Wednesday, August 8, 2012

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Google Android News Android Forums

False alarm; Motorola will not be releasing a new 4G LTE device this friday

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 03:16 PM PDT

 

Earlier today we reported that Motorola posted a teaser on its Facebook site indicating a new device coming Friday. While everyone assumed it would be the Motorola RAZR HD due to the numerous leaked photos, it turns out the post on Facebook was actually just a game. Becki Leonard, a spokesperson for Motorola, released a statement: “We’re sorry for the confusion, but it’s a Facebook game asking people to guess a current smartphone and not meant to come across as a new phone.”

It was an easy mistake to make as the post was quite ambiguous to begin with. It asked people to “guess the smartphone” and that clues would be revealed each day until it would ultimately be unveiled on Friday. When Facebook commenters started throwing out the RAZR HD, Becki Leonard denied the rumors and stated, “It’s a phone already on the market. It’s which current smartphone is this?”

I’m sure this news will sadden some folks as the RAZR HD has been an anticipated device from Motorola. Hopefully news of the RAZR HD’s release will leak out soon, and we’ll be sure to inform you as soon as we know.

source: Facebook

Grab Jelly Bean for your 4G LTE Galaxy Nexus

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 01:06 PM PDT

When is a Nexus not a Nexus? When you buy it from Verizon, evidently. It’s long been a gripe of Verizon Nexus owners that their pride and joy often receives the latest and greatest Android update months after the GSM variant. The good news is that whilst Verizon might be standing in the way of progress, the developer community has got your back (as ever!).

Shortly after landing on the AOSP servers, Android build JRO03L has been worked into a custom ROM prime for flashing to your Verizon Galaxy Nexus or Google Nexus 7. Early reports suggest that the build is seamless, offering the pure Jelly Bean experience just as Google intended. If  spending an evening rooting and flashing floats your boat, you can click the link below to get going.

Source:  XDA Developers

Carphone Warehouse Expects to Ship the Sony Xperia Miro This Month, Pre-orders Already Started

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 12:47 PM PDT

Sony recently announced the new Xperia Miro, a 3.5-inch entry level device with a 5MP camera and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This is a great device for people not wanting to spend a lot of money and just want a decent phone. Well, up until now we were given no indications as to when the Sony Xperia Miro would be release.

Carphone Warehouse has updated their product sign-up page to show potential buyers they can expect a ship date of August 2012. The phone was announced back in mid-June and looks to be just about ready for prime time! Are you getting one? Hit the source link below to pre-order yours!

source: Carphone Warehouse

Sprint Reaffirms Pledge To Launch HD Voice In Limited Capacity By The End Of The Year, Will Ramp Up By 2013

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 11:05 AM PDT

 

You remember how we mentioned how Sprint would be bringing its HD Voice service to select handsets later this year? Well Sprint has reassessed its strategy and believes it needs to upgrade a “critical mass” of its markets with the necessary network improvements to support HD Voice. That means Sprint will likely make a major push of the service to early 2013, in addition to the limited rollout later this year. Sprint also mentions its HD Voice’s availability will gradually increase over 2013 and 2014 and that it expects a significant portion of its network and devices will support HD Voice by the end of 2014. That means the HTC EVO 4G LTE will have more than a few friends to party with.

No additional news for now, but we’ll be sure to keep you all posted as we hear anything else from the Now Network.

source: Phone Scoop

Samsung upsets judge (again) after accusing Apple of tampering with evidence

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 10:38 AM PDT

The drama of the Apple v. Samsung court case continued today with more irritation for Judge Koh. This time it was Samsung who turned up the heat in the courtroom. Apple presented a photo of a Samsung Epic 4G Touch that shows an icon layout very similar to the iPhone layout. Samsung objected to this claiming Apple had rearranged to the icons so that the photo no longer represented the "out of the box" layout of the product.

Samsung then presented its own photo, which Samsung's legal counsel claimed had been taken on Sunday, showing a different layout and a larger number of homescreens. This only opened the door for Judge Koh to question the veracity of Samsung's photo as she noted the Google search widget was missing and the image featured Monday's date. These two items were problematic as Samsung's legal counsel had earlier claimed the search widget was present on the device out of the box and that the photo had been taken on Sunday. Despite personally inspecting the device in question, it does not appear Judge Koh has received an answer regarding the missing Google search widget. Samsung's legal counsel did eventually admit to misspeaking about the date when the photo was taken.

Throughout this review of the Epic 4G Touch, Apple's legal team simply maintained their position that they had not manipulated the device for purposes of producing the image. Judge Koh agreed with Apple's position and overruled Samsung's objection.

