly a personal assistant but its the as best as it can get. You can do more in less time like buy movie tickets as you walk into the theater, go shopping at local boutiques while you wait for your nails to dry, settle a bet at the breakfast table on the square root of Pi, or plan and invite guests to that night’s happy hour – all with just one ask of Dragon Go!

The app runs on Andorid 2.1 and above. In our tests we used android 2.3.6 on Galaxy Note and it works seamlessly with american and asian accents.

You can ask Dragon Go! all sorts of questions. Just like Siri, these audio queries are processed by Nuance’s servers and then sent to  appropriate services such as Wolfram|Alpha, YouTube, AccuWeather, Dictionary.com, Last.fm, Pandora, IMDB, Wikipedia, Yelp, Google, Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango, etc. In all, Dragon Go! accesses 200+ services in order to query and return with responses that are actually logical.

Drag go, doesn’t integrate with Native Google apps, yet, but in future they do plan to. As of now, you can still make calls, find directions, and send texts. Whats coming is alarms, emails and mode.

Unfortunately, the app is limited to US only, available via Market: Download Dragon Go!

But you can still download it outside US by directly downloading the Dragon Go APK or use Market Enabler to fake to a US carrier like “USA T-Mobile” and then onwards, its visible in your android market.

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The app is called BT Controller and is available for free. Initial setup is easy and quick, within seconds you can start playing the games across android devices. BTController turns your Android device into a bluetooth gamepad, allowing you to remotely control emulator games running on another device (the host).

Of course, BT Controller must be installed and running on both the devices – the host as well as the controller. At the time of writing, the app only works with a handful of game emulators, and supports controlling one Android device with the other over Bluetooth connection only, but support is extending.

BT Controller already works with various Emulators for Mame, Playstation, CPS2 and N64 games:

Games supported: Riptide GP

Emulators:

• DroidEmuLite
• Snesoid
• Nesoid
• Gensoid
• N64oid
• FPse [PSX]
• Tiger Arcade [CPS2]
• Mupen64Plus, AE [N64]
• Mame4Droid [Mame]

For full list and downloading the app, goto app on android market.

The app also supports haptic feedback which can also be disabled.

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CloudOn is the first app on iPad (and in fact Tablets) that brings the Desktop feel to the MS Word and other MSOffice suite apps. CloudOn’s interface is very similar to that of MS Office, and it’s hard to stay away from it.

The app relies heavily on the cloud storage service, Dropbox. There are 2 steps to creating an account. 1. CloudOn Account 2. Dropbox account ( which you can also signup during the initial wizard).

The most useful aspect of CloudOn is its ability to let users create new documents: a Word doc, PowerPoint presentation, or a new Excel sheet. Luckily, the Word section is amazingly laid out almost in exact manner, order. You’ve function keys on top of the keyboard, like in android apps, which make experience even more seamless. The tool is indeed very rich and powerful.

Not to mention, all your documents are saved automatically to Dropbox, so chances of losing one are naive. This amazing app is free, so go ahead and try it on your iOS device.

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The main concern is losing Jailbroken data i.e. Cydia apps, settings, packages, sources, settings. Hail! now its possible to backup them all to the iCloud, which gets restored the next time you install an new iOS ->  jailbreak and hit restore.

OpenBackup lets you Backup Cydia Apps, Packages, Sources, settings to iCloud on iOS 5. Its available for free on the Cydia store vi ModMyi repo.

When you initiate a backup, OpenBackup will save all your Cydia apps and their preferences to a ZIP file under var/mobile/Library/Preferences/OpenBackupFiles location, along with a plain text log file that lists all backed up packages.

iCloud sync will automatically backup this file. If iCloud is not supported on your device, you can take this backup and extract it next time to get all the apps back. It restores everything other than paid Cydia apps.

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NCInstaCall is a Cydia tweak, of cours for Jailbroken iPhones, that lets you dial numbers, make calls directly form iOS notification center.

NCInstaCall is free on Cydia store available via Big Boss repo. After installation you’ll have to enable it from settings > notifications center > NCInstaCall > enable.

When enabled, a new dialpad widget would appear in the Notification Center. One downside is that there is no address book support in NCInstaCall, at least for now.

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Games use hardware acceleration with efficient Native C/c++ code. This code is often optimized for the platform and hence incompatible with others. But often, developers don’t allow relatively less compatible phones to maintain higher quality apps, and hence better rating. However, you can skip this compatibility check by spoofing your phone to be Google Nexus S. Google, by default, allows all apps to run on it’s developer phone: Nexus S.

