Samsung’s venture into the Android arena really paid off well for the Korean electronics giant, and the company made it to the pinnacle of fame through it Galaxy lineup of flagship devices. It’s become kind of tradition for Samsung to follow up with a Galaxy flagship every year, and they’ve been delivering what people have been hoping for, for the most part. Since the release of Galaxy S III i9300 last year, speculations started surfacing about what the next flagship, Galaxy S IV, would be like. First, it was specs, then design, and then pretty much everything. Well, seems like the rumor mill has far from settled down.
On Monday, Sony’s vice-president announced that the Galaxy Note 8.0 would be formally announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress at the end of February. Excitement has clearly gone around the company, enough for an alleged picture of the new device, as well as its hardware specifications, to leak online via a Twitter account of Spanish language classifieds website which has not hesitated to spread the word and win its fair share of publicity.
Over the past few years, more and more users have been ditching their old-style cell phones for smartphones, as demand for full-featured web browsers and email continues to grow. For the fifth year in a row, the iPhone continues to be the main beneficiary of this shift, with 51.2% of the market share in the last quarter of 2012.
Google's Nexus 10 tablet has hit the ground running in tablet space, with the majority of consumers and reviewers giving it the proverbial seal of approval. It features a dual core Exynos 5 processor to keep things ticking over, and while, all told, it does a fairly good job in doing so, it does struggle to cope with the 2560×1600 display. At a time when quad-core processors are ever becoming the norm, it has been suggested that Google may be planning to slap the revered tablet with a quad-core SoC later on this year.
Icons are great and all, but you know what's really great? Icons made out of photos of things. If you own the right kind of phone, such a thing isn't too far away.
If you take the slightest interest in politics or current affairs, you are likely aware that President Obama is being inaugurated for his second term today, in a ceremony that will drag the attention of large crowds in Washington, DC. But if you live in any other part of America, or the world, and are not able to join Obama in person, there is a new app for iOS and Android, made by the White House itself, which makes it easy for you to celebrate this occasion.
Samsung's much hyped Galaxy S IV is believed to have put in an appearance via a benchmarking database, not once, but twice according to reports.
The beauty of Android is that it’s not just limited to one specific manufacturer or operating system variant, which gives it the real edge over Apple’s iOS. The iPhone in comparison has only one company behind it, and while their work so far has been nothing sort of stellar (I am talking the sales volumes here – no judgment), the open source nature of Android and the large manufacturer support behind it makes the platform far more diverse and unique, not to mention variable. The availability of multiple OEMs not only impacts the buyers’ choices and hardware diversification, but also impacts the software side of things. How? HTC has its Sense theme, Sony came up with Timescape. Samsung favors TouchWiz and Motorola cooked up MotoBlur, just to name a few Android skins.
A new tweak for the Samsung Galaxy S III has just been released which allows the clock on the system’s status bar to be customized. While not necessarily significant for everybody, this tweak will be welcome by users who have found it difficult to check the time at a glance from the status bar, or maybe for visually impaired users who could use with a slighter larger font on their Android clocks. Or maybe you’re just tired of the old Android look and are looking to try something new.
The powerful and extremely well thought of XBMC software has often been thought of as a complete media center solution for the Windows, OS X and Linux platforms, but thanks to some incredibly hard work from the people over at XBMC, it looks like we can reliably add Android to that list of supported platforms. We've been hearing about Android pre-release and nightly builds of XBMC for quite some time, so we knew it was in the works, but the team has officially announced what they call the "first end-user friendly release of XBMC for Android".
