Articles about Android

Luxury British smartphone manufacturer Vertu used to be owned by Nokia and made its name producing incredibly expensive Symbian handsets. But times move on, and the company is now focusing on producing incredibly expensive Android handsets.

The first new product of this endeavor is the Vertu Ti. The 3.7-inch device sports a brushed titanium frame (making it up to five times stronger, and at 180g (6oz) quite a bit heavier than most other phones), with real leather trim and a sapphire-screen.

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Little more than three weeks since the last build, Android Open Kang Project, the team behind the popular AOKP green droid custom distribution, has unveiled Jelly Bean MR1 Build 3. The newest stable build sports the latest bug fixes and improvements added before Google released Android 4.2.2.

The team behind the project warns that issues related to Bluetooth should not be reported, as "it can’t/won’t be fixed before the 4.2.2 merge". The timing is rather interesting seeing as Google reportedly took charge and finally improved Bluetooth connections in the latest update, which arrives less than a day after the release of Jelly Bean MR1 Build 3. The new build introduces support for a couple of new devices, including the Acer Iconia Tab A510 (codename "a510"), the T-Mobile variant of the Samsung Galaxy S II (codename "hercules") and the LTE variant of the Samsung Galaxy Note II (codename "t0lte").

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Google Nexus owners, unlock your devices and start checking for updates because Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean is now rolling out. The latest software version is reportedly hitting Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 devices, with no word at the moment relating to the Nexus 4.

The Android 4.2.2 update bumps up the build number to version JDQ39 and mostly appears to contain minor fixes. No official changelog has been provided by Google at this moment, but users are reporting improvements for Bluetooth streaming which now presents "less hicups [...] but still not perfect" with apparent disconnects when switching from Wi-Fi to cellular data.

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Sony's Android 4.1 Jelly Bean upgrade for 2012 Xperia smartphones is a long time coming. The Japanese manufacturer announced its plans in mid-October last year, and followed it up with a brief update two months later. Finally, as planned, deployment is set to kick off "this week".

The first smartphones to receive the coveted upgrade to the original Jelly Bean iteration are the Xperia T and Xperia, with Xperia TX owners having to wait until next month for the same software treatment. In an attempt to appease impatient users and to drum up some interest, Sony has decided to spill the beans on what Android 4.1 Jelly Bean entails for Xperia users by providing a list of significant changes included in the upgrade.

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The Chinese smartphone market is dominated by five top manufacturers, none of them Apple, Canalys reveals. As I've warned a couple times recently, despite CEO Tim Cook's prognostications about China's importance or his company boasting 2 million first-weekend iPhone 5 sales, competitors rapidly close out the market for costly fruit-logos.

China is the biggest market for mobiles, largely dominated by smartphones -- 73 percent of the total in fourth quarter, up from 40 percent a year earlier. Shipments soared 113 percent to 64.7 million units, or 30 percent of all smartphones globally. Samsung captured the top spot, followed by Lenovo, Yulong, Huawei and ZTE.

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Nothing says geek quite like Lego. Come on -- you know you secretly still love those tiny multi-colored bricks from your youth. Except now they are not just bricks, and the simple projects of our youth have become the incredibly complex projects of our children's youth...that we still love to "help out" with.

Lego Cuusoo is a "Labs" type of project where customers can suggest future kits and if the item gets at least 10,000 supporters then Lego pledges to consider producing it. And now the company is faced with an Android project that easily passed that requirement yesterday evening.

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In with the new and out with the old. Well, almost. Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich are slowly taking Gingerbread's crown, running on 42.6 percent of all Android devices. The two-year old operating system only has a slight edge, of 3 percentage points, against the two newest sweets in the family, based on the number of devices accessing Google Play during the 14 days ending February 4.

Almost three months after Google released Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, the latest treat in the candy jar reached a 1.4 percent distribution level. Compared to the previous data set released by Google in early-January, the number is merely 0.2 percentage points higher, which translates into a 16.66 percent increase.

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You’ve read all the press about the new BlackBerry 10 smartphones, and you’re intrigued enough to want to know more. Well, a clever new marketing campaign lets you transform your existing iOS or Android device into a BlackBerry Z10 using augmented reality. Well sort of.

Unlike the Playboy interactive cover which uses Layar, you’ll need to have the free Blippar app installed on your phone. Once done, scan the special BB Take Over Me webpage (or just scan the image here, if you prefer) and your phone will be instantly transformed into an interactive Z10. Or at least that’s the theory.

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With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices, Kim Dotcom's Mega storage locker appears out of place without an official smartphone or tablet app, especially when Box, Dropbox and Google Drive, to name but a few alternatives, embrace the on-the-go user. Thankfully Alexander Hansen, an Android developer, has come to the rescue with his unofficial Mega Manager Alpha.

As the use of "Alpha" in the name implies, Mega Manager Alpha is not a stable release at the moment but rather a "work in progress". The developer also warns that users might experience "some crashes". That said, the app only comes with a limited feature-set, which includes the ability to browse and download Mega content, and does not support uploading files to the cloud storage service.

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During the mainframe era, you could hear phrase: "No one is fired for buying IBM". In the 1990s and 2000s, the same could be said about Microsoft. As the so-called Post-PC era pushes forward, soon same can be said about Apple, if some IT organizations don't already. Gartner predicts that by 2014, enterprises will accept the fruit-logo as much as Windows, which is something scary for the company owning that market segment.

Consumerization of IT -- or bring your own device to work -- forced Apple on unwilling IT organizations. Now, after tasting the fruit, they like it. More of them than ever are willing to deploy Macs, which encroach on territory Microsoft seeks to claim for Windows 8.

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Some days the sorry state of news reporting really baffles me. Today I read numerous headlines claiming that Android tablet share surged past 50 percent in Q4, usurping iPad -- all using numbers I wrote about a day earlier. The one on CNN -- "IDC says Android is the new king of tablet market share" -- got to me. Immediate reaction: "What did I miss?" But in looking over the numbers, nothing really jumped out that IDC said any such thing. Sure iPad shipment share fell to 43.6 percent from 51.7 percent annually and from 46.4 percent sequentially. I chose to ask the analysts rather than follow the feeding frenzy.

"Android actually passed the 50 percent mark in 3Q 12", Tom Mainelli, IDC research director for tablets, says. Whoa, there's no new king at all. Android took the crown last summer. Still, that's a phenomenal achievement, setting me to write a story I couldn't imagine a year ago.

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The HTC Windows Phone 8X is a smartphone that you will either love or not want to touch even with a 10 foot pole. Part of the arguments for and against it stem from the operating system of choice, Microsoft's latest (and greatest) Windows Phone iteration. Sure, the device has good build quality and the software is fluid and responsive, but the app selection is currently lacking compared to rivals like Android and iOS. So where does one draw the line between success and failure?

I've been using the Windows Phone 8X for almost two weeks and the early impressions are still on the positive side. In my initial review I touched on a number of points that I found revealing for my brief time with it, but the real test is how the Windows Phone 8X fares over a longer period of time. My main and initial gripes concern the limited app selection and general usability issues of Windows