Android Community |
- Verizon Galaxy Nexus phones arriving in stores, rumors still suggest December 9th
- 6-year-old HTC Universal gets Ice Cream Sandwich port
- Intel says smartphone and tablet hardware will run Android 4.0 next year
- Sony Ericsson brand to be phased out in mid-2012; Sony goes all Android
- ComScore: 41 million US smartphone owners use Android
- Fujitsu aims for the DROID RAZR with 6.7MM thin ARROWS ES
- Android 4.0 for $100: NOVO7 is the cheapest Ice Cream Sandwich tablet around
- HTC update for Flyer tablet gives Honeycomb for Christmas
- Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Sleeve spied on video
- Dell kills Streak 7 tablet
- Android Community Weekly: December 4, 2011
| Verizon Galaxy Nexus phones arriving in stores, rumors still suggest December 9th Posted: 05 Dec 2011 10:48 AM PST Here we go guys, Verizon is finally starting to maybe get ready to make some noise with the Galaxy Nexus. For all those awaiting its arrival the time may finally be coming. We are now seeing actual hardware devices and retail packaging for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus arriving in Verizon Wireless retail stores thanks to a tip from XDA Developers. Hopefully I can convince the pretty blonde at my local Verizon store to sell me one early — I’ll be taking flowers with me later today for good measure.
What we see here is that famous NEXUS symbol and the Verizon 4G LTE enabled Samsung Galaxy Nexus finally arriving actually in stores. This is a very good sign and I’m still holding strong with my promise for an occupy Verizon if they don’t announce it by the end of today. According to our latest sources Verizon is still aiming for December 9th as the official release date. Meaning there’s a good chance they’ll announce the device today and it will be available by the end of the week. This is still just a rumor along with the many we’ve previously seen so take it as you will. There are a few more retail packaging photos in the gallery below and plenty of information at the XDA thread linked to above. With Samsung showing off the Verizon edition this weekend in NYC and the latest update to Android 4.1 I’d say things are finally ready for the green light. Don’t get too excited because we should all remember the DROID Bionic delays — just saying. Stay tuned as we have a feeling an official announcement and some pre-order information could be showing up any day now. Who’s getting excited?    Device Info
Display
Dimension & Weight
Battery & Power
Software
Hardware
 Cellular Network
Device Connectivity
 [via Droid-Life] )
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| 6-year-old HTC Universal gets Ice Cream Sandwich port Posted: 05 Dec 2011 10:19 AM PST A few days ago I joked with my fellow Android Community writers that I’d like to see Ice Cream Sandwich ported to the Atari 2600, so I could use it to run an Atari 2600 emulator. That hasn’t happened, but in terms of wow factor, the latest ICS port isn’t that far off. The HTC Universal, the Taiwanese company’s gigantic flipping QWERTY Windows Mobile megadevice from 2005, has been given a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich via (where else?) the XDA Developers forum. The port is based off of CyanogenMod 9, the ICS version of the most popular custom Android ROM.
If you’ve been following the mobile tech world for a while, you may have drooled over the HTC Universal way back when, just like I did. (Not that I could do much more than drool, being in high school at the time.) Naturally the Windows Mobile hardware isn’t ideal for running the modern version of Android – at 64 or 128 megabytes of RAM, compared to the 25gMB of the original G1 and a full gigabyte for the Galaxy Nexus. Like other Windows Mobile ports, this one has to be initiated from the MicroSD card. After some tweaking by creator “notime2d8″, the image seems to work well enough, if slowly. Not surprising, since the entire system is running off of RAM and using a 528Mhz ARM processor. If you’re lucky enough to have an HTC Universal gathering dust, be sure to try out the port. Good on ya, Android mod developers – now how’s about that Atari version? )
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| Intel says smartphone and tablet hardware will run Android 4.0 next year Posted: 05 Dec 2011 09:43 AM PST In an attempt to win back its place in the mobile market, Intel is hyping up its upcoming hardware designs with some Android flair. According to PC World, Intel-based smartphones and tablets running Android will be ready for next year. A version of Ice Cream Sandwich for the upcoming Atom Medfield system-on-a-chip is already at the production stage.
