Here's a Honeycomb-specific app you won't find in the Android Market just yet -- the popular podcast player BeyondPod has an open beta for testing the tablet optimized HD version, and things are shaping up nicely.  A couple of us here have been fooling with it for about three versions now, and it looks very close to release-quality.  Certainly working well enough for me to recommend you guys give it a try.

It has the features you expect from BeyondPod, but scaled beautifully for the big screen of a Honeycomb tablet.  Widgets, high-speed playback, favoriting, and tabbed navigation make this one a real standout.  Will there be bugs?  Probably.  This is a development beta, and if you download and install it you're actively participating in the testing.  But version 2.70.10 (latest as of this writing) seems really stable and the features are all there.  Hit the source link for full change logs and the download.

Source: BeyondPod

Taptu has updated its popular Android app to version 1.5 with a handful of new features that will make users old and new pretty happy.  Having fully supported Honeycomb since version 1.4, now they take the UI up a couple notches and offer some pretty slick enhancements.  To start with, you can now enlarge the section holding the stream you're currently reading, giving you a better view of things you might want to click and explore further.  You also have the ability to color code the stream headers, to tell at a glance which is which.  Both sound subtle, but in practice they really are nice features -- the folks have done their homework.

If a nicer UI isn't enough, the search function has been enhanced.  When you search a keyword, both the topics and content are searched to offer the articles that may have been missed otherwise.  Says Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar:

Our promise has always been to ensure that no matter what you're searching for, we’ve got a stream for it. We wanted to give Taptu fans even more ways to discover new content in our app. We wanted to bring even more serendipity to what the app can offer, aside of course, from giving them the ability to customize the app to get exactly the content they want.

A couple days with the press preview tells me they have succeeded here as well.  Of course there's other enhancements as well.  Back-end URL shortening is available from within the app, the phone version now shows larger images, scrolling over to the right auto-refreshes the current stream, and the whole app benefits from new performance and speed improvements.  In this bloggers opinion, they've outdone themselves with version 1.5.  Taptu is still free, and runs on Android 2.1 and higher devices.  You can find the full press release, a couple more screenshots, and the download link after the break.

Youtube link for mobile viewing

Hear ye, hear ye, all musicians and readers of sheet music. Pretty soon you too will be able to flip through your digital purchases of sheet music on your Android tablet of your choice, removing the need things like paper and folders that we've all grown accustomed to.

It definitely looks like it'll only show music you've bought from Musicnotes.com, but with such an expansive catalog, you'll probably be able to find what you're looking for. Say the developers:

"Over the last few months we've been hard at work creating an Android app for our customers to be able to access their sheet music. It's based on the things that have worked well on the iPad app (which has been downloaded over 100,000 times) -- and will have a few extras that Android allows us to do that Apple doesn't."

Pretty cool stuff, especially if you're the type of person who is used to hauling around a couple of 3-inch binders filled with music. The app is set for release sometime this summer, so as soon as we know it's out, we'll let y'all know.

Source: YouTube; Thanks, Bill!

Adobe has release the 10.3.185.23 update to Flash in the Android Market this afternoon.  This update directly addresses two known security issues discovered recently (see security bulletins APSB11-12 and APSB11-13 for details), and brings the following bug fixes and enhancements:

• Enabled NEON optimizations for OMAP4 (Cortex A-9) based devices.
• Corrected an issue on the Samsung Galaxy S where H.264 video at resolutions of 720p and below was not displayed.
• Fixed an issue where app packaging would fail for Android Apps using Flash Player in WebView that set android:hardwareAcceleration to True in their AndroidMainfest.xml.
• Fixed a crash on the HTC EVO that some users encountered with specific video.
• Fixed an issue that caused video frames to stop rendering on long streaming videos (> 1 hour) on some Motorola devices. 
• Fixed an issue where touch events were getting delayed with Kongregate.com games.
• Fixed an issue where games on Kongregate.com freeze when users exit from Full-Screen mode.

You can grab the update from the Android Market (we'll have the link after the break) and as always, it's advised that all users update. 

Source: Adobe

We all were excited when we heard Words With Friends for Android was being released, but things certainly cooled down when all the bugs started popping up.  We're not pointing the finger at Zynga, it's a huge undertaking to port about a gazillion lines of code from one platform to another, and they have kept working on it, offering up several bug fixes that addressed force close issues.  These solved many a users problems, but a quick peek at the Android Market comments will tell you that more work was needed.

Zynga hopes to address a lot of that, with the release of the 4.0 update of Words With Friends, which promises "Awesome new features, lots more friends, way less bugs".  The 4.0 update for iOS brought Facebook integration, zooming features for use with tablets, and and updated games list, so we're assuming we'll see similar changes.  Of course, the best of the news is the "way less bugs" part.   It's great to see developers accept the issues, and work to get them under control.  As of this writing, the version in the Android Market is still 3.41, but Zynga has contacted us to let us know that version 4.0 is available for Android.  I suspect we'll be seeing it in the Market shortly.  For now, the download link for the latest version is after the break.

Update:  After speaking with a representative from Zynga, we'll have to ask you to ignore most of the above.  The update being discussed is for iOS and we received and reported it as an Android update in error. 

The good news is that we hear the developers are hard at work on the Android client, and we should be seeing an update in the future that does address many of the bugs in the current version.  You can still download the latest version, and while there are some annoyances, it's a great game and one all of us here love to play. 

Notice that Netflix is no longer working on your EVO 4G? You're hardly alone. You can no longer find the app in the Android Market from your EVO 4G, and indeed the phone's been pulled from the list of supported devices. So what's up?

Netflix tells us that it stems from the EVO 4G's recent update to Gingerbread, and that they're working on a fix, but there's no estimated time for when an update will be made available.

Netflix has had a bit of a rocky start on Android, namely in that it's been made available on so few devices. Let's hope for a fix soonest -- and more important, some sort of mechanism so that we're not punished just because our phones get an all-important system update.

Thanks, Kysha!