Android

Amazon launched their own Android app store today and are offering Angry Birds Rio for free to give you a little more incentive to install their app store. Click here to get started by entering your phone number so Amazon can send you the download link. The install process is pretty long and halfway through I read that the Amazon app store is blocked by AT&T, my carrier. So apparently I can't get this deal, but the rest of you can expect Amazon to offer a different premium app for free every day.

The Prince George's County government seeks to consolidate its services with two recent endeavors: the 311 County Click call system and creation of the Department of Permits, Inspection and Enforcement. Launched last October, 311 County Click allows county residents to request non-emergency government services without having to call 911. Jennifer Hawkins, senior manager of the 311 Call Center, said the system is intended to be a "sole repository for citizens for complaints and service requests.

BALTIMORE BASEBALL APP Access award-winning Baltimore Orioles content from The Baltimore Sun and baltimoresun.com -- anytime, anywhere. Stay updated with the latest breaking news, 24/7. Get insight and analysis from Orioles Insider bloggers and Sun columnists. Read game stories, optimized for your device, as soon they're posted. View picture galleries of games, players and fans, along with images of Orioles legends from The Sun's archives. Conveniently track player and media Twitter accounts and lists.

Good news for all you earnest economy watchers out there. The U.S. Census Bureau today released its first mobile app called "America's Economy. " The Census built the app with some nifty features, such as notifications and social sharing to Twitter and Facebook. Now you can spread the joys and pitfalls of the U.S. economy with friends, family and followers! You'll have easy access to the following 16 key indicators: Advance Monthly Retail Sales; New Residential Construction; New Residential Sales; Construction Spending; International Trade; Advance Report Durable Goods; Business Inventories; Manufacturers' Goods; Monthly Wholesale; Homeownership Rate; Quarterly Services Survey; QFR - Retail Trade; QFR - Manufacturing; Gross Domestic Product; Personal Income and Outlays; Unemployment Rate.

In "Solo," the Terminator joins the Magnificent Seven.A movie so purloined from other movies it has almost no single moment of original life, this odd hybrid follows as an experimental super android infantryman joins forces with a guerrilla-besieged Central American village and, faster than you can say "Yul Brynner," has the villagers outfighting the boys with the AK-47s and the Che T-shirts.Mario Van Peebles is the best thing in the picture as the title character. With his head shaven (nice conceit: When the android is given a choice of faces during construction, he picks Michael Jordan's)

The crowd reaction to ''Eve of Destruction'' was the better part of the experience. Some of the male members of the audience bolted the theater as the movie was about to end. One shouted that he wanted his money back. The others said things you wouldn't want to see in print.You couldn't blame them. When it comes to silly movies, ''Eve of Destruction'' is one of the more ridiculous.The title character is a robot created in the image of its maker, a woman scientist. It's really a walking bomb, and, naturally, it malfunctions.

Amazon is on a roll lately! Last week they announced their own Android app store and are giving away a different premium app for free every day. This week Amazon announced their new Cloud Player . From what I've read on Amazon and Engadget  essentially you can get a free 5GB cloud storage drive for your music collection that you can then access and stream on any PC or Android phone with an internet connection. Amazon is betting this will encourage more people to download music from their store and not iTunes.

Go to  http://www.woot.com/  right now and check back often. Woot is blowing through several items today, one at a time. Right now they are selling a pretty sweet Android tablet for $279.99. That's about $20 under the lowest price I could find anywhere else and way under what you'd pay at an actual B&M. Let the Woot off begin!

Thousands of students from elementary school to college age are competing in an Olympiad of sorts this week at the University of Maryland College Park campus.Their sport is mental gymnastics; the event is the world finals of Odyssey of the Mind -- a 20-year-old educational program that challenges participants to solve difficult problems creatively.About 750 student teams from 16 countries and all 50 states began vying yesterday for coveted trophies and medals for such accomplishments as making the best android, strongest structure or top model car design.

''Hardware'' is a hard watch. Yeah, it's an old, familiar expression, but this is a very familiar film, one that was done in England and Morocco and plays like a closet version of ''Alien.''It also plays like ''Friday the 13th, X.'' The gore is overwhelmingly repugnant. You'll be looking away much of the time. If you're smart, you'll look the other way all the time.''Hardware'' is futuristic. We know that from the first frame, one that scans the desert to pick up what looks like a street person.