Intel is no stranger to the mobile market, though ARM and Qualcomm have been dominating it as of late. The chip maker hopes that x86 versions of Android will help revive its presence in the mobile space, allowing it to expand to the low-power netbook, tablet and smartphone markets. According to Intel, the first smartphones using its designs will hit the market in the first half of 2012. Intel has been working with Google behind closed doors on Gingerbread and Honeycomb products, none of which have made it past the experimental stage thus far. Manufacturers already have pretty wide array of system-on-a-chip choices, though it’s all dominated by ARM’s underlying architecture. If Intel can extend its sizable presence into the mobile world with x86 and ARM-based products, it’ll be in a good position to stay healthy when the first ARM-based Windows 8 machines begin to surface, reportedly in 2013. Being part of two of the fastest-growing segments of the technology industry wouldn’t hurt, either. )
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| Sony Ericsson brand to be phased out in mid-2012; Sony goes all Android Posted: 05 Dec 2011 09:06 AM PST With Sony purchasing what’s left of Sony Ericsson back in October, keen observers knew that Ericsson’s days as an official brand partner were numbered. According to an interview with the Times of India, that transition will be happening sooner rather than later, with Sony Ericsson-branded phones being transitioned out by the middle of 2012. The phones that are produced post-integration will simply feature the “Sony” label.
More interesting is the fact that the company plans to only manufacture smartphones, leaving the thinner margins and shrinking market of feature phones behind. Since Sony Ericsson now uses Android exclusively and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future, that’ll make them an important contributor to the Android ecosystem, especially in Europe and Asia. ” A lot of planning goes into getting the branding right but we will be done by middle of next year. It will also mean that the marketing and advertising investments will go up,” said Sony executive Kristian Tear. After rumors of a Sony Windows Phone 7 device earlier this year, a Sony CEO said that WP7 wasn’t as good as Android, and didn’t factor into the company’s immediate plans. Now that Sony’s mobile future is dependent upon Android, you can expect the company to expand its already aggressive production and marketing. That should manifest in at least three primary product lines: the core XPERIA phones, PlayStation-enhanced products like the XPERIA Play, and possibly a more media-focused line centering around the Walkman branding. We’ll likely see the first fruits of any new initiatives at Mobile World Congress in February. [via MobileBurn] )
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| ComScore: 41 million US smartphone owners use Android Posted: 05 Dec 2011 08:08 AM PST Android is dominating the worldwide smartphone game, and while there are markets where it’s even more dominant than it is in the United States, a combination of population and smartphone interest makes it one of the hottest markets on the planet. Android’s continuing gains were highlighted by Nielsen last month, and comScore backs up their numbers with the latest reports on the US mobile market. According to comScore’s math, 41.6 million Americans now use Android-powered smartphones.
That’s 46.3% of all US smartphones,which now number approximately 90 million. The second banana is Apple’s iOS, which has 28.1% of the market, which figures out to 25.3 million iPhones. Unsurprisingly, BlackBerry and Windows-based phones fell again, to 17.2% and 5.6%, respectively. These statistics are for the month of October 2011, when total smartphone ownership in the U.S. grew 10% overall from the last quarter. Android and iOS together made up two-thirds of the smartphone userbase. There’s two things that we can take away from this report: one, total smartphone adoption in the US is growing fast enough for multiple OS and device makers to increase their sales at the same time, and two, Android may be approaching a saturation point within the next year. With nearly half the smartphone market running Google’s OS, and Apple controlling a the majority of what’s left, the two giants are essentially fighting over users that are abandoning the arguably weaker platforms of Windows Mobile/Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Symbian and others. If you extrapolated that in the next year, half of all users from other platforms switched to Android, a quarter switched to iOS and another quarter stayed put, that would give Android a 59.1% share of the market, with iOS trailing at 34.5. That’s a very optimistic projection from an Android point of view (and, just to be clear, absolutely unscientific). That said, the continued expansion of the smartphone market in the US and worldwide makes it an imperative for just about every manufacturer and developer.  [via Fierce Mobile Content] )
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| Fujitsu aims for the DROID RAZR with 6.7MM thin ARROWS ES Posted: 05 Dec 2011 07:21 AM PST Manufacturing the smallest, lightest, and thinnest in this day and age means that there’s always someone waiting to take your title away. In the case of Motorola’s drool-worthy DROID RAZR, the challenger is Fujitsu’s ARROWS ES IS12F smartphone, performing a caliper double-take at 6.7 millimeters. That’s a whole .4mm thinner than the RAZR – a vital statistic when space in your skinny jeans is at a premium. This is almost certainly the same hardware as the Arrows-F-07D that made its way through the FCC last month.
