While Google’s top brass were busy dissecting the company’s Q1 earnings on their scheduled conference call, it was business as usual for the rest of the company. Over on the official Android Developers blog, for example, Google announced that developers in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Israel, and Poland can now sell Android apps and in-app additions in the Google Play store (and in their native currencies to boot).

“But wait,” you may say. “Developers from Israel and Mexico have been able to sell their apps for years now!” You’d be absolutely right — the Czech Republic and Poland are the only really new additions, but there was a bit of a catch for the other two.

At the time, developers in Mexico and Israel could only sell their apps through an AdSense merchant account and set prices in U.S. dollars. With this new change in place, Google now supports both countries’ respective currencies. The process for Israeli or Mexican developers to make the transition seems a bit hairy though — Google outlines the whole thing here, and it involves creating a new Google account and re-registering with Google Play.

So what does this mean for you developers? Well, unless you live in one of the aforementioned countries, not a whole lot. While most of the work will have to be done by developers operating out of those locales, Google still suggests that you consider whether or not you want to set a specific price for each of those new markets instead of just letting your default price ride.

Those minor issues aside, Google now officially supports paid application sales from developers in 31 countries. It sounds pretty good until you realize that it’s taken over a year and a half for Google to add these new names to the list of supported countries. I’m sure that developers in those countries will appreciate that Google has finally gotten around to them, but there are still quite a few that haven’t.

A link to the post was shared by the Android Developers’ Google+ account, inspiring a litany of requests from people asking Google to support their countries as well, prompting Android Developer Relations Lead Reto Meier to apologize for the delay. Then again, Google’s always been very upfront about this sort of thing — they note in their list of seller countries that they are “unable to provide any guidance on timelines.”

As if producing commercial airliners, helicopters, and satellites didn’t keep Boeing busy enough, the company revealed earlier this week that they would soon be branching out into a slightly different market. National Defense Magazine reports that Boeing is currently working on an highly-secure Android-based smartphone of all things, and that it should see a release later this year.

Boeing President Roger Krone declined to go into specifics when it came to the device’s hardware or release date, though he did note the Boeing Phone (the company hasn’t officially decided on a name yet) is nearing the end of its development cycle. It seems as though the device has been in the works for a while so it’s a safe bet that the spec sheet won’t be the most competitive, and I wouldn’t expect to see anything newer than Froyo or Gingerbread running on it.

If you hadn’t already guessed, this isn’t the sort of device you’ll be able to pick up at your local mom-and-pop cell phone store. In developing their Android phone, Boeing kept an eye on big competitors in the secure communications market, who often price their proprietary devices in the five-figure range. Thanks in part to the inclusion of a free (not to mention robust) mobile operating system, Boeing plans to introduce their smartphone at a much lower price, which should please the procurement folks within the Defense Department and other security-conscious operations.

Cost apparently isn’t the only reason that Boeing opted to create an Android device — with Google’s OS accounting for over around 50% of the U.S. smartphone market, users are coming to expect more out of their work-issued devices. As Krone told National Defense Magazine’s Stew Magnuson, the Boeing Phone will give customers “what they are used to seeing [on consumer market smartphones] and give them the functionality from the security perspective.”

Boeing isnt the first company to surprise us with news of a security-conscious mobile device — Dell surprised us late last year when they announced that the their discontinued (and oft-maligned) Dell Streak 5 was the first Android device to be given the official seal of approval by the U.S. Department of Defense. Folks within the organization were apparently fond of the mini-slate’s design, though I have to wonder how well those things actually hold up in the field.

Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have been noticeably silent since their photo-sharing app Instagram was bought by Facebook earlier this week for $1 billion.

In the meantime there has been a lot written about that deal, from praise to backlash, parsing what it means and why.

But if you’d like to hear a little (actually, a lot) about how Instagram got to where it did, read on.

Last night, Krieger gave a presentation at an Airbnb event for employees and members of the network, part of a regular series called the Tech Talk. The subject was “Scaling Instagram.”

Considering his company was just bought for $1 billion, it’s a pretty remarkable effort, 185 slides in all.

The talk, as the name of the event would suggest, is mainly about engineering and back-end work. It goes through some of the obstacles and solutions that Krieger and team faced as Instagram instantly picked up millions of users. Some notable points:

• It’s true that Instagram never had to create a “fail whale” but they had some clear 404′s early on and “tons of errors.”

