The good news is, VLC Beta was released today, giving Android users a long-awaited taste of do-it-all media player VLC. The bad news is, VLC's developers say the app is meant only for power users and hackers, meaning most of us should probably wait on downloading it.

Just like its bigger brothers on Mac and Windows, VLC is a free and open-source multimedia player that can open just about any media file out there. It offers an audio and video media library with full search capabilities, and supports subtitles and network streams, including HLS.

While VLC Beta is available to the public now, its developers make it clear that it is still an early build with a lot of unfinished elements. According to them, it's unstable and slow, and in much need of performance improvements and a UI face-lift. Also, audio issues may occur when using it, and hardware decoding "works only with a limited set of hardware."

All that said, if you still want to give this fan favorite a try, VLC Beta is available now for free from Google Play.

Get him, Spidey!

App developers know how to plan ahead. Just in time for "The Amazing Spider-Man," which swings into theaters July 3, Disney Publishing and Gameloft have released two very different, but equally great, movie tie-ins.

The Amazing Spider-Man (Android | iOS, $6.99) delivers an action-packed gaming experience, while the Spider-Man AR Book HD for iOS ($4.99) -- unappealing name notwithstanding -- gives kids an interactive storybook to read, hear, and play with.

Let's start with the game, which plays exactly like a Spider-Man adventure should, giving you an open city around which to crawl, swing, and battle.

Because games like this all but demand a big(ger) screen, I tested The Amazing Spider-Man mostly on my iPad 3. Visually, it's a knockout, bringing Manhattan to life like few mobile games I've seen. Cars drive, pedestrians walk, signs flash -- it's a feast for the eyes. (Gotta say, though, Spidey's rear end is a little t... [Read more]

Firefox OS, previously known as Boot to Gecko (B2G), is designed to give Mozilla a foothold in the smartphone market.

Mozilla's browser-based smartphone operating system has grown up a notch, winning over partners such as Sprint and ZTE and picking up the marketing-friendly name of Firefox OS.

In addition, Mozilla has announced several partners, a necessity for making a bunch of software into something people actually use: only a very small number of people have the skills and interest to install a mobile-phone OS.

Carrier Telefonica and chipmaker Qualcomm already were partners that emerged when Mozilla announced B2G at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. They'd said to expect phones by the end of 2012 then, but now the schedule calls for Firefox OS models to arrive first in Brazil in 2013.

Related stories

• Hands-on Boot to Gecko: Interesting, but far from baked
• Mozilla looks to summit 'Kilimanjaro' for project unity[Read more]

SAN FRANCISCO--Adobe Systems, retooling as fast as it can for a future of Web publishing and Web apps, sees the technology as mostly caught up to the Flash technology that Adobe previously preferred.

"I think it's close to 80 percent," Arno Gourdol, Adobe's senior director of Web platform and authoring, said in an interview during the Google I/O show here.

Gourdol, who leads Adobe work to embrace Web standards, has a lot on the line as the company tries to make a difficult transition away from the widely used but fading Flash. He's eager to convince skeptics that the company is serious about it: "We're not just looking at parity with Flash. We're trying to go beyond what you can do with Flash."

The company for years advocated its Flash Player plug-in as a way to deliver games, video, and slick, magazine-style layouts to Web browsers. But at the same time Adobe was struggling to bring Flash to the new world of mobile devices -- including a particularly public fight when Apple barred the plug-in from iOS -- the company started branching out to Web standards, too.

With new Web design and programming products such as Muse and Edge, and with an active effort to design new standards, Adobe is fully engaged in the post-Flash world now. Emblematic of the seriousness of the effort: two Adobe employees were the only non-Google people to make presentations at Google I/O show, where Web te... [Read more]