Popular Emulators yanked from Android Market

Retro gamers who use Android devices to play classics from old-school systems like Atari, Nintendo 64, and Sega took a hit this week when emulator apps for those consoles and a handful of others were removed from the Android Market.
Yongzh's (also known as Yong Zhang) emulators have been among some of the most popular and highest rated in the market, but the emulator creator reports that his developer account has been terminated without warning.

The removal of yongzh's account comes just weeks after PlayStation emulator PSX4droid--the work of another developer--was also deleted from the market in the lead-up to the release of Sony's Xperia Play. Yongzh, who lives in China, took down his Genesis emulator last month after receiving a complaint from Sega, but apparently it wasn't enough to placate Google and/or those console makers who may have lodged complaints with Mountain View.

While emulators on their own are not necessarily illegal, using the game ROMs that give them actual value apparently is, at least that's what Nintendo's lawyers claim in a company FAQ.

Yongzh says he's now out one of his main sources of income; he's posted the emulators on alternate app market SlideMe, where he's made them available for free so existing customers don't have to re-pay for the apps. N64oid alone has already registered more than 23,000 downloads from the site since Sunday.


Source: http://news.cnet.com/

Android App Market shows lower turn over rates than Apple

A new study of various mobile application stores during the month of April conducted by research company Distimo found that the top apps chart on Google's Android Market had considerably less turnover than the one on Apple's App Store for the iPhone, which leads to less downloads overall.

In terms of numbers, that works out to 94 unique applications in the App Store for the iPhone's top 10 free and paid categories during the month of April, with just 26 in the Android Market during the same time period. For the top 300 apps in the iPhone's App Store, the company found there were 843 unique free applications and 584 unique paid applications. That's compared to Android Market's 388 free apps, and 363 top paid apps that made up the top 300 paid and free lists for that platform.

"The fact that many applications have been downloaded relatively few times may be at least partially due to the fact that the top charts in the Google Android Market change very little over time," the report said. "This is caused by the fact that Google also takes long-term performance of applications into account in order to rank applications."

However, that difference could be short-lived, based on changes made to the way both Apple and Google have begun ranking applications as part of these top charts.
"Google recently made major changes to the Web storefront of the Google Android Market," the report said. "It now displays more local content and top new and trending charts. Perhaps these, and future changes, will provide a higher probability for success for a larger proportion of the applications in the Google Android Market."

Evidence from early April, which Distimo's report covers, points to Apple rolling out its own changes to App Store rankings based on app chart movements across the board. Those changes were said to add weight to rankings within individual categories to affect an app's overall ranking.

Some other interesting findings from Distimo's report include Google Maps being the most-downloaded app on the Android Market, at more than 50 million downloads. To put that in perspective, just 96 applications on the Android Market have hit download numbers higher than 5 million. Distimo also found that 20 percent of free applications, and 80 percent of all paid applications on the Android Market have been downloaded less than 100 times since the store opened.

Google's Android Market inventory is now up to 200,000 free and paid applications, according to Google's latest numbers. Apple's most recently announced numbers put it north of 350,000 apps. An estimate posted earlier his week pegged Apple's App Store at reaching 500,000 apps.


Source: http://news.cnet.com/
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Droid 3 details and image LEAKED

Additional details for the Motorola Droid 3 are circulating ahead of the handset's expected June launch. The Droid and Droid 2 successor will feature a slightly larger 4.0-inch qHD display, likely running a 960x540 pixel resolution, according to a TechnoBuffalo source. If true, the screen is larger than its predecessors, with a higher resolution as well. Further, the source adds that the back of the Droid 3 bears an 8.0-megapixel rear-facing camera and has a secondary front-facing camera of indeterminate resolution.

Rumors have run rampant that Motorola will double up the Droid 3's processor, possibly in the form of a TI OMAP or NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core chipset. While TechnoBuffalo's tipster was unable to provide any more clarity, either choice would be a significant step up from the Droid 2's single core 1GHz processor.

This time around, Motorola seems to have slid in a dedicated row for numbers, making for a 5-row QWERTY keyboard. Also new in this potential Droid is HDMI-out, a feature we had hoped to see in last summer's Droid 2.

Despite the "new and improved" hardware allegedly coming to the Droid 3, one feature is still missing. According to multiple reports, the Droid 3 won't offer support for Verizon's 4G LTE network. Perhaps this will be among the first options added to the Droid 4.
Word on the street is that the Droid 3 will be arriving in June, just a few short weeks from now.


Source- http://cnet.com
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