Earlier today, Barnes & Noble officially announced the release of their app, “NOOK for Android.” Right on the heels of the Kindle app from Amazon, the NOOK app boasts all of the features you would normally get from the already android based NOOK device; You can shop the book store (including new releases, free classic titles, and best sellers), utilize 14 day digital lending, and more:

Read your way: Customize the eReading experience by choosing from eight font types and five sizes, read in landscape or portrait modes and lock the screen orientation.

Enjoy the read: The fun and immersive experience offers animated or sliding page turns, a navigation scroll bar, bookmarks and more.

Easy access to your content: Using the Library List view, see the cover art, sort and filter your eBooks by author, title or recent reads. Access rich product details for the selected eBook, including the synopsis and more books from that author.

Read across multiple devices: Android users can now complement their eReading experiences with Barnes & Noble’s other eReader experiences such as NOOK eBook Readers, previously announced eBook readers powered by the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, and a variety of other computing and mobile devices, including iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry® and HTC HD2™ smartphones, HP computers, PC and Mac®.

Pick up where you left off: Sync the last page read of the last eBook opened on an Android device with BN eReader (soon to be renamed NOOK) software-enabled devices including PC and iPad. Coming soon, both will sync with NOOK for iPhone and more devices to follow.

Follows the standard: Read eBooks formatted in ePub, quickly becoming the industry standard

The B&N NOOK for Android app is available in the Android Market for any device on 1.6 or higher now. What do you guys think? Will eReaders be able to compete in the mobile market when devices like your phone can do everything eReaders can and more? With the release of devices like the EVO and DROID X and their 4″ plus screens becoming standard, it’s starting to look glum. Amazon and B&N have definitely taken a step in the right direction by releasing apps to utilize these services right from your Android device. As far as the future of stand alone eReaders is concerned, only time will tell.

Via Android Guys

Press release below.

*****PRESS RELEASE*****
Barnes & Noble Introduces NOOK™ for Android™ –An Easy-to-Use Free eReader Application for Android Devices
Announcement Marks Shift to Consistent NOOK Branding Across Barnes & Noble eReading Offering

New App Gives Android Users Access to the Barnes & Noble eBookstore with More than One Million Digital Titles and Personal B&N Digital Library

Only Android eReader Application to Offer eBook Lending

New York, New York – July 22, 2010 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today introduced NOOK for Android, a fun and easy-to-use Barnes & Noble eReading experience for those with Android-based smartphones and devices. The new application is the latest addition to Barnes & Noble’s slate of free, popular eReader software and the only Android eReader application offering the ability to share eBooks with friends.

The new Android app is also the first eReader software to feature Barnes & Noble’s new NOOK-centric branding, leveraging the strength of the company’s NOOK brand across its entire eReading offering. NOOK for Android will soon be followed by an updated NOOK for iPhone®, NOOK for iPad™, and others in the coming months. The new eReader software branding aligns with the company’s current NOOK offering – NOOK 3G and NOOK Wi-Fi® eBook Readers, and the recently announced NOOKstudy™ online study platform and software solution for higher education.

NOOK for Android offers those with devices using Android OS 1.6 and higher the ability to shop Barnes & Noble’s expansive eBookstore of more than one million eBooks, including new releases, bestsellers and free classics, and download titles in seconds. Any customer’s personal Barnes & Noble eBook library – purchased on a NOOK eBook Reader, online at BN.com or on another BN eReader-enabled device – will easily sync to their device in seconds so their library goes wherever they go.

NOOK for Android offers a fun and immersive eReading experience with the ability to customize text with many font styles and sizes, an easy-to-use navigation bar, reading in landscape and portrait modes, and graphical page turns. It is also the first Android eReader application to offer digital lending. Using Barnes & Noble’s unique LendMe™ technology, customers can easily share eligible eBooks for up to 14 days with friends, who can enjoy these digital titles on a NOOK eBook Reader, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch® and PC enabled with free BN eReader software.

“NOOK for Android is customizable, fun and easy to use and we’re excited to deliver the most-requested version of our free eReading software to the growing number of mobile customers using Android-based devices,” said Douglas Gottlieb, Vice President, Digital Products for Barnes & Noble.com. “Android customers can enjoy the great NOOK eReading experience on their mobile device, including access to our vast digital catalog and their personal B&N digital library at their finger tips. And, of course, Android users can now enjoy Barnes & Noble’s unique eBook lending feature to share their favorite eBooks with friends.”

Added Gottlieb, “With NOOK for Android, and the other renamed software to follow, customers can also easily recognize and have confidence in Barnes & Noble’s NOOK brand to provide them with a fun and easy-to-use eReading experience on any device of their choosing.”

