Designing and implementing an efficient network communication in your Android application is not an easy task. This is something Sony research engineer Erik Hellman has put a lot of thought and work into, and he shared some of his best hints and tips regarding this at his presentation at Droidcon London 2012. Check out the video and the presentation after the jump.
![Make your apps fast, user-friendly and power-efficient [video + presentation]](http://developer-static.se-mc.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/04/hellman_droidcon2012-220x128.jpg)
As our smartphones become more powerful, they 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, which basically lets you use the powerful CPU in modern smartphones to interpret the images captured through the camera. The best approach to using Computer Vision on Android is through library called OpenCV. Check out our new Open CV tutorial where Erik Hellman, research engineer at Sony, explains more.
![Get started with OpenCV on Android™ [tutorial + code example]](http://developer-static.se-mc.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/02/OpenCV-220x128.jpg)
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.
Did you miss Droidcon and the VHack in London last week, or do you feel like re-living some of the action? No worries, we’ve gathered up some of the highlights, as well as images and presentations from Sony. Droidcon London is one of biggest and most influential Android events in Europe, gathering about 1100 attendees this year. And the VHack gathered about 70 top developers from all over Europe who celebrated five years of Android by hacking their way through Friday and Sunday. Check it all out after the jump.
![Get all the highlights from Droidcon and VHack London [presentations+pictures]](http://developer-static.se-mc.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/11/droidcon_660x384-220x128.jpg)
If you’re gearing up to attend Droidcon UK next week, don’t miss the opportunity to attend Erik Hellman’s session Fast, user friendly, and effective network communication on Android on Day 2. Erik, a research engineer here at Sony and a regular speaker at Droidcon events, sat down with the DroidCon organisers to discuss his Droidcon experiences, Android development, and how developers can make their applications better. Read the Erik Hellman interview on Droidcon News for the inside scoop.
See the magic happen in the floating touch video.
The new Xperia™ sola announced earlier today, includes a brand new touch sensor technology, called floating touch™, that lets you interact with the phone without even touching it. This unique user experience never seen on a smartphone before lets you control parts of the user interface (UI) by simply letting your finger hover above the screen. At launch, this feature is implemented in the web browser. Floating touch™ enables the phone to register your finger up to 20mm above the screen. This makes it possible to detect not only the screen coordinates that you are pointing at, but also your finger’s distance from the screen. Erik Hellman, research engineer at Sony Mobile and one of the inventors of the technology, explains more after the jump.
![Imagine controlling your phone without touching the screen – floating touch makes it possible [video]](http://developer-static.se-mc.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/03/floatingfeatured-220x163.jpg)
Have you ever thought about using hidden Android™ APIs? A few weeks ago, Erik Hellman from Sony Ericsson’s Technology research department presented a few examples of how these APIs could be used at Droidcon in London, and at Mobile Monday in Bucharest. We have now made Erik’s hidden API code examples available for download.
Download and learn more after the jump.
Going to Droidcon in London, UK, on October 6-7? Don’t miss the speaker session with Sony Ericsson’s Erik Hellman (above), in which you will get to learn how to access and use hidden and protected Android APIs. You will also find out what limitations exists, and you will get some tips’n'tricks on how to use the hidden APIs in a safe way, across multiple vendors devices and Android versions. You will get to see several advanced demos that you normally can’t see on Android! Developer World will also have a booth at Droidcon, where you will have the chance to win some really cool prizes.
Read more about Droidcon after the jump!
Wouldn’t it be cool to have a 3D UI in your Android™ application? I’m Erik Hellman, Lead Software Architect for Android development at Sony Ericsson, and I’ll explain how to make this possible. In this article, I’ll describe how to incorporate 3D with Android’s UI API and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics, and I provide a bitmap code example that can be used as input to a texture in OpenGL ES 2.0.
Erik Hellman.
Ever wondered how a manufacturer goes about to implement Android on a phone? Interested in how Sony Ericsson works with the Android platform? Erik Hellman from Sony Ericsson will present his experiences from working with Android at the Android Only event in Stockholm, Sweden, on Sept 29-30.
