What's better than selling 20 million smartphones? Selling 30 million of course, and that's exactly what Samsung has gone and done!
If running Android on a tablet doesn't fill you with excitement, what about the prospect of installing Chromium OS on that same tablet, adding a distinctly desktop-like flavor to proceedings? Sounds good, right? Right!
The launch of the original Samsung Galaxy Note was met by mocking calls from smartphone and technology fans who thought that the Korean electronics company were onto a loser with the release of the plus-sized device. Hindsight would seem to suggest that someone at Samsung knew exactly what they were doing. The first-generation Note managed to shift over ten million units during its first year of existence, and we now have the news that the Galaxy Note II is showing signs of being even more popular, with three million handsets selling in the first thirty-seven days of availability.
Remember the days of yesteryear when smartphones were all about the Windows Mobile experience with a good old stylus to assist with navigating around the system? We may not have had the advanced technology that we have now in terms of touch panels and high-definition displays, but even the early Windows Mobile devices had a set of fantastic and powerful apps like the original G-NetSpeed creation that allowed connected cellular networks to be monitored.
Yesterday, we showed you how you could implement a feature somewhere representative of Android Jelly Bean (4.2)'s gesture-based keyboard, provided you were running a device on Ice Cream Sandwich or newer. As exciting as that was, it was only a going to be a matter of time before more of the new firmware's key features and exclusives were ported through to those wielding older devices, and just a day later, here we are with the Android 4.2 camera and gallery, both of which have been successfully ported to a Galaxy Nexus running Jelly Bean 4.1.1.
The Galaxy S III may have a multi-core chip, a gig of RAM, high-end optics and an HD display, but that HD display is also freaking huge! At 4.8-inches, it is among the tallest and widest Android smartphones available in the market. As comfortable as it is to hold, with its smoothly curved body, it is mighty uncomfortable to use with one hand.
The success and popularity of the Nexus 7 Android tablet has never really been in question, but recent announcements during ASUS's third-quarter earnings call give us a little insight into just how popular the mid-range tablet really is. As part of the earnings announcement, ASUS Chief Financial Office, David Chang has announced that sales of the tablet have been rising on a monthly basis since launch and have now hit approximately one million units each calendar month.
Whenever a new operating system is launched, intuitive minds immediately begin developing ways of porting some of the new features back to the majority running older software. Case in point: Android 4.2 Jelly Bean only launched yesterday, but already, one of its key components has been snatched away, bagged up, and ready to be shared with those running earlier versions of Android.
When a new product line launches in tech space, there's usually that two or three week, pre-retail period where we anxiously await the unboxings and hands-on experiences of the very latest gadgetry. Google launched quite a few exciting new products yesterday, including the Nexus 10, Nexus 4 and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, but if you simply cannot wait to get up close and personal with these just-launched products, a very well-arranged video by The Verge offers an extensive look into how the new tablet, smartphone, and accompanying software came to be.
Although the tech coverage was dominated by Microsoft and Windows Phone 8 yesterday, Google also announced some significant new releases of its own, and among them was the LG-manufactured Nexus 4 smartphone. While it's perhaps lacking in one or two key departments, it still has enough about it to qualify as high-end, and as such, what bigger test for a top-drawer smartphone than to compare it with the iPhone 5 on iOS and the Lumia 920 on Windows Phone 8?