Going forward, both parties will now have to agree in advance on images to be used as joint exhibits.

source: The Verge

Moborobo Review: The all-in-one PC Manager for your Android phone

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 09:55 AM PDT

 

Moborobo is an all-in-one PC manager that’s been around for several months now for your Android phone and/or tablet. Now I know a lot of seasoned Android users might not find a lot of use for it, but I know there are a lot of you that’s either new to Android or recently migrated to Android from iOS. I think Moborobo might just be the right application for those users especially if you’re used to syncing your phone with your desktop. Moborobo will allow you to backup your phone/tablet’s contacts, apps, text messages, music, wallpapers, and videos. It also gives you a file manager, the ability to install or delete apps, make ringtones, and install various wallpapers. That is certainly a lot of features, so how well does Moborobo do at getting the job done? Hit the break to find out.

The first thing you need to know about Moborobo is that it’s Free and it’s fairly easy to install. I should also mention that it’s in Beta so there could be some bugs, but overall I didn’t find anything too crazy. I did have a little trouble setting it up on an older Windows XP machine, but I didn’t have issues with newer Windows Vista or Windows 7 machines. The layout and UI is very easy to understand so you shouldn’t have too much of a problem navigating around without too much instruction.

Upon opening the software for the first time, you will have a choice of connecting your phone via USB or WiFi. USB is recommended for obvious reasons of speed and reliability. If you’re phone was never connected via USB before, it will need to install the driver.

I had no issues in using a Galaxy S III, but at first it wasn’t reading my phone. I quickly went to the help area and I realized USB Debugging needed to be turned on. This is something that probably should have been mentioned beforehand, but hopefully it will save you a few minutes by knowing about his up front. You can access Debugging from the Settings/Developers Options. Just make sure USB Debugging is checked. Once I turned Debugging on, it quickly connected.

Upon connecting, it takes a minute or so to read your phone and you will find yourself at the main Home section.

At the top you will notice tabs that you can easily navigate to with a click. The Home area is what we will talk about now, but later we will discuss the Data tab, as well as Apps, Tunes, Images, Videos, and Themes tabs.

As you can see, there is an image of my phone with whatever the phone is currently displaying. If I flick through the screens on my phone, the Moborobo software will refresh and always show what my phone is showing. You can even bring it to full screen mode. Probably the coolest thing here is that you can take a screenshot of your device. This is really nice for those of you that have phones below Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (about 85% of Android users) and aren’t rooted.

You will also notice a graphical view of your storage and how much is allocated to Music, Video, and Other along with what free space you have. It should be noted that I actually had one album on the device, but it showed 0 bytes. This might be a bug based on the fact that it’s Beta or it also might mean that the amount was too small to register.

You do have the option of selecting either the device storage or SD card. In this example, I didn’t have an SD card installed so it didn’t show it as an option to choose.

You can also click on the File Manager which opens a pop up with all your files sorted by folders.

It’s much like Windows Explorer so you should feel right at home. You can easily delete files, upload files from your PC to your device, download files from your device to your PC, or create new folders. You basically have full control. This kind of functionality is easily obtained from Android apps such as Astro or File Expert, but again, a lot of newbies feel more comfortable doing things such as this with a desktop.

Going back to the Home tab, you will also notice statistics for how many contacts you have, messages, Apps, Images, Music, and Videos. You will notice that for music it has the number 1 below it, which probably represents 1 album, but I’m a little surprised it didn’t show the number of songs, which was actually 11. So for whatever reason there seems to be an issue with the software properly showing you how much music you have, but overall not too big of a deal. This might not be an issue for bigger collections.

The remaining option left on the Home tab is the backup/restore function, which is one of the major features of Moborobo.

Moborobo allows you to backup just about everything from your device so in the event something happens to your phone, you will have everything saved on your desktop. Again this is something that can be done with Android apps like MyBackup or Titanium, but if users fail to move those backups from their SD cards to their desktops, they are useless in the event you lose your phone. Some apps do allow for cloud back up, but you also might have to pay for that storage.

You can tell Moborobo what you want backed up by simply clicking on the items you want backed up. You have your choice of Contacts, Messages, Call Logs, Images, Wallpapers, Themes, Media, and missing from the screenshot: Ringtones and Apps. Also under Apps, is an option to back up App Data, but you need to be rooted in order for this to happen. This means you can save all game progress and restore it to another device. After you have selected the categories you want backed up, all you have to do is click back up.

All Backups are saved in whatever location you wish, but a default location was already set at Documents/Moborobo/Backups. Each backup gets a different folder and the folder title is based on the date and time.

So in this example, I have two backups, one was done on August 3, 2012 at 23:28.08 and the other was on August 4, 2012 at 15:59.40. This makes it very convenient to find what you’re looking for. Within these folders you will find the categories that were backed up by folder.