How to Install Incompatible, Unsupported Apps from Android Market

Pre-requisite: Your android phone must be Rooted.

Step 1. Clear Market Cache & Data. Settings > Applications > All > Market > Clear data.

Step 2. Install Prop Editor from here.
or scan:

Take backup of existing build.prop file.

Step 3. Open Prop Editor click on build.prop and look for following keys and enter values corresponding to them, manually:

ro.product.model=Nexus S
ro.product.manufacturer=samsung
ro.build.fingerprint=google/soju/crespo:2.3.4/GRJ22/121341:user/release-keys
ro.build.description=soju-user 2.3.4 GRJ22 121341 release-keys

The last one is not always required.

Step 4. When done, press menu > save. Reboot phone.

Step 5. Launch Market and search for the app, your phone should be detected as Nexus S and all apps will be visible.

Enjoy any app from Market! Subscribe to us below for more.

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Read more: http://geeknizer.com/worlds-fastest-camera-trillian-frames-per-second/#ixzz1gR3AhNwS

The Google Currents supports more than 150 publishing partners to offer full-length articles from more than 180 editions including CNET, AllThingsD, Forbes, Saveur, PBS, Huffington Post, Fast Company and more. Content is optimized for smartphones and tablets, allowing you to intuitively navigate between words, pictures and video on large and small screens alike, even if you’re offline.

Google Currents fetches content from top blogs around the world and displays them intuitively. By default, Google doesn’t allow Google Current app to be downloaded outside US, but the hack is simple, download the apk attached and you are all set to go.

Scan the QR code below to Download Google Currents APK, anywhere in the world

or
Direct Download

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There are couple of Alternatives for Android. Most popular till date is Lightbox photos. But a bigger developer has now come up with a better app. Go developers have developed Go Photos.

Just like Instagram, GO Photo lets users take photographs and upload them to the network. Users can add effects to the images before uploading them, with more than 60 effects available to choose from. This is the biggest choice you will find across any such app.

Uploaded photos can then be shared to other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, all from inside GO Photo. Images can also be sent via email and you can find and follow your friends using existing social networks. You can follow popular contributors as well.

Key Features:

• Take and share photos easily
• 60+ effects: More than 20 Lomo effects, More than 20 theme effects, More than 20 filters
• Montage is supported
• Share to Twitter, Facebook and Sina Weibo
• Can be installed to SD Card

We’ve give Go Photo a shot on various Android devices. It doesn’t seem to be optimized for tablets, but update shouldn’t be far.

Get Go Photo from Market

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The recycling deleted images is now possible on Android. If the deleted file is still discovered on storage, the new app called Undelete Beta attempts to restore it.

Alternatively, if you are an security freak, you can delete file securely so that its no longer accessible by anyone.

Undelete for Android, an application for root users that allows you to recover any type of deleted file from your SD card or internal storage. This is the first application of its kind on Android.

I had a chance to test drive the app on custom ROMs on Dell streak, nexus one and stock galaxy S, SII android 2.3.x. The app works great most of the time. If the file had been deleted within last 2 days or so, it was able to recover it without trouble. Generally speaking, whatever area os storage is not re-written, it can be restored.

Recovery from SD card or internal storage works the same way it happens on a PC or Mac. The app has scope of improvement, of course, but is great for what it offers for free.

App requires Root privileges, as one could expect.

[Market] Undelete Beta

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Best & Top News, Magazine apps on Android Honeycomb for tablets

1. News 360

One of my favorite apps. Aggregates news from various sources and displays them beautifully.

2. CNN for Android Tablet
Clean, and very well designed app that brings world class news right to android tablet.

3. Pulse

Pulse aggregates news content from various top internet blogs and displays them in a very natural scrollable thumbnails. This is my fav app on Android phones, tablet. Syncs and downloads news for offline reading, automatically.

4. USA Today

Latest news, scores, weather, stocks and photos from USA TODAY. The latest news, scores, weather, stocks and photos you’ve come to expect from USA TODAY and now available in a beautiful new way, on the Android Tablet. Staying informed has never been this quick, easy or enjoyable.

5. Feedly

Integrates with Google Reader, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Read it Later and Instapaper.

6. Newsr:

Sync and read Google Reader feeds.

7. CNBC Realtime

Get real-time stock quotes, watchlists, news, videos & more. The CNBC Real-Time App for Android gives you free access to real-time stock quotes – before, during and after market hours, directly from both the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ Marketplace. Additionally, you will get CNBC breaking news alerts, top news stories & analysis, and access to the latest CNBC business video clips, CEO interviews and market updates via CNBC video-on-demand.

