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Samsung sells a million mobile devices a day, 2 televisions every second, and an awful lot of other devices. The company sells more Android phones than any other company — but if you tuned into the Samsung Developers Conference keynote today, you wouldn’t have heard much mention of Google Android.
Instead, the company is pushing its new tools that developers can tap into for apps that use multi-window, digital pen, or motion controls, among other things, on Samsung’s phones and tablets.
The company is also playing up its Samsung Apps store and support for in-app purchases as an alternative (albeit a non-mutually exclusive one) to the Google Play Store.
It’s good for Samsung to have Android phones that don’t look like anybody else’s — but is it good for users?
Here are some of the day’s top stories from around the web.
- Samsung kicks off developer conference, unveils 5 new SDKs that set its devices apart from other Android products
Sasmung is holding its first developer conference, and while the company’s phones and tablets continue to run Android-based software, the largest Android device maker is encouraging developers to write apps that take advantage of Samsung-only SDKs to work with the S Pen, Samsung Smart TVs, and more. [GigaOm] - BLU’s Life View $290 unlocked Android smartphone reviewed, generally liked
BLU is starting to make a habit of selling unlocked devices with decent specs and performance at reasonably good prices. The BLU Life View may be no Nexus 5 (or Nexus 4, for that matter), but it seems to be a decent phone for the money. [Android Police] - 1Sheeld turns your smartphone into a multifunction Arduino shield
Like the idea of a tiny, hackable Arduino device, but tired of having to buy new expansion boards and shields every time you want to do something new? 1Sheeld makes your phone into a shield that can perform all sorts of different functions. [TechCrunch] - Now you can use Ubuntu 13.04 with accelerated graphics on a Freescale i.MX6 processor
Folks have been running Ubuntu on Android TV sticks and other devices with Freescale i.MX6 processors for months — but hardware-accelerated graphics can be a bit tricky. Now there’s a way to get GPU acceleration working with xorg-server versions 11 and later, which means Ubuntu 13.04 now works. [Jas Hacks] - Coming to CyanogenMod? Mirror an Android device to a desktop web browser tab
Developer Koushik Dutta has made a habit of figuring out how to stream content from an Android device to all sorts of other hardware, including a Chromecast, Roku, and now a web browser tab. [+Koushik Dutta]
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