Samsung’s smartphone-tablet hybrid, known as the Galaxy Note II, has managed to turn many heads since its announcement this last August. Should your bank balance be way too uncomfortable to get your hands on one, no worries: there’s a new knockoff in town that might actually be convincing enough to trick your less tech-savvy friends.
Thanks to its ability to run custom launchers at the drop of a hat, the Android experience is one of very few limits. If you don't like the look or functionality of your stock Android ROM, you can completely alter the experience to suit your needs by means of a home screen alternative. If you've always had your eye on the unique software quirks of the Sony Xperia range, but haven't been as taken by the devices themselves, you can now enjoy the Xperia launcher on your device running Ice Cream Sandwich or above, thanks to the stellar work of the folks over at XDA Developers.
There’s a pretty reasonable and easy to understand explanation for the popularity of AOSP-based Android ROMs like CyanogenMod or AOKP, or even MIUI – these firmware often give you a chance to try out a version of Android that’s either not yet available for your device, or that might not have been official supported by the manufacturer at all. I am rocking unofficial CM 10.1 on my Huawei U9200 just to get a taste of Android 4.2, and had I stuck with the stock operating system that came from the manufacturer, I’d still have been at 4.1 Jelly Bean. This is not just me – a lot of people go for unofficial builds so that they can try out new features and improvements without having to upgrade the device itself. Thus, it makes complete sense that a device like the international Galaxy S III I9300 would receive a CyanogenMod 10.1 build, even if its unofficial.
It’s a generally accepted fact that first mover advantage exists in all fields of life, including the online world. If you look at the most famous web services and applications today, this indeed seems to be the case. However, there are almost invariably always some exceptions to the general principle, and Facebook happens to be one of those. When today’s social networking giant entered the market, there were already big players like MySpace, Orkut and Hi5 in operation, but Facebook offered something different, continued to improve on it, and thrived with it. Today, the online portal boasts enough active members that had it been a country, it would’ve been one of the largest in the world by population.
Jaws definitely dropped when Apple launched the first iOS 6 beta with no Google Maps support, but we have moved on since then through the Mapgate scandal and now we have the official launch of Google Maps for iOS through the App Store, that comes with a reported admission from within Google that this latest launch for Apple devices provides a better experience than its Android based counterpart.
If you’re an Android user and at all interested in modding your device, playing around with custom firmware, trying different recoveries, manipulating your device’s bootloader, or anything that falls under the umbrella of advanced usage, you are bound to have come across the term “ADB”. Abbreviation for Android Debug Bridge, ADB for the uninitiated, provides a terminal/command-line-based interface for interaction between your computer and Linux-based Android device. Packaged as a part of the platform tools in Android Software Development Kit (SDK), ADB allows app developers to tamper the internal components of the operating system; ones that are not available to the user otherwise. Since modding a firmware often deals with changing parts of the system, ADB is essential to gain those abilities.
China may have garnered itself the unwanted label as one of the knock-off capitals of the world, but there are an increasing number of companies - particularly in the mobile - looking to establish themselves alongside the global big boys like Samsung, LG, and Apple. One such outfit is Oppo, and if its just-announced Find 5 smartphone is a sign of things to come, the aforementioned market-leaders should be more than a little concerned. The device packs in the kind of features we're expecting of the Samsung Galaxy S IV, with 5-inch 1080p display, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC, and a whopping 2GB of RAM. To top it off, it runs on Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean!
Android has now become a generally pretty stable platform/operating system for smartphones and tablets, and every new iteration only adds to that. Long gone are the days when an Android device would go into constant freezes, get repeated app Force Closes, or would generally become sluggish in performance; a huge of contribution of that goes to the open source development community, too, that strive day and night to make our devices more useful and stable. However, there still might be time when you install an app that doesn’t agree with your operating system or firmware version, or that might have some broken pieces of code, or any other issue, resulting in the same problems that we discussed above. Even worse are the cases when you start suffering from severe battery drain, or when the device itself goes into a boot loop after having installed a certain APK. For all those cases, Google has built-in a neat hidden feature in Android, called safe mode.
Yahoo! may have been bullied from its once-prominent web position by the likes of Google, but the Sunnyvale-based company still has something to offer. Today, Yahoo! has released a glut of new mail apps targeting those on iOS, Windows 8 and Android, as well as revamping its web-based offering, and we've got all the details after the jump.
In a move almost contemporaneous with Instagram's significant update for iOS, Twitter has announced its intention to integrate photo filtering into its iOS and Android apps. Instagram's effortless application of a varied range of filters have made it a huge hit with point-and-shoot photographers, and it's a hit Twitter simply cannot miss.