8. HackerNews
Love HackerNews? You’ll love this easy to user Hacker news navigator.

9. Press Reader
PressReader for Honeycomb brings over 1,900 full-content newspapers from 95 countries in 51 languages to your favorite Google Honeycomb operated tablet.
Choose from a growing list of the world’s most popular publications, including: The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune.

10. F5 Reddit browser

Like Reddit? You would love this. Browse through various top links from around the web.

11. Financial times

Ge the latest in Finance via the official FT app.

12. Sports Illustrated

A Magazine that covers all your sports.

13. News Republic

Choose your favorite category of News and be bedazzled with them in a beautiful interface.

14. Time Magazine

The Famous Time magazine is now on Honeycomb. Various pay models for subscriptions.

15. SkyGrid

SkyGrid is the most powerful & only app for you to stay up to date on your interests. Follow your own topics and get updates on the exact interests you care about!

15. Appy Geek

APPY Geek, the best-rated Tech news app on Android is now available on tablets!
With hundreds of news articles every day (including TechRadar, New Media Age, Pocket-Lint, Technology Blogged, Tech Watch and more)

16. Honey Reader

A Simple RSS reader.

17. Fashion news app

A simple app that gives you different Fashion apps for android.

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Given the changes deep into the OS, chances are quite a few tweaks won’t be compatible with iOS 5. Bu there’s a handy spreadsheet showing users just which jailbreak apps and tweaks have been updated for iOS 5, or work as-is, out of the box.

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JBED will let you run any Java/J2ME/MIDP games or applications natively with JBed Android Java Emulator. JBED is available as a signed flash-able package for easy installation. You need a rooted android phone, ofccourse

Howto Run Jav, J2me, MIDP apps on android

Flash the package via your recovery (tested on Clockworkmod) on clockworkmod recovery version 2+. The Java emulator is efficient enough to run on even low end android phones.

Download via the QR code below or get the zip from here.

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DSLR Controller is the first app of its kind that lets you control your Canon DSLR cameras over USB by any any android device. The beauty is in the fact that you get full controls in the Live view.

(click on right image to see full size)

image credit: Romain guy

See it in action:

Here’s word from market:

Fully control your Canon EOS DSLR from your Android device with only a USB cable. No computer or laptop required, no root required, only a compatible mobile device, a compatible camera, and the right USB cable.
The product is not finished yet and there will still be issues. Due to massive demand and a great many requests to release it is being released early.

Features
——–
Features include but are not limited to:
- Live View
- Auto Focus (tap Live View)
- Manual focus adjustments in Auto Focus mode
- Histogram
- Zoom control
- Grid display
- Bulb capture
- Continuous capture
- Extensive modification of settings
— Shutter speed
— Aperture
— Exposure Compensation and Bracket
— Flash Compensation
— ISO speed
— Auto-Focus Mode
— Focus and Zoom area (tap-and-hold Live View)
— Picture Style
— Drive Mode
— White Balance
— Color Temperature
— Auto-Lighting Optimizer
— Metering Mode
Note that available options depend on the mode you have your camera set to (M, Av, Tv, etc)

DSLR controller has been tested with the following hardware:
- Samsung Galaxy S2 (KG1 firmware and newer)
- Motorola Xoom
- Canon EOS
— 550D
— 50D
— 7D
— 5D mk II
— 1D mk IV

Although, it should work with other android devices, and Canon dslrs too.

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These companies are offering cash-strapped developers high payouts to put intrusive ads in their apps. Teh beauty (or call it ugliness) of these ads are that they can come into foreground even when app is not running. IT runs as a service in background, and can pop an ad into your Notification bar at any time.

How Notification pane ads work

When a notification pops up, you want to tap on it to see what sort of information it holds. For the first timers, they look attractive and they click on them only to find that it was an ad. That’s why these companies are claiming 40% CTR (click through rate). The ugly part is, you can’t necessarily tell what app is is creating this ad.

Catching the App spamming your Notification Bar with ads: One way to track source of ads is to monitor the URL it makes request to, they call referral URL  that later redirects to ad. If you look closely at that URL, you may see the developer or package name.

Payouts with ads on Notification bar

AirPush claims an average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of $3.18, where as other ads often yield only a 10% of that amount. Developer makes enough money to keep the app free.

You as a user, might be annoyed and have full right to opt-out of these ads. A free app called AirPush Detector finds apps on your phone that have Airpush enabled. SlingLabs is still new, and undetectable by easy means.