Key features available in NOOK for Android include:

· Shop Barnes & Noble’s vast eBookstore: Search, explore and browse through more than one million digital titles at www.bn.com/ebooks directly by touching Shop Books from the Library. There are more than a half-million free eBooks available and free samples are offered for all eBooks. Learn more about titles from thousands of editorial and customer reviews. Pick a current bestseller, a classic or anything in between and download it wirelessly in seconds.

· Access your personal B&N digital library: All eBooks purchased through the Barnes & Noble eBookstore sync in seconds and are ready to read in your Library.

· Lend to friends: NOOK for Android is the only Android eReading app that offers eBook sharing with friends.

· Read your way: Customize the eReading experience by choosing from eight font types and five sizes, read in landscape or portrait modes and lock the screen orientation.

· Enjoy the read: The fun and immersive experience offers animated or sliding page turns, a navigation scroll bar, bookmarks and more.

· Easy access to your content: Using the Library List view, see the cover art, sort and filter your eBooks by author, title or recent reads. Access rich product details for the selected eBook, including the synopsis and more books from that author.

· Read across multiple devices: Android users can now complement their eReading experiences with Barnes & Noble’s other eReader experiences such as NOOK eBook Readers, previously announced eBook readers powered by the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, and a variety of other computing and mobile devices, including iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry® and HTC HD2™ smartphones, HP computers, PC and Mac®.

· Pick up where you left off: Sync the last page read of the last eBook opened on an Android device with BN eReader (soon to be renamed NOOK) software-enabled devices including PC and iPad. Coming soon, both will sync with NOOK for iPhone and more devices to follow.

· Follows the standard: Read eBooks formatted in ePub, quickly becoming the industry standard.

Those signing up for a new BN.com account when downloading the new application, will also find three Barnes & Noble Classics Series eBooks – Dracula, Little Women and Pride & Prejudice – in their libraries, along with samples of two current bestselling eBooks.

NOOK for Android is now available at www.bn.com/nookforandroid. Barnes & Noble continually enhances its eReader software and will add new features to its Android offering this summer including highlights and notes, a search library and look-up feature, library grid-view and more. For more information on free BN eReader (soon to be renamed NOOK) software and apps, please visit www.bn.com/ebooks/download-reader.asp.

The Barnes & Noble Digital Library Advantage

Barnes & Noble’s Lifetime Library™ helps ensure that Barnes & Noble customers will always be able to access their digital libraries on a variety of devices as well as on BN.com. In addition, Barnes & Noble’s use of ePub format and Adobe technology allows customers to read all of their digital content across a growing universe of devices.

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For those of you who don’t know what Audible is, let’s take a quick second to go over that. Actually, let’s let Audible.com take a quick second to go over that:

“What Is Audible?
We’re active listeners who enjoy stories well told.

And we’re your destination for the widest selection of digital audiobooks available for download.

Come join the millions of listeners who’ve discovered a new way to receive the entertainment, information, and knowledge they seek. In addition to audiobooks, we’re home to magazines, radio shows, podcasts, stand-up comedy, and speeches from icons who shape our culture, politics, and business world. We feature the best narrators interpreting books by top authors.

How can vocal inflection—a pause, a breath, a smile you can feel through your headphones—add to your experience of the latest best sellers and timeless classics?

Find out by downloading an audio program now.

And listen for yourself.”

Heh, a smile you can feel through your headphones… Essentially, Audible hooks you up with digital books-on-tape, and gives you multiple options on how you choose to listen to them. You may remember Audible for Android coming up a few months ago when Breon got an invite to the private beta. Well the Audible app for Android is officially in the market yet, but open beta has started. You can jump on over to a Google groups for the beta now, and if you’re signed up, download away. For more information on Audible, visit Audible.com. That’s where you’ll find pricing info as well as how to start an account. Is anyone out there going to try this? Let us know how it works out in the comments.

Via Audible

This post shares tags with:

• Nook for Android
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• Chili’s 4sqr extravaganza
• Motorola Droid X: Secret Code and must have Apps
• Android Market at 70K apps and growing

Good morning! Today we’ll be taking a look at the new Fox News Channel release to the Android Market, their Fox News Application. There has been plenty of chat about whether or not the Fox News articles really are ‘fair and balanced,’ as the splash screen says, but that’s not the main focus of this review. We’ll be taking a look at the user interface of an application that has come straight from the developers, through the beta stage, and into the marketplace.

First of all the application has a nice clean, professional look to it. It’ll look good on just about any phone, however performance is a completely different issue that will be covered later. Similar to the USA Today App, which hasn’t been reviewed yet by DroidDog, the Fox News App features a tabbed news interface at the top, sorting your news into Articles | Videos | Slideshows | Shows | Favorites. Furthermore, beneath these 5 tabs you can continue to filter news into a ton of categories using a scrolling slider bar. Some of thse sub-categories include ‘Top Stores,’ ‘Entertainment,’ ‘Sci/Tech,’ ‘Sports,’ and more. This is, in my opinion, one of the most efficient and unobtrusive ways to sort through news and read it on a daily basis. You can check out my NewsRob App Review for an example of another news-reading application that actually aggregates news from a variety of sources. (cont.)

