Tag Archives: Android

As our smartphones become more powerful, we can do more advanced things that previously required a high-end PC. One way to make use of the robust processing power of your smartphone is Computer Vision – the ability for a device to acquire, process, analyse and understand images the same way images are perceived by human eyes. Basically, we can use the powerful CPU in modern smartphones to interpret the images captured through the camera. Examples of use cases are face detection and recognition or simple post-processing of photographs. The best approach to using Computer Vision on Android is through library called OpenCV. Read on as Erik Hellman, research engineer at Sony, explains more.

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Developer World is Sony’s main hub for Android™ developers, and in addition to handy tutorials and the latest technical news, don’t forget that we also have valuable developer tools to help you in many stages of app development, whether you’re working on a Sony tablet, smartphone, or a mobile accessory. The BacklogTool, ChkBugReport, and XAppDbg are also open sourced, so you can modify these tools to suit your own development needs. Read further to get a quick summary of some of the tools available.

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App developers, have you ever wished that you wouldn’t have to rebuild and run your application to try out every small change you’re making? Sony’s XAppDbg tool (eXtra Application Debugging tool) lets you try out different parameters without the need to rebuild the code for every change. And it’s open source! Read on as Pál Szász, who developed the tool, explains more!

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The latest version of AppXplore – version 2.5 – is now available for download on Google Play. AppXplore is a free analysis tool that lists all the apps on your Android device, and gives you detailed information for each, including permissions used, Android™ versions supported, libraries shared, and much more. AppXplore is especially useful for seeing how much memory an app is using, and if the file is movable to the SD card. Likewise, developers can use AppXplore for QA purposes, to make sure their apps are showing the proper permissions in the manifest file. Read on to learn more about the latest features of AppXplore 2.5.

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If you’re currently working on an app where image scaling is needed, such as when you’re developing a SmartWatch extension for your application, don’t forget that we have a handy tutorial to explain how to get images scaled correctly. Andreas Agvard, a Senior Software Engineer at Sony, has created an image scaling code example that you can download, compile, and run. Read more after the jump.

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Today, we release a beta version of our new flash tool for Xperia devices, which enables you to put on standard Sony software* on a Sony Xperia™ smartphone which has the boot loader unlocked. This functionality has often been requested by the open Android™ community, and now we’re glad to support it. Please note that the phone still stays unlocked, and that the warranty may still be voided. As this is a beta version, only a limited number of phone models are supported to begin with. Read on for instructions and more information, and to find out how provide us feedback – we are really eager to hear what you think!

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Today, we’ve just announced Xperia E, a new addition to the Xperia™ smartphone range. This affordable smartphone comes with HD voice, data usage monitoring, and battery management. It also comes in a dual SIM version called Xperia™ E _dual. Both these versions are powered by a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon™ processor, have a 3.5” HVGA screen, and will be available from Q1 2013. Also, Xperia™ E launches with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), while Xperia™ E _dual launches initially on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) but will be upgraded to Android 4.1. Read more about the features of Xperia E and Xperia™ E _dual after the jump.

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If you have a new and innovative app, service or game designed for multiple screens, or if you have a unique idea for such a use case, then the new Sony-sponsored Multi-Screen UX Competition might be something for you. If  your user experience (UX) is designed for a smartphone, tablet, TV, PC, or SmartWatch – or any combination of these devices, you might get promoted in Sony stores or highlighted as a showcase listing on the sponsor websites. Read more about the competition and what you can win after the jump.

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Facebook just made an interesting blog post about how the Ringmark mobile browser test suite is being adapted by the mobile industry. Among others, it’s highlighted that the latest Sony Xperia™ smartphones (Xperia™ T) include improvements to the Android™ browser based on priorities set in Ringmark. It’s a good read if you want to know more about the progress of Ringmark. Check the full post on the Facebook HTML5 blog.

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For some time now, Jean-Baptiste Quéru (JBQ), technical lead of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) at Google, have been working to get the AOSP running on Xperia™ S. Today, we are moving the AOSP on Xperia S project from the main branch of the AOSP to a Sony git on GitHub. This is because while JBQ considers the Xperia™ S AOSP experiment a success, from Jelly Bean MR1 Xperia™ S will not be kept as a target device on the main AOSP branch. However, as we can see a great interest from the community we will continue the work on a Sony git and keep it open for external partners and developers to contribute. Read on as Björn Andersson and Johan Redestig, software engineers at Sony, explain more!

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