The Great Big Spreadsheet of All Known Android Devices Everywhere

How many Droids are there? How much RAM is in the Nexus One? Does the Samsung Galaxy S support Wi-Fi N? Does the Droid X have a bigger screen than the Droid 2? Can you get Android in a TV? In a car?

If these are the sort of questions you've found yourself wondering about (or even Googling about with limited success), there's a new resource out there that you should be aware of. It's this incredible spreadsheet of all known Android devices and their technical specifications. And it includes smartphones, netbooks, e-books, PMPs (personal media players), MIDs (mobile Internet devices), TVs, cars and more.

We have to credit Portable Electronics Ltd., a New Zealand-based electronics distribution company, for building this massive resource. And we must thank the many kind folks on Twitter who also brought this to our attention.

The spreadsheet, which is a publicly available Google Doc, sorts Android devices into different categories (phones, netbooks, TV, etc.) using tabs across the top.

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Hardware Acceleration is Coming to Chrome - Try it Now

Google just confirmed that Chrome will soon support GPU hardware acceleration. Developers can speed up the rendering of complex pages by offloading a lot of the processing to a computer's graphics card, which - after all - was specifically designed for these tasks. As browser developers continue to try to increase the responsiveness of their applications, hardware acceleration is the natural next place to look for performance gains. Microsoft is also working on hardware acceleration for the next version of its browser. The company plans to unveil the first complete build of Internet Explorer 9 next month. Mozilla, too, offers support for GPU acceleration in the latest beta version of Firefox 4 for Windows.

Vangelis Kokkevis, one of the engineers behind the Chromium project, notes that Chrome currently only uses hardware acceleration for displaying some content. Now that the basic infrastructure is in place, however, the Chromium team expects to move "even more of the rendering from the CPU to the GPU to achieve impressive speedups." In the long run, Google will likely also use this same infrastructure to offer support for accelerated 3D graphics in the browser.

 

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Top 10 Most Important Features for Enterprise Smartphone Management Solutions

A new report from Forrester confirms a trend we've been reporting: enterprises are turning away from "one size fits all" organization-owned smart phone phone strategies in favor of multi-device, employee owned smart phone strategies. Of the firms polled by Forrester, approximately half are already embracing a multiplatform strategy, and nearly 60% support personally owned smartphones. Many enterprises are considering solutions to augment or replace their Blackberry Enterprise Servers. Forrester has identified the ten most important features for smart phone device management solutions, and ten vendors that offer all ten features.

Challenges for the enterprise

According to Forrester, IT is struggling with a two-fold challenge: mobile device management and security. To solve this problem, enterprises are increasingly investing in device-agnostic solutions. In the firm's report on mobile application development, Forrester recommends creating Web applications, instead of native applications, whenever possible.

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Popular Android Mod Now Supports Froyo, Breathes Life Into Old Phones

The new Android 2.2-compatible version of Cyanogen, a hacker-created extension for the Android mobile operating system, was released this weekend. The new version of the popular mod is already being downloaded by scores of Android users who want more from their phones.

Android owners who "root" their phones can install CyanogenMod 6.0 to boost speed and battery life and add features not supported in the factory version of the operating system, such as music app enhancements, browser enhancements and FLAC playback support.

Rooting is a process similar to jailbreaking for the iPhone that gives users more freedom to modify a phone's software (see our coverage, How to Hack Your Android Phone and Why You Should Bother).

Mods like Cyanogen claim to increase speed and performance and add features to your Android device, which may be especially useful for users with older phones. Google's Nexus One handset, for example, is a beloved early-generation Android phone that could potentially be modified to improve performance.

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