Of course backups would be worthless unless you had the ability to restore, and of course Moborobo has you covered. You can restore any of your previous backups and you can also select whatever you want restored. For example, if you only want to restore your call logs, you can do just that.

All you have to do is click the restore tab from the backup/restore popup and you will see a full list of your backups. You can clearly see the two backups that I mentioned above. Depending on what you actually backed up, you can then select the items you want to restore. It couldn’t be any simpler.

If you are new to Android and you were using an iPhone, you can easily move your contacts over by simply connecting your iPhone and exporting your contacts. Then import those contacts to your Android phone. You can see more on this at the Moborobo website.

Now we will move on to the Data screen, which contains your contacts, SMS text messages, and call logs. For contacts, you can import, export, manually add, or delete.

You also have access to all your SMS text messages and you can even send text message from the interface.

Last but not least, you can see your complete call log.

Moving on to the Apps tab, Moborobo makes it really easy for you to install or uninstall applications.

One feature that’s very nice with this section is that for each app, it shows you the permissions that are required so if you ever have a question on a particular app, you can easily find it here.

Under Web Resources, you can search for apps or even get recommendations.

Unfortunately you won’t find every app available on the Google Play Store, so I really wouldn’t recommend this feature. Also, I found it to take a little too long to download and install any apps that were found. Android already has the ability to browse all Play Store apps from your phone, tablet or Web so this doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Next up is the Tunes section, which allows you to upload or download music from/to your desktop. You can also make a ringtone from any of your songs.

You will notice I only have one album on the phone as I store all my music on Google Music. You simply click on Add and you can easily select the songs you want from your desktop and they will be downloaded to your device. As you navigate the music that is on your device, you can click on “Apply as Ringtone” for any song and it will simply make that your new ringtone for your phone. Unfortunately you can’t edit out the portion of the song that you want, but it’s something quick and simple for the average consumer. There is also a Ringtone Center that is “under construction.” It’s possible that area might give us the ability to edit portions of songs in the future.

Next up is the Images tab, which gives you complete control of all your pictures and wallpapers.

By right clicking on any image you can edit (simple cropping and rotating), delete, apply as wallpaper, or export. The one thing that the Images tab does have that is fairly nifty is a Wallpaper Center.

This allows you to browse various wallpapers and download them to your device. You can also apply them as your default wallpaper directly from this tab.

The Videos tab is an area I didn’t get too much into. I don’t normally keep videos on my phone and as far as the Web Resources section, it said it was under construction so I expect some sort of service for loading web-based videos on your devices to be launched soon.

The last section is Themes. In order for this to work, you will have to install the Mobo Launcher on your device. It’s available in the Play Store, but you can install it from this software. Then if you go to Web Resources, you can pick custom themes to install.

Closing

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, Moborobo is probably not for seasoned veterans of Android. It’s meant for migrated iOS users or beginner level Android users. It works fairly well, but since it’s in Beta, there are some occasional bugs like freeze ups. I also felt that the software moved a little slow between screens. Overall Moborobo is a well thought out piece of software and the fact that it’s Free is surprising. With that said, if you’ve been looking for an all-in-one package for your Android device, you have nothing to lose by giving Moborobo a try.

Click here for more information about  Moborobo.

 

Apples claims the iPhone caused a ‘Crisis of Design’ for Samsung

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 08:41 AM PDT

Yesterday’s court battle between Apple and Samsung continued with Apple showing an email from J.K. Shin, Samsung’s Head of Mobile Communications. According to Apple, Samsung went through a “crisis of design” shortly before the launch of the Galaxy S in 2010. Shin’s email said:

“All this time we’ve been paying all our attention to Nokia, and concentrated our efforts on things like Folder, Bar, Slide,”

“Yet when our UX is compared to the unexpected competitor Apple’s iPhone, the difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth. It’s a crisis of design.”

Later Samsung’s Strategy Head Justin Denison took the stand and downplayed the language of the email calling it hyperbole. He went on to say “Samsung does an excellent job of remaining very humble, self-critical and maintaining a sense of urgency within its own ranks to drive hard work and innovation. We want to change so that it never rests on its laurels and becomes complacent. So you hear a lot of hyperbolic statements like ‘crisis of design’ and ‘heaven and earth’.”

Samsung’s attorney also attempted to downplay the importance of being first to market with certain designs and features by leading questioning in this manner.  Denison said that Samsung introduced many features before Apple, which included voice recognition technology and he didn’t feel “ripped off” when Apple introduced the same features afterwards.

As to screen size, Denison said he wouldn’t mind if the next iPhone had a larger screen because it would be another example of following a trend as Samsung and others are already doing.