Under the hood, the ARROWS ES has a 1.4Ghz CPU, a 5 megapixel camera, a MicroSD card slot, NFC and a TV tuner for Japan’s terrestrial mobile television. 512MB of RAM will probably handle Gingerbread 2.3.5 just fine, but it might start to chug a little if and when Fujitsu upgrades the phone to Ice Cream Sandwich. A single gigabyte of user-accessible storage won’t win it any fans, but the 4-inch, 800 x 480 AMOLED screen might. Fujitsu is claiming an IPX5/IPX8 waterproof body and Gorilla Glass, surely a boon in competing with the RAZR’s tough-as-nails marketing. In addition to being thinner than the Motorola phone, it’s also shorter and slimmer, with a complete set of dimensions at 64×127×6.7mm. Keep in mind that includes a smaller, lower-resolution display, and the ARROWS ES doesn’t have to make room for an LTE radio. There’s no price or date mentioned, though the phone is bound for NTT DoCoMo. What are the odds of seeing this beauty on American soil? Normally I’d say somewhere between slim and none, but that FCC filing gives hope that it may land on AT&T or T-Mobile sometime next year. [via TechCrunch] )
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| Android 4.0 for $100: NOVO7 is the cheapest Ice Cream Sandwich tablet around Posted: 05 Dec 2011 06:53 AM PST Android’s open source nature lends itself to a staggering variety of form factors and price points, but if Chinese manufacturer MIPS Technologies is to be believed, it’s breaking into the low-end in a huge way today. The company is promoting its brand new NOVO7 device as “the first Ice Cream Sandwich tablet”, and has priced it at a staggering $99 USD. The specs aren’t amazing and the hardware won’t turn heads, but if you’ve got to have ICS right now (and can’t bring yourself to try out a custom ROM) this would seem to be the cheapest way to do so.
The NOVO7 is your basic 7-inch cheapo tablet, not altogether unlike the Polaroid models that were on sale everywhere on Black Friday. A “power-efficient” 1GHz processor it twinned to a 444Mhz GPU. A 2-megapixel rear camera and a front-facing cam of indeterminate quality cover the absolute basics. The 7-inch screen is thankfully capacitive, not resistive, but the marketing materials omit a resolution – I’d guess either 1024 x 600 or 840 x 400. The manufacturer is quick to tout the tablet’s low-power status, claiming a power draw of less than 400mA during web browsing and a 30-hour standby time. An actual mAh battery rating is absent, but you get expandable storage via the microSD card slot. The tablet comes with 4GB of on-board storage. Wireless is limited to WiFi, but MIPS highlights support for “external 3G”. Obviously the Android Market is nowhere to be seen, but the ad mentions Google CTS Certification, so you can probably get the Market, Gmail, etc. running if you’re up for a little aftermarket hacking. The NOVO7 will offer support for Gameloft titles, including the pre-installed Spider-man.
So, how do you get one? Just click on the “$99″ link on the image-only website to be directed straight to a PayPal order form. But be ready for a nasty shock in the form of $60 shipping and handling, bringing the total price up to $159. That’s Nook Color territory, and even considering that it ships straight from China (with no assurance of a date, by the way) it seems a little stiff. I’d steer clear of this one for your holiday shopping, and wait for ICS tablets or updated software from more established brands. But if you’re feeling adventurous, head on over there and check it out. This is only the first of many Chinese ICS tablets set to hit the market very soon. )
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| HTC update for Flyer tablet gives Honeycomb for Christmas Posted: 05 Dec 2011 05:21 AM PST If you own an HTC Flyer tablet there is some good news coming out of France today. Apparently, the French are getting the update for the smartphone starting today. The new update brings the Flyer up to Android 3.2 Honeycomb. Flyer owners have been waiting for this update.
The update brings the software to 3.55.405.1. The update itself is 210MB and is coming OTA. Since the update is larger, do yourself a favor and grab it when available using WiFi. Apparently, this version of the update is for the 32GB version with WiFi and 3G connectivity. There is no word on version of the update for other tablet models like the 16GB WiFi only version. If you are able to get the update in countries outside of France let us know. Also, let us know if they have the update for the WiFi version of the tablet. [via HTC-Hub] )
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| Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Sleeve spied on video Posted: 05 Dec 2011 04:44 AM PST We have spent our share of hands on time with the Transformer Prime and really like the tablet. I am sure we aren’t the only ones looking forward to the tablet hitting the market. A video has surfaced on Facebook that shows off a new accessory for the Transformer Prime that is really interesting. The accessory is the Transformer Prime Sleeve.
