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Android Central weekly photo contest winners: Photo filters and effects Posted: 18 Mar 2012 04:54 PM PDT The winner of this week's photo contest is Cody Griffith, who captured the full hipster spirit with his entry. Taken with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and using the Pixlr-o-matic app, he successfully made an image captured with amazing 21st-century technology look like something taken in 1974. Nice work Cody. Keep an eye on your inbox for information about your prize. We had some other great entries this week, as we usually do. Android users love to take good pictures (we have thousands and thousands of pieces of evidence). Hit the break to see the 10 runners-up to get an idea of just how good some of the submissions are. We'll start a new contest tomorrow and do it all again next week.  read more

CyanogenMod 7.2 release candidate now live with support for 69 Android devices Posted: 18 Mar 2012 03:18 PM PDT The first major CyanogenMod release of the year is upon us, as the leading custom Android firmware launches the first release candidate (RC) build for version 7.2. CM release candidates are generally considered stable enough for regular use, and are intended to flush out the last remaining bugs before the final release. In addition to the large jump in the number of supported devices, currently at 69 for the new release candidate, CM 7.2 adds bug fixes and new features. These include a few which have back-ported from Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Others, such as the T9 predictive phone dialer, are found in manufacturer ROMs but not stock Android. CyanogenMod 7.2 is still based on Gingerbread, so the list of supported devices focuses on phones and tablets running Android 2.3.7 or older. CyanogenMod 9, the next major version, is based on Android 4.0. Early nightly builds of CM9 are available for a few devices, including the Galaxy S II, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S. Hit the source link for the gigantic list of CM 7.2-supported phones. We've got the full changelog after the break. Source: CyanogenMod read more

From the Editor's Desk: We don't need Just Another Android Tablet™ Posted: 18 Mar 2012 02:06 PM PDT Let's talk tablets. Specifically, let's talk Nexus tablets. Forget, for the moment, that as yet there's no such thing as a Nexus tablet. And I'm willing to bet that if Google actually does make its own tablet sometime in the coming months, it won't actually be called "Nexus" anything. (I'll go one further and opine that perhaps the Nexus line has run its course, but that's another column for another day. You folks feel free to steal that idea in the meantime.) There's been growing talk of some sort of Google-produced tablet. Whispers go back many months, and in December 2011 an Italian newspaper quoted former Google CEO and current Chairman Eric Schmidt as saying "We in the next six months plan to market a tablet of the highest quality." We've seen other posts from analysts and Digitimes (which covers Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers and often dreams up unicorns as often as it does actual products) that seem to corroborate that Google's producing something. And on Friday we've seen further rumors from The Verge and Android and Me (who's been peddling this thing for a while now) going back and forth on pricing -- $149 of $199, either of which would be perfectly conceivable for an aggressively priced, Google-backed tablet. And specs, well, specs are specs. Maybe it'll be quad-core. Maybe it'll be dual-core. Maybe it'll have a display so great it'll make the new iPad look like the jacked-up resolution on your grandmother's aging laptop. None of that matters. From time to time you'll hear us joke about hardware rumors, saying something like "Breaksclusive! Next-generation hardware rumored to be thinner/lighter/faster than current-generation hardware!" Part of that's just us breaking Wheaton's Law. But that doesn't make it any less true. And in the case of Android hardware over the past year, it's been ridiculously true. I have no idea how many tablets Samsung has announced in the past 12 months. I'm willing to bet there are a great many people at Samsung who couldn't tell you without having to look up the number of tablet models it's released. It really just comes down to this: The last thing Google needs to do is make Just Another Android Tablet™. Think about it. What good would a "Google Nexus Tablet" be? What would it bring to the tablet table that we haven't already had for a year now? Thinner? Faster? Lighter? Inevitable. (To a certain extent, anyway.) Stock experience? The Motorola XOOM's had that for a year now, and most other tablets keep relatively the same experience. Price? What's a $149 Just Another Android Tablet™ going to do in the consumer space that the $199 Kindle Fire hasn't done already? Google's got the cash to eat the cost, sure. But Amazon's got the distribution pipeline, and the head start. (By the way: Don't call this unicorn a Kindle Fire killer unless it's capable of sneaking into people's homes and disintegrating the millions of Kindle Fires already sold and is able to negate current Amazon's retail stance.) I said this a long while ago in regards to the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich — the key is going to be software. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich meant relative fresh start for Android. That said, it's been a troubled birth, as we still have a scant few devices with ICS, though that'll start changing fairly soon. (Though certainly not soon enough.) The tablet rumors we've been reading all share a common thread — they're thinking too small. The next version of Android — by all (unsourced and uncreative) accounts it'll be called "Jelly Bean" — has to be more than just an iteration of a mobile operating system. You've undoubtedly heard the rumors of some sort of Google entertainment system. Or that Google Play is the start of something bigger. All this, I believe, is true. If there's one thing we know about Google, its that it has much more patience than those of us who don't create things for a living. (And certainly more patience than those of us who report on things for a living.) Google's in all this for the long haul. Google TV was a disappointment. Android tablets have, on a macro level, been a failure to launch. Smartphones stand out, but there's certainly room for improvement. We know this. Google knows this. Word on the street is that we're all about to get a big lesson in WiDi, which in and of itself presents its own questions. (For most people, that'll be "What the hell is WiDi, and what can I do with it?") We'll likely get some answers come the Google IO developer conference in June. And I've got a feeling everyone's going to be surprised. read more

More Samsung Galaxy S III leaky goodness Posted: 17 Mar 2012 09:53 PM PDT In the ongoing saga of Samsung Galaxy S III leaks, rumors, and chicanery, a new leak has been posted at Reddit. Mixed in among the U MAD BRO meme pics was the picture you see above, and the post with a brief explanation, supposedly from a fellow with a friend who works at Samsung. We've quoted the following spicy bits for easy reading: He said that it will possibly have two optional launchers, ICS with touchwiz overlay and vanilla ICS. They aren't 100 percent sure if they will stick with touchwiz or have the dual launcher option. If they go dual, you will have the option of picking which one to use at startup, and you can change any time. He said it has a 4.7 inch screen that nearly takes up the whole phone, but some bezel space was needed for the camera, speakers, mic, and so cases would fit on it. He said it WILL be HD and have a ceramic "micro arc oxidation" back. Is this for real? We have no idea. But it sure is fun to look at on a Saturday night. Hit the source link to see the various Reditor's take on this one. Source: Reddit. Thanks everyone who sent this in!