We heard the news today that paid apps in Android market place have been extended to 18 new countries. Could “Carrier Billing” (Allowing your service operator to add the apps’ price to your cellphone bill) be the reason behind it? I think so. It was long suggested that Google Checkout and corresponding legal issues in using it across various countries was the reason behind the paid apps not being available in those countries. The, all of us developers got an email from Google on 24th of July about an updated Developers’ Distribution Agreement, which basically said in clause 13.1 that “authorized carriers” had been added as an indemnified party in the apps sales.

Just got a mail from Google that paid apps are being made available in India. HOORAY!!! In addition, developers from 20 more countries can sell apps on market (Unfortunately, no India in this list) and people from 18 more countries can buy paid apps.

This is a big thing because now 32 countries out of 44 where Android has footprint can buy paid apps. This should take away one of the biggest drawbacks that Android marketplace was facing.

I wanted to record calls on my Android phone (Nexus one). The easy way would have been to download an app but I like tinkering. And given that I recently bought Tasker, android’s very own swiss knife, I thought I should give it a run. After just an hour I was able to create my very own call recorder (some time went into trial and error with things as this was my first major task with tasker and also some things didn’t work with nexus one, which I will note below). I’ll outline the process to set it up here in as much detail as possible and will also provide the profiles. Please note that I made this setup for nexus one but it should work on pretty much any android phone and, in fact, it might work even better on your phone by making a few tweaks that I will outline as Nexus one doesn’t allow jacking into the call streams directly but your phone might.

An application review process was announced today for getting your apps into Ubuntu “extras” repository. But like most other announcements of new things, this one was met as well with as much criticism as the praise it got. A lot of the criticism is FUD though, although mostly unintentional and caused by ignorance of some facts behind it. I’ll try to address some of these concerns here to the best of my knowledge from what I’ve been reading over the past some time about this development.

Another nail in the coffin before this Android tablet lives to fulfill the Indian kids’ dreams. Well, not exactly a nail in the coffin. The tablet might still be here, and at the price promised but the thing to note is how low the government can stoop to get bragging rights (and votes). The article elaborates how the IIT/IISC scientists weren’t even aware that such a “project” existed and they were invited to be a part of it just a month before Mr. Kapil Sibal unveiled the epitome of Indian innovation to the world media, telling everyone with gusto how it was a brainchild of India’s premier institutes backed by the revolutionary and modern government. How the low cost motherboard had been designed and fabricated by students where years of research by experts around the world had failed in projects like OLPC.