The iPad has its smart cover that can turn the iPad 2 on and off when it opens and closes. The new Prime Sleeve for the Asus tablet has an even cooler trick up its sleeve. You can see the sleeve in action on the video below. When the sleeve flap is closed, you can see the lines on the surface where the thing folds. You can fold it into two shapes with one of the shapes for standing the tablet upright for watching video and such. The other shape props the tablet up at a much lower angle that would be good for typing. It appears that the Sleeve plugs into two of the mount holes for the keyboard add-on. Pricing and availability for the Sleeve is unknown. [via SlashGear- Thanks dy4me!] )
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| Posted: 05 Dec 2011 03:23 AM PST The Dell Streak line of Android tablets haven’t been hugely popular with most folks choosing offerings from other makers. The sales of the smallest of the Streak offerings the Streak 5 were bad enough that Dell ended the tablet in August. Dell has now ended the larger sibling to the Streak 5, the Streak 7 reports StreakSmart.
We had heard back in September that T-Mobile would not be updating its 4G version of the Streak 7 to Honeycomb. I am sure we weren’t the only ones that thought that move didn’t bode well for the tablet. Dell didn’t issue a press release or any reasoning for ending the Streak 7 tablet’s run. It’s easy to assume that the tablet simply didn't sell enough to justify making it though. Dell pulled the listings for the Streak 7 from its website and left a note on the Streak 7 page saying it was no longer available online. That would seemingly hint that you might still be able to get a Streak 7 tablet in T-Mobile locations. The obvious downside to buying one at this point is that you will be stuck with whatever Android version is on the tablet when you get it. Perhaps they will be cheaper though since they are no longer being produced. [via SlashGear] )
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| Android Community Weekly: December 4, 2011 Posted: 04 Dec 2011 08:44 PM PST This week in tech news we’ve had our share of reviews, unboxings, and even some much needed software updates. We had heard Monday the ASUS Transformer Prime would be launching December 8th from a Newegg pre-order page. Needless to say, we got the official word from ASUS confirming that same date Wednesday which turned out false. The Prime will arrive stateside on December 19th. The device is simply amazing, and we’ve got an excellent hands-on to prove it. Though our official review isn’t out yet – you can check out the one over at our sister-site SlashGear. Yet another video taken compares the Transformer Prime to the Apple iPad 2 – a great matchup indeed.
The entire week Samsung Galaxy Nexus owners were awaiting an update from Google to help fix the volume bugs. They had even stopped selling the devices for a while, but by Tuesday officials said a fix had been made and sales resumed. For the Galaxy Nexus phones already sold, an OTA update was forwarded to your devices Wednesday. There’s still no word of when we may see the Verizon branded Galaxy Nexus with 4G LTE speeds, but more information on it consistently appeared throughout the week. Actual Verizon press images were revealed, and an anonymous tip lead us over to a clip demonstrating its 4G LTE speeds. Also shown, was how easily Verizon’s “bloatware” can be disabled from the new Nexus; a feature I’m glad was incorporated. As for Flash support, Adobe promises a December launch – so keep your eyes peeled in the Android Market. The LG Nitro HD was officially announced Monday, and just recently our own Michael Crider was able to post a hands-on demonstration. The HD display looks amazing, and is a great upgrade over previous LG devices. Hopefully upon launch, the LG Nitro will see its 50GB of free Box.net storage recently reported. Also eligible for a free 50GB will are Sony XPERIA owners – hopefully we see this trend to all manufacturers; living in the cloud is where it’s at. I’m sure you’ve heard of recently busted Carrier IQ – a software preinstalled on many devices that records keystrokes and web traffic. If you want to see if you’re a culprit to Carrier IQ, try out this Android app that will actually detect if you have it! I’ve tried it on mine, and so far it says I’m safe. Finally, check out the future of Samsung’s Exynos processing line – the Exynos 5250 dual-core processor is said to be clocked at 2GHz. There’s no doubt it will set new standards, but how high will they actually be? )
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