Samsung’s half-smartphone half-tablet Galaxy Note recently received Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich and there is good news for those of you who like to hack their devices: an easy-to-apply method has been unveiled that not only lets you gain root access to your Galaxy Note but also do it so without increasing the flash counter that causes a yellow ! sign to show up at boot time. We’ve prepared a step-by-step guide that you can follow right after the jump!

Besides the obviously buttery-smooth scrolling, tight integration with iTunes and lack of customizability (without jailbreak), the first thing I noticed when I shifted to the iPhone camp was the sheer abundance of well-designed apps especially those in the Photography category. Camera+, Photosynth, SloPro and Instagram are good, established examples of this.

The smartphone has replaced many gadgets. The music player, the electronic organizer, the flashlight, the alarm clock and, arguably, the portable console and the point and shoot camera.

Don’t you just hate how much of a time-suck today’s smartphones have become? It’s very easy to lose track of time and mind. With social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and fun games like Dummy Defense just one or two taps away, it’s kind of difficult maintaining focus on more important but boring tasks like babysitting your kid brother while the folks are away or, preparing for an exam.

Smartphone owners, what is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? For me, (after snoozing for the nth time) it’s dismissing the alarm on my phone and launching an RSS feed reader to check up on what’s happening in the world*.

One of the most common uses of the smartphone – besides doubling as a camera, a music player and internet communications device – is as an organizer. iOS comes with built-in apps like Calendar, Clock and – more recently – Reminders which are made for this exact purpose: to help us orchestrate our daily life.

When it was released in 2010, the iPad was labeled as “a large iPod touch” and predicted to be a market failure by many (including a younger, more naïve version of myself). As it turns out, the fact that it is a large iPod touch is precisely what makes it so darn awesome, especially for non-tech-savvy people like my mother.

One of T-Mobile’s latest smartphones – the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G – is also one of the latest Android smartphones to achieve root access. This one device was relatively easy to root, thanks to the unlocked bootloader that it comes with, but still, someone had to package the root method and make it easy for your Average Joe to root their Blaze 4G.

The “One” series of smartphones marks a rebirth for HTC, once a dominant Taiwanese smartphone manufacturing company but now far behind juggernauts like Apple and Samsung. With just three models with straightforward names – the One X, One S and One V – it shows that HTC has finally, finally realized that Apple’s strategy of quality over quantity of products is far more beneficial than releasing a new flagship device every few months.

Google’s Android OS for mobile devices offers a ridiculous amount of variety when it comes to alternatives to pre-included software. Whether it’s replacing the stock launcher, the music app, camera app, dialer, browser and keyboard, it’s basically impossible to not find a third-party alternative that doesn’t completely fit your needs.

Smartphones – especially high-end ones – are primary targets of ‘mobile snatchers’ today, and because of that it is really important that you take some precautionary measures to ensure that, ideally, your device doesn’t get snatched and if it does, your data doesn’t get misused.

Battery life on today’s smartphones is one of their least impressive features. While things have indeed improved in the past few months, heavy users are generally forced to carry a spare AC charger/battery wherever they go so that they don’t come across a situation where they need to make/take an important call and it turns out that their LTE smartphone is out of juice.

Landscape/portrait orientation in smartphones is, as far as I know, based on the device’s orientation with respect to the Earth instead of with respect to the user. In certain cases, this can become a bit of a problem.

The premise of photo-sharing apps for mobile devices is the same: take a photo, apply an effect to it, share it online on the app’s own network or on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Success lies in having the right knowledge at the right time at the right place. The aforementioned saying isn’t actually directly linked with the app I’m covering in this post, but since it sounded nice, I thought to include it anyway so deal with it.

Today’s smartphones are, admittedly, one of the smartest commercially-available gadgets: they come with great computing power, loads of memory, advanced optics and a handful of sensors all powered by some of the most advanced operating systems which, together, offer a better experience than your regular phone.

It is not very often that a live wallpaper gets covered here at Redmond Pie. These moving wallpapers are mostly one-trick ponies that add nothing of functional value to your device, so that is why we prefer covering apps with real features rather than purely cosmetic ones.

After the glorious success of the Galaxy Y, Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note, Samsung is getting set to unveil and launch its next flagship smartphone – the hotly anticipated Galaxy S III.

It’s established: there is no dearth of good launchers on Android. In fact there are so many launchers out there that it is virtually impossible not to find one that fits perfectly with your exact needs. Whether it is performance-conscious or customization-friendly or both, Google Play has got you covered!

Despite being an open mobile operating system which offers more freedom than competing platforms, Android comes with a bunch of small but nonetheless frustrating limitations. One such limitation is Gmail’s limited support for different file formats; it plays well with things like PDFs, DOCs and AVIs, but when it comes to ZIP files and other, lesser known formats such as 7z, the popular email client simply denies the user from downloading it. Further, Gmail doesn’t let you save attachments to specified locations on your device’s internal memory or SD card.