There is unfortunately no widget to go with this application, but the app still allows you to stay on top of breaking news by visiting the applications and either turning on or off background notifications. Some news aggregating apps have been notorious for hogging and draining Android phones’ batteries because of their need to constantly check for new stores in the background. The Fox news application hasn’t degraded my battery life at all, but it may help to look into a process manager application to help you kill unnecessary tasks from chomping into your battery life when you’re not using your phone. (cont.)



Like I mentioned earlier, the one issue I’d say is something to work on by the Fox App developing team is performance. Any news app has to pull in a large amount of data and images in the background and it can be difficult to streamline this process. The Fox app runs fairly smoothly on the Motorola Droid and is extremely snappy on the Motorola Droid X I’m testing. I’m unsure, however, how this device would perform on some lower end phones like the Droid Eris or the HTC Desire. Keep that in mind when ’shopping around’ for a news reader application for your Android device. Be sure to check out the accompanying YouTube video for more information on this.

Speaking of shopping, this application is [thankfully] completely free in the app store, and can be found by either searching ‘Fox News’ in the Android market or by scanning the QR code below this article.

If you want to see more of the videos I make on a weekly basis you can check out my Youtube Channel

Thanks!

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Nothing helps me drift peacefully to dreamland like interviews with witches, accounts of Bigfoot attacks, tales of time travel, and analysis of the role of inter-dimensional beings – generally referred to as “aliens” – in the afterlife and government conspiracy. The nighttime radio talk show, Coast to Coast AM covers all of these things and even more bizarre topics with style and a sense of humor.

There are a number of free radio apps in the Android Market that facilitate listening to C2C, but because most of them provide live or delayed streams from the actual on-air broadcast, they often leave you stuck listening to ads and even fuzzy transmissions. One of the reasons I chose to join the C2C premium service, Streamlink, was because I wanted access to MP3s of past shows. Once I stopped working graveyards, it was difficult to catch live.

For over three years, I had the previous night’s show automatically downloaded to my computer without advertisements – the ad space was filled with hold music. But then came the Coast to Coast AM iPhone app, which lets you listen live or to archived shows with no ads or empty space between segments. It has been the single app that requires me to use an iPod or borrow my wife’s iPhone at night, but those days are nearly over. I’ve contacted the show regularly to request an Android version of the app, and I’m not the only one.

On the June 6th broadcast, George Noory, successor to the legendary Art Bell, opened the show with this announcement:

“Hey, here’s some great news for you Streamlink members: As you know, we have the iPhone app right now. Well I’ve got a big meeting with out technical folks tomorrow morning and we are going to cut the deal for apps for Android and Blackberries. So all of you with all those phones, you’ll be able to have all your apps…if you’re a Streamlink member. And also, we’re going to be talking about some new video applications through the website.”

George has not updated the audience on the status of the meeting as of the July 7th broadcast.

The iPhone C2C app gives users access to news headlines, a game more than reminiscent of an Android app called Abduction, a screen for contacting the show, and of course, an interface for downloading and listening to shows. The iPhone app is free and has not yet been updated to iOS 4. I would guess that the Android version will have the capability to play in the background at the time of launch.

Here are some snaps of Coast to Coast AM for iPhone, followed by Streamlink pricing:

Streamlink pricing for US listeners:

1 month for only $US 6.95 (auto renewal)
6 months for $US 29.95 (auto renewal)
12 months for $US 54.95 (auto renewal)

Stay tuned to DroidDog for updates on this app.

Via The Nighthawk

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As rumors bubble about Apple’s potential foray into cloud-based music storage, Google is apparently set on the strategy from the get-go in a bid to change the way we consume entertainment. (I say “from the get-go” in that Google haves’t seriously approached media management for Android as of yet.) And what else but a calculated sea change and technological leapfrogging could capture the imaginations of the masses and spirit users away from iTunes (as we know it) and into the clouds with technology from the recently-acquired-by-Google Simplify Media?

According to Israeli finance newspaper, Calcalist, Android product manager Gaurav Jain says that the streaming music service will launch with the release of Android 3.0, Gingerbread. The trouble for Google is, that this may come on the heels of a similar announcement by Apple. But while the new product may not cause a mass exodus from Apple camp it sure will go a long way in addressing the regular complaints and justifications from patrons of an undeniably lesser media management system. Let’s hope this is more than just a rumor. (I happen to be one of the complainers.)

Via Know Your Cell by way of BGR

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