Kev’s Blog – Page 220 – Kev's Development Toolbox

November 7, 2011

Android tablets a plenty. New Nook Color, Amazon Fire coming soon, and quad-cores on the way

There’s an amazing variety of Android tablets out there right now. Barnes and Noble are giving their press conference this morning on their new Nook Color, which they’re saying outdoes the coming soon Amazon Fire in terms of a media consumption device.

Things are about to start getting real interesting though with the new nVidia Tegra 3 chipset which is rocking quad cores. Given that the Tegra 2 is the current powerhouse for all the fastest Android devices, this one is going to be a rocket for sure. The latest eee Transformer Prime from Asus is expected to be the first tablet to be released with the new processor, and a benchmarking app has already showed up with records of benchmarked Transformer Prime running the new chip, and surprise surprise it’s multiple times faster than anything currently out there.

November 6, 2011

Invaluable tips for restoring a Mac OS X Time Machine backup to a new drive

I recently replaced my hard drive in my 2008 MacBook Pro. After following the excellent step-by-step instructions here, I booted up from my install DVD formatted my new drive, selected the option to restore from backup and was shocked to not see my new drive as an available target drive. I can’t find the post where I found this invaluable tip, but apparently it’s a known issue with the install DVD and the ‘restore from backup’ feature that if you’ve just formatted a new drive, you need to press ‘back’ all the way back to the language display screen before going forward again to get to the restore option. Now you new drive appears as a target drive for the restore. Bizarre. Ok, well it works.

The great thing about Time Machine on the Mac is that it’s effortless to restore your whole machine from a backup. This was the first time I’d tried it to a new hard drive but it worked without any issues. Well, almost…

Not thinking, I booted my machine for the restore from my original Leopard DVD but I had upgraded my machine to Snow Leopard some time back. Restore completed without an issue, rebooted, got a kernel panic! WTF! That’s the first time I’d seen that on my Mac. Quick bit of Googling later, rebooted from the Snow Leopard DVD, redid the restore and now all is ok.

October 28, 2011

Samsung dominates smartphone market, outdoing Apple at their own game

Samsung’s smartphone market share has apparently increased to 28%, leaving behind Apple at 17%.

This is surprising given Apple’s recent launch of the iPhone 5, no wait, 4.1/4+/4G/S/G (or whatever it’s called). Maybe next quarter’s numbers will show some increase for Apple.

Android sales continue to surge ahead at 500,000 a day worldwide since June, and that ‘growing at 4.4% week after week’ comment still has people speculating at that rate assuming it remains constant, there’s a possibility of hitting 1,000,000 a day any time soon…

October 21, 2011

Android device activations possibly approaching 1,000,000 a day?

In June this year, Google announced it was seeing 550,000 Android activations a day, and was seeing the rate increate at 4% each week.

Assuming the rate of increase is constant, someone has crunched the numbers and projected at this rate by this month (October), there would be 1,000,000 activations of Android devices EVERY DAY. That’s incredible. No confirmation at this point from Google, but when you think about it, even 550,000 a day is still a mind boggling number (and far ahead of iOS activations at around 300,000 a day).