Apple also brought in Peter Bressler, an expert witness. Apple paid him $75,000 for this appearance. You have to love our legal system. He claimed that Samsung’s designs were “substantially the same” as Apple’s. He also said, “My opinion [is] that there are a number of Samsung phones and two Samsung tablets that are substantially the same as the design in those [Apple] patents.”

He also said consumers could be confused looking at the two products, but when cross-examined by Samsung, he admitted he hadn’t witnessed the confusion for himself.

Today’s proceedings should have more of Bressler and another Apple expert witness, Susan Kane. She is a former creative director of NeXT and a contributor to the graphical user interface of the first Mac.

source: ibtimes

Ouya And XBMC Announce Joint Collaboration, Brings One Closer Step To Ensuring The Gaming Console Can Also Be A Topnotch Media Center

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 06:23 AM PDT

It’s no secret that Ouya is set to revolutionize gaming and XBMC is primed to revolutionize how we consume and manage our media— but what happens when you get both hyper cool concepts and mesh them together? You get a joint collaboration of course. Both XBMC and Ouya announced their agreement to ensure the media app runs smoothly on the gaming console. To ensure the app runs smoothly and at an optimal level, the XBMC team will receive early prototypes of the console and will undergo vigorous testing to ensure the app has an open, DRM-free media functionality.

The Ouya console just seems to look better and better by the day, doesn’t it?

 

source: The Verge

Samsung in Hot Water for Alleged “Icon Theft” from Apple’s iOS

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 06:08 AM PDT

Samsung has found themselves in a whole heap of trouble in the latest battle of Apple vs. Samsung. This time Apple has brought a whole grip of images revealing their icons Vs. Samsung's icons and how they were copied. Some of the images are legitimately a copy and you can clearly see it while others are a bit of a reach. Well, hit the break and you tell us what you think!

First up is the Telephone app icon for the iPhone. Clearly, this is undeniably a copy, or as Samsung would have you believe, an incredible coincidence. You can see the Apple icon on top and the rest of the icons are from various Samsung phones.

Moving on to the iTunes trademark logo compared to Samsung’s choice of their music logo. When you look at any iOS device and its music logo, you can see it’s nothing more than a music note with a white circle. I know when I look at it I don’t see anything more than that. My first impression is not that it’s representing a disc behind a note. See for yourself.

Next is the Setting icon of iOS compared to that of Samsung Android devices. This one has me confused as to why Apple is claiming it against Samsung when the ‘gear’ has been the icon for settings ever since the Android 1.6 Donut days. Take a look at Apple’s Icon, then Samsung’s and finally the icon pack from Android 1.6 to see what I’m getting at.

Notes applications are on both the iPhone and Samsung Android phones. When you look at the icons you can see that both color and paper type were copied. This is silly to me, I’m truly wondering if Samsung’s artists were either really lazy, or just completely oblivious to the fact that Apple’s icons are the same. You and I both know there are more ways than one to convey a “Notes” app.

Next, take a look at Apple’s shoddy attempt at claiming Samsung is copying the “Photo” app icon. Yes, they both have a flower, but Samsung’s has two pictures of said flower on top of the same flower and a play button (why…I have no idea). While Apple’s is a clear picture of a Sunflower with a blue sky and clouds in the background. C’mon, APPLE!

Last and certainly not least is Apple’s Contacts app icon. You can see the color scheme has changed but they both show a picture of a person on some sort of bound book. Really? I mean…REALLY? Samsung, there are many ways to make a contacts icon, can't you just come up with something that will leave you above reproach? I’m not necessarily agreeing with Apple here, but I do wonder if Samsung can be more original.

In closing I have one burning question for you: Why is it that mostly every one of Samsung’s icons is different for each phone they manufacture? Now, I don’t run a multibillion dollar company, but I’m pretty sure NOT designing a different icon for every phone would be in their best interest, not to mention really fun for the artist! Yeah I know, some of the phones all have similar icons, but I think you get what I’m saying.

This isn’t the last we have heard in this case and we’ll be sure to update you the moment we know more!

source: CNET

HTC July 2012 Revenues Fall 45 Percent

Posted: 07 Aug 2012 06:06 AM PDT

 

HTC doesn’t need to hit the panic button just yet— but it’s coming awfully close to doing so. Following HTC’s well-publicized 2nd quarter disappointment which has led it to do such things such as hightail it out of Korea, it announced its July 2012 earnings… which appear to add to the massive bleeding. HTC’s unaudited consolidate revenues for July were NT$25 billion (roughly $835 million USD) and down 45 percent from July 2011. In addition, the July revenues were down aroundNT$5 billion (roughly $168 million) from HTC’s May revenues.

Looks like those Samsung Galaxy S III sales are having a bigger impact than we could have ever imagined. Hopefully HTC’s renewed marketing strategy will help it rebound sooner than later.

source: HTC
Posted by at 5:42 AM

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