First thing you can do is contact the developer and let them know your concern. It might be the case that app costs him a big deal and in order to keep the app free, he has to use these ads.

You can always be annoyed by it, but you shouldn’t forget that they made the app available for free, despite their hard effort. They are trying to make their living via these ads. But if it is something you can’t bear, complaining to the developer is the right thing to do. IF he gets enough requests, he would have to take them off.

Other way:

AirPush offers an opt-out procedure which they claim is easy to use. You can get a special AirPush app that blocks the ads, or blacklist your IMEI number on the AirPush site. You can check your IMEI by pressing *#06# on the phone dialer.

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New Android Market version 3.0.26 has been rolled out to US android users and would eventually be available worldwide. IF you can’t wait, here’s how you can get it now.

Download, Install Android Market 3.0.26

On any android 2.1+ device, just download the apk and install as normal.

Download Market

You can revert to original market:

• Go into your phone’s Settings
• Select “Manage Applications”
• Select the “All” tab at the top
• Scroll down to Market app and select it
• Select “Uninstall Updates”
• Thats it.

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The Android video call app works over Wi-Fi or 3G/4G data connections, no hacks needed.

"With approximately 30 million concurrent users logging into Skype at any given time and making up to half a million simultaneous video calls, the Skype video chat on Android app makes it even easier for users to share moments with their contacts wherever they are."

Skype 2.0 gets a complete redesign of interface, other than improved support for Phone calling, and SMS. There’s a new main menu on the Skype app for Android where users can navigate easily through their contacts, access their Skype profile to change personal details or see the balance of their Skype Credit. Skype also gets a bit social by letting users set mood message.

Video calling for Skype isn’t supported on all devices, right now it would just work with the HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia pro and the Google Nexus S. More phones soon. Hopefully we would find a hack to Enable Skype video on any android phone, soon.

Get Skype

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Swype, the most popular keyboard after the official gingerbread keyboard is hitting new limits with Swype 3.0 beta. Swype lets type without actually typing, instead you swype across the keys and it automatically predicts your intent and types the word for you.

What’s new in Swype 3.0:

• Tap Correction:You’ve always been able to jump back and forth between swiping through letters and tapping letters one-by-one; now you can do the latter without losing the autocorrect/predictive functionality that comes with swiping.
• Horizontal Word Choice: When there are multiple possible words for the letters you just swiped through, the options will be shown in a sliding horizontal bar above the keyboard as opposed to the strange popup selection window that Swype has had for a while.
• Available for devices with HVGA, WVGA, FWVGA, QVGA, WQVGA, WSVGA, qHD screen sizes
• A special Honeycomb-only WXGA version for Android tablets, which features a resizable and moveable keyboard

Swype 3.0 in action

Get a flavor of Swype 3.0 beta here.

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With Visidon AppLock, you can automatically lock access to specified apps when Android device is not handled by the original owner. This would come handy when you don’t want your friends to read your email, gtalk or even access the gallery of photos.

This is much more useful & practical than a Facial recognition unlock on iPhone, but such an app must be days away from iOS as well. Visidon AppLock lets you choose the apps to be protected. Your face is a key to open them! Application uses the frontal camera of your mobile and verifies in real-time that the face matches the one allowed to access the private apps.

The app comes very handy in our day to day life and is a must try. Get a hold of the demo below:

The best part, the app is free, go ahead and start using it.

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RecognizeMe comes from the developers of  3DBoard, the interactive 3D homescreen on iPhone, and is available in Cydia market for $6.99 via BigBoss repo. So if you feel you are too lazy to type in the password to unlock your iPHone, or just wish to try out the fun, its worth buy. The app can be used with all devices having the front camera: iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G, iPad 2 (when jailbreak is out).

RecognizeMe is the first of its kind facial recognition on iPHone, and its not perfect, but does a decent job identifying you. If you are looking to replace the passcode with facial recognition, you might find it slow and less intuitive. However, the app can be trained via settings to recognize different kinds of facial perspectives.

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Meal Snap brings calorie counter to the iPhone in a intuitive way. Its as easy as it can get, just shoot a photo of your food and Meal Snap goes to the servers and returns back with the number of calories you’re about to consume.

As far as I played with the app,  Meal Snap appears seems promising but with one exception. It appears the app is being a little general in its calorific assessments with no consideration for portion size or slight variations (such as a sandwich with a topping for example). But on a closer look, this is no less accurate than a handbook though, so we won’t take this as a show stopper, the app still rocks.

You can always share the meals to Facebook,  twitter, etc that you’ve been upto, and side-by-side you can also get reviews for the meals.