• Possibly the truest test of scaling: “replacing all components of a car while driving it at 100mph”. Also: Don’t try to reinvent the wheel in your work. And be open to getting knowledge from others (“awesome advisors”) — without passing the buck (“don’t think ‘someone else will join and take care of this’”).

• In Krieger’s view, that Android launch it had earlier this month ranks right up there with some of the most important aspects of running Instagram smoothly. (One slide notes “scaling for Android” as just as essential as choosing the right database and technology and staying nimble.) Figuring out how they could get that right was one reason why it took so long to bring that Android app to market.

And simplicity, one of the things that makes Instagram so attractive, appears to be a philosophy and approach that Krieger & Co. follow right through to the most back-end parts of the site.

“The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible,” he says is the goal. We look forward to seeing how that evolves with Instagram’s next chapter.

The full slide deck is here:

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Last December, Google launched Currents, its attempt at challenging popular mobile apps like Flipboard and Zite. Since then, the company has added about 400 new publishers and over 14,000 self-published editions to its lineup . Until now, though, Currents, which runs on Android and iOS, was only available in the United States. That’s changing today, as Google is taking Currents global. Local publishers can now start adding their content to the app and U.S. publishers can now turn on a translation feature to make their texts available in any of the 44 languages that are supported by Google Translate.

Among the international publishers who are already using Google Currents are The Guardian in the UK, LaStampa in Italy, Financial Times Deutschland in Germany, ABC News in Australia, Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland and Hindustan Times in India.

The translation feature, though, is what Google really wants to highlight in this release. Given that it’s based on Google Translate, those translations can be a bit rough at time, though they are generally good enough to get the general gist of an article.

This new version of Currents also sports a new “dynamic sync feature,” which ensures that articles are downloaded immediately when you open the app without having to press the sync button. Currents’ users can now also download select editions for offline reading.

Those dull 20-minute+ commutes to work are certainly made a lot easier by the plethora of games available on our smartphones – take your pick from Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, Draw Something and thousands more.

Now, however, fans of the perennially popular Football Manager series can continue their addiction to the beautiful game wherever they roam, with a trimmed-down version for Android hitting Google Play today.

Football Manager Handheld has been on iOS for a couple of years already, and the 2012 edition has been on iOS devices for a few weeks. However, the news that it has finally been ported over to Google-powered smartphones will please millions of people.

Developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega, Football Manager Handheld 2012 isn’t just a direct translation of the hugely popular PC game, instead it has been built with the shorter-term player in mind.

The games lets you to take charge of any club in leagues covering 12 countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Scotland, Spain and Wales), and you control transfers, training, tactics and managing your team during matches.

You can tackle this job either in commute-sized chunks, or in mammoth sittings whilst sprawled on the sofa.

Football Manager Handheld 2012 has been designed for Android devices using OS 2.2 and above, and weighs in at a whopping 27MB.

It’s also worth noting that it’s not free…the game will set you back £6.99 ($11 USD/€8.5 EUR), and it’s available in English, French, Spanish and Italian.

➤ Football Manager [Android]

We’ve always been interested in the Notion Ink project, which has always striven to be a true alternative to both the iPad and Android masses. Last time, it was through both a Pixel Qi screen and an interesting custom interface, but delays and yield problems more or less buried it and competitors piled up.

The sequel to Notion Ink’s Adam was originally going to have a 10″ screen running at 1920×1200. A post on the company’s development blog has admitted that this is not likely to happen.

What would replace it in the new model isn’t said, though a more common 1280×800 screen or thereabouts would be a likely candidate. They’re common, efficient, and cheap, and the high-resolution panel they were looking at before was none of those.

It says something about the trials of developing hardware as a small company. Someone like Apple has the clout to make the components and materials for something like the new iPad cheap enough to buy in bulk. But if you’re only shipping, say, 10,000 units, the cost per unit starts looking way different.

He notes also that such a high-resolution screen, while it has its benefits, is not really beneficial in the Android ecosystem now. Apple’s high-res screen is being adopted at large by developers (or else), but Android is a more complicated beast and the display engine isn’t locked down quite so tightly.

On that front, Notion Ink’s Shravan says that their next blog post will go over the new Adam’s “Visual Enhancement Engine,” probably a serious makeover of stock Android, and a “Display Power Optimizer,” which is probably what it sounds like. Once they lock down the hardware specs, they have the advantage of knowing what they’re developing for, and final software work can begin.

It may not ever ship as many units as an iPad or Kindle Fire, but the David vs. Goliaths story continues to be worth following.

[via Engadget]

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