Safeway, with 30 Baltimore-area stores, is launching a new online and mobile shopping tool Wednesday that offers customers access access to hundreds of digital coupons and weekly specials and allows them to download personalized deals to their Safeway rewards card. The program called "Just for U" can be accessed online or via a new Safeway mobile application for iPhone or Android smart phones. Customers can sign up, either at the Safeway.com website or by downloading the mobile app, with their email address and Safeway Club Card membership.

My eyes, I can't see. My ears, they're ringing. What's that? Apple did what? Yeah, Apple dropped a big concussion grenade on us today, especially Google and the GPS makers. CEO Tim Cook & Co. unveiled a ton of new goodies at Apple's annual developer conference today in California. First off, hardware. New MacBook Air and a New MacBook Pro . With retina display. So you'll be able to see pixel-perfection with every image. And a solid state hard drive on the MBP, which at least theoretically means a faster, lighter, thinner component.

Atholton High School student Eric Lu whipped out his cellphone and displayed information about the 7.3-magnitude earthquake that occurred off the west coast of Sumatra on Tuesday. The information came courtesy of mobile application software called Quakes — Earthquake Notifications, and Lu vouches for its accuracy. After all, it's his app. Lu, 17, is an independent software developer who has four applications on Apple's App Store sites. They include Quakes, a free app that Lu says offers users information on earthquakes greater than magnitude 2.5, along with data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

In 1996 Robert H. Frank published "The Winner-Take-All Society," an explanation of why so few in the wired world do so well and why everybody else falls short. The intervening years have only strengthened his case that, in a networked economy, most sales, profits and other rewards go to a small group of companies and individuals. Google blew away other search engines. eBay is still the only online auction site most people have heard of. Facebook turned MySpace into a punchline. Thus the chances for Millennial Media to make it huge in mobile, wireless advertising would seem few. Only five years old, the Baltimore-based startup is less than a hundredth the size of its main competitors, Google and Apple.

Dealnews.com has posted its list of a dozen things getting cheaper this year.  Many of them are tech related, such as the Apple iPad 2, Android tablets and eBook readers. Wine is expected to be less expensive, and we're not talking about Mad Dog 20/20. Apparently, tight budgets prevented consumers from buying high-priced wines - $30 and up - which means retailers are going to slash their prices to move the bottles off the shelf, according to Dealnews. And though gas prices are going up, car rental rates won't follow because of competition and a good number of cars sitting in lots, Dealnews says.

BALTIMORE BASEBALL APP Access award-winning Baltimore Orioles content from The Baltimore Sun and baltimoresun.com -- anytime, anywhere. Stay updated with the latest breaking news, 24/7. Get insight and analysis from Orioles Insider bloggers and Sun columnists. Read game stories, optimized for your device, as soon they're posted. View picture galleries of games, players and fans, along with images of Orioles legends from The Sun's archives. Conveniently track player and media Twitter accounts and lists.

SAN FRANCISCO - As Apple Inc.'s iPhone faces stiffer competition in the lucrative market for smart phones, the company is going after one of its main rivals with patent lawsuits claiming theft of touch screen technology and other features. The complaints cover a slew of models made by Taiwanese phone maker HTC Corp., including the Nexus One, G1 and myTouch 3G - all using the free, rival Android mobile operating software from Google Inc. Non-Android phones include HTC's Touch series. Patent cases can take months or years to resolve.

The Prince George's County government seeks to consolidate its services with two recent endeavors: the 311 County Click call system and creation of the Department of Permits, Inspection and Enforcement. Launched last October, 311 County Click allows county residents to request non-emergency government services without having to call 911. Jennifer Hawkins, senior manager of the 311 Call Center, said the system is intended to be a "sole repository for citizens for complaints and service requests.

This week, Watchdog wants to take a moment to alert Baltimore residents as well as those who spend lots of time in the city about a new way to report problems. Watchdog often hears a common refrain when talking to residents troubled by something they spotted in their travels: How should they report it? There's a new answer to that question with the launch of a free iPhone and Android 311 app. "The primary goal was to provide another tool, another way of access for the citizenry to submit problems to 311 for resolution," said Rico Singleton, Baltimore's chief information officer.

I'm wearing my Watchdog hat while I explain this bonus Consumer Website of the Week: Baltimore's new 311 app and website. If you've got an iPhone or an Android handset, you can download the free Baltimore 311 app . Use it to report problems such as potholes, street lights that are dark or malfunctioning traffic signals, or check on service requests that you've already submitted. The app allows people to submit photographs of the problems along with the descriptions, which is really powerful --- inspectors might be able to make some judgments about the issue and send the appropriate equipment as a result.