Meal Snap costs $2.99, its worth every calorie.

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Update: Run Android apps on Windows

BlueStacks is an application for windows that lets you Run android apps on Windows using a snappier Virtualization mechanism.

Install BlueStacks on your Windows machine and the software allows you to run an instance of Android app right inside windows.

This is no different from installing VMware or Virtualbox and running android inside it, but only being easier and slightly faster.

Right now the BlueStacks website appears to be misbehaving on multiple fronts, behold your patience, the fruit is going to be tasty.

More on this after a break.

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Blackberry realizes the fact that it landed in the modern smartphone/tablet OS market quiet late and that’s why they would like to cover-up the shortcomings by letting users run Android apps on their Playbook, which are already available in large numbers.

RIM today announced that the PlayBook will be able to run Android 2.3 (interesting that they’ve assigned an OS version requirement) applications via runtime environments that will handle both BlackBerry OS phone apps and Android apps.

Of course we would love to see them running but there are a number of problems that Blackberry would run into.

Android apps run on top of a customized Java virtual machine aka Dalvik virtual machine that is cleaner and meaner than the desktop counter part. The apps are written in Java using the Android SDK but at the runtime, these API calls are translated to call core system libraries that are written in C/C++. This is done using JNI (Java native interface). These system libraries talk provide the core functionality and often interact with the kernel that provides Hardware abstraction layer. Kernel is also responsible for interactions with the hardware. So in order to run android apps outside of the android eco-system, you would need to have the fullstack implemented. Alternatively, you can translate java calls into your OS specific (QNX here) native calls which in turn controls the hardware. But doing that is both tricky and incomplete solution.

Alien Dalvik made it possible to run Android apps on Blackberry, Nokias and its not hard to guess that as a hacker hobby, this project is way to wonderful, and its too far from being “usable”.

So where is the Problem with Running Android apps on Playbook?

• Barely any Hardware acceleration: None of the Android apps on Playbook would leverage hardware acceleration. Clearly most graphic intensive apps especially Games would run painfully slow and glitchy on the device.
• Poor Hardware support: You might not even get access to your hardware through android apps to Playbook. Even when it does, it would have slower response times, defeating the purpose. e.g. accelerometer used to play games would create an almost unbearable experience. And don’t forget that your camera, NFC, bluetooth, wifi apps (that directly talk to hardware other than for network connectivity) would not work.
• Fragmentation to a new Level: If you look closely at the some of the apps (especially games and highend apps), they have different flavors of the apps designed to run optimally on a different hardware using NDK. On Playbook, such apps would not be just slow, but also incompatible most of the time.
• More Resource hungry: The customized Dalvik that would run on Playbook would be an additional layer for the QNX based tablet device. It would crunch more CPU, memory when trying to run android apps vs. blackberry native apps. Even the RIM’s CEO agrees with this, Jim Balsillie noted that the virtual machine could have performance issues, and that games and other resource-heavy apps will want to be coded specifically for the PlayBook using RIM’s QNX platform and SDK.
• No Honeycomb support: Oh yeah, even if they plan to cover up all those drawbacks, they just actually ported smartphone apps to a tablet device, not Tablet OS/apps. Would you be ever happy with Gingerbread apps stretched onto 7″ screen?
• No Android Market: RIM will run its own android market, and will not have license to run Android Market. So it would be purely upto the mercy of the android developer to publish their app to Blackberry’s android market which would be called “App Player”. To me that sound like VMWare or  Wine on Linux.

Porting a VM alone would not help Blackberry get where they want. There has to be a deeper OS-wide integration to support full Android apps. As far as we know, they have actually done a part of that with Playbook, but its not good enough for the claim. It would be much worse than running a Mac OS X inside windows using Virtualbox or VMware.

Of course we can achieve near-native experience but it would take years to have full deep down integration with Android. It won’t be as easy as RIM is touting it to be. We won’t be surprised when we get handson on one.

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Winamp has been bringing some unique set of features to android devices like wireless music sync using Winamp desktop.

Winamp 1.0 comes with handful of enhancements, adding the ability to stream and download free music from Spinner. “Now Playing” has now been improved with a cleaner and more streamlined interface. There’s  now a new “Info” button which provides biographies, discographies, album photos, and links to articles written about the artist.

Other tweaks include a redesigned home screen with new buttons for “Search” and “Free Music”. The lockscreen widget for winamp has also been enhanced to mimic “Now Playing” screen. Apart from that there’s gesture support for skipping songs.

Check it out on Android  Market.

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