Such is the popularity of smartphones and mobile devices that there seems to be some kind of survey, experiment or report for every single aspect of the mobile technology industry. Just so you understand, we aren't complaining about this as these reports and experiments generally provide some extremely insightful information which can sometimes mold the way users operate their devices. In the last few years we have seen not only mobile devices, but mobile software burst onto the scene and become a multi-billion dollar industry almost overnight. Ecosystems such as the iOS App Store and the Google Play serve up billions of downloads to consumers, consisting of all different types of apps.
The most popular custom aftermarket firmware CyanogenMod is seeing a big update today. In an post published over on their official blog, the CyanogenMod team has released the first Release Candidate (RC) of CyanogenMod 7.2.
ASUS’ $249 MeMo Android tablet, which first debuted at the CES in January, is rumored to be the first Google Nexus tablet, set to retail between $149 and $199.
In the last few days, most of the smartphone attention has firmly fixed upon the manufacturers of Android devices as number of them begin to announce, and roll out updates to Android Ice Cream Sandwich for a select number of their devices. Over the last two days we have seen welcome update announcements from Samsung as well as HTC, informing their users that certain smartphones will begin to see over-the-air updates in the coming weeks, eventually bringing Android 4.0 to a wider audience.
The level of interest and passion that is associated with mobile devices, especially those running the iOS and Android operating systems, is something that has skyrocketed over the last couple of years. With the imminent release of the new iPad and Google making some noise about future versions of the Android OS, it seems that consumer interest is only going to increase in the near future.The release of the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android was made public in the final quarter of 2011, but due to the way Google handles allowing manufacturers to update their firmware, it has seen a relatively tiny uptake, with approximately 1% of Android devices in existence running version 4.0.
HTC recently unveiled it’s One series of smartphones based on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Hardware specifications and advanced, next-gen optics aside, these devices come with Sense 4.0 - the latest version of HTC’s custom skin - which looks absolutely stunning and a vast improvement over Sense 3.5 and older which were very bloated.
In a timely announcement on the eve of Apple's big media event, Google has really wrung the changes to its online content-selling infrastructure - know hitherto as the Android Market.
The Galaxy Nexus comes with a 4.65” Super AMOLED HD 720p display that is considered to be among the best in its class. It produces crisp and vivid images; a little too vivid for some, actually, as it turns out that the display isn’t set at best Gamma, Color Balance and Color Temperature values. Over on XDA-Developers, mumchristmas has found a way to correct these values and we’ve got a simple-to-follow (at least for those of who you are familiar with flashing ROMs/kernels) step-by-step guide ready after the break.
With Android 4.0 being publicly available since November 2011, users might be forgiven for wondering why their device can't benefit from the features that Ice Cream Sandwich brings. After all, when Apple releases an update to iOS, users can generally grab the latest version immediately as long as the hardware supports the update. Users of several premium handsets, such as the Samsung Galaxy S II have been waiting for a number of weeks for Samsung to finally announce when they will be allowing users to update to Android 4.0 ICS.
It seems that we are living in a world where the technology scene is under such close scrutiny, and has such intense public interest that we are already seeing speculation about the name of the 6.0 version of the Android operating system before we have even seen a public release of Android 5.0 Jelly Bean. Google executives have been hinting recently that we may see a public release of Jelly Bean in quarter four of 2012, but nothing has been officially confirmed yet.
