Flash has been one of the largest building blocks of the internet. Maybe not fundamental, but it’s hard to argue that Flash didn’t play a very vital role in creating and shaping the web as we’re used to it now. From Macromedia to Adobe, and from MiniClip games to catchy animations on websites, Flash technology outlived its days of glory when Steve Jobs declared a war on the platform by not supporting it on iOS – so much so that Adobe, the curators of Flash, finally decided to pull the plug on it, themselves.
Android manufacturers aren’t the very best when it comes to supporting their smartphones after the initial point of sale. You get the occasional bug fixes, performance improvements and such, but upgrades to major new versions of Android come way too infrequently and very late. This is in contrast to Apple’s strong support for their devices: the iPhone 3GS is almost more than 3 years old now and is still slated to get iOS 6 later this year.
Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) has now been superseded by Jelly Bean (4.1), but that doesn't mean to say some consumers are not waiting for an OTA update of the older iteration for their device. HTC's Desire HD is a pretty useful device in terms of specs - despite its age - thus most owners presumed their treasured device would inevitably see the new firmware.
Although most of you will have become familiar with Google Now, for those who didn't follow last week's Google I/O conference, perhaps a little background information is in order. The service logs location, time, and user habits in order to help you to be as productive as possible, and the few who've had a little experience with the Jelly Bean (4.1) feature have reported it as working like a charm.
Well, it appears that it is once again time to pen a comparison post, this time following up with the one published in October of last year - about 8 months ago - that compares a few of the important factors between the three important mobile platforms of our time. With iOS 6 freshly unveiled, along with a few developments that have transpired over the past 8 months, there are a few changes to make.
Most of you looking to get your hands on Samsung's latest Galaxy S III smartphone will still be waiting, but courtesy of the intuitive folks over at XDA, it's already been rooted. As was the case with the Galaxy S, S II and the larger-than-life Galaxy Note, it doesn't have a locked bootloader, so the task of acquiring root was automatically that tidbit easier.
Having only seen the light of day through the Galaxy Nexus initially, Google's release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was beginning to become an easy target of flak from the tech world. The Big G's latest - and supposedly greatest - mobile OS had only reached a miserly 1% of the total Android population at the turn of the year, and rivals Apple must have been chuckling at Google's abject display in how not to announce and release a firmware update.
Although Google has born the brunt of much criticism concerning the reach (or lack thereof) of its latest and greatest mobile OS, the grand Ice Cream Sandwich rollout is in full flow, and the next in line, it would seem, is Samsung's larger-than-life 'phablet', known to its mother as the Galaxy Note.
Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, and anyone else who may happen to be using an Android-powered HTC smartphone, good times are coming, well, for some of you that is, as HTC have begun rolling out their Ice Cream Sandwich update to a very select few devices, with a larger device set to be included in the near future. The latest major release of the mobile operating system, Android 4.0, has been knocking around the smartphone scene since October 2011, but has so far only managed to make its way onto a very select number of devices due to various and unnecessarily complicated reasons.
There has been some good news for Samsung Galaxy S II owners today with the announcement that the Korean company will start to push out the Android 4.0.3 update to S II devices in Korea and some parts of Europe. The update process looks like it will initially focus on devices in Hungary, Poland and Sweden before starting to roll out in the United Kingdom during the week commencing on March 19th. When taken at face value, it sounds like S II users could be running Ice Cream Sandwich in the very near future, but the reality is that individual networks also need to approve the software updates and put it through vigorous in-house testing to ensure it plays nicely with their own branded software, meaning that although the official update button is pushed it could still be quite some time before users can benefit from it.
