If you think this Space Colony wallpaper looks good here, wait until you see it in action.

Introduced all the way back in Android 2.1, Live Wallpapers provide animated, and often interactive backgrounds that range from minimalist designs to a downright busy motif.

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As Android has evolved over the years and become more power efficient, developers have created increasingly more robust Live Wallpapers.

Thanks to advances in the platform, these eye-catching backgrounds now also sip your battery instead of chugging.

I've put together a small collection of my favorite Live Wallpaper apps for Android,... [Read more]

On Monday, Opera released a new tablet browser redesigned from the ground up that blurs the lines between app and Web.

Coast, as the browser is called, is an attempt by Opera to mimic the nativity of iOS and bring that to the Web browsing experience. The result is a Web browser that basically acts and feels like a cross between iOS and the old WebOS platform.

By stripping away the buttons and menu of most conventional Web browsers, Coast brings pages front and center; each Web page takes the stage to be treated more like an app than a Web site. The use of Pins makes navigating Coast "Inception"-esque -- think an OS within an OS. The structuring of opened pages into cards is reminiscent of the now-defunct WebOS. Swiping left and right lets you go back a page or forward. Flicking up in card view closes the site. By far the most impressive feature is the fluid response of the browser. Pages load almost instantly and the process of moving between sites offers the perception of flipping through a magazine. As Web designers move forward with making more intricately responsive pages, it's a welcome sight to see this browser company reacting to greet the movement.

Opera also backs up this new, minimal Web experience with a background security process that analyzes a site's reputation and warns you of any suspicious sites.

Currently, Coast is only avai... [Read more]

Opera's Coast browser presents users with a grid of icons for Web sites, an interface idea the company thinks will be familiar to people who've used mobile devices.

What began as one person's programming project a year and a half ago has become a major new project for Opera Software as the Norwegian company debuted its new Coast browser for iPads on Monday.

Instead of looking like a traditional browser reworked for a mobile screen, Opera's Coast presents users with an interface that looks like what they're more likely to be familiar with in the mobile world, said Coast project leader Huib Kleinhout. Instead of an address bar, bookmarks, and tabs, people get a home screen with grid of icons representing Web pages, a search box, and a small home button at the bottom to get back to that home screen.

"I wanted to make a browser for the Internet as it is now, not for the geeks 20 years ago," Kleinhout said. Tablets are eating into sales of traditional personal computers, and Coast, which had been code-named Ice, is designed for that market.

Opera debuted the software at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference Monday and released Coast 1.0 on Apple's App Store. There's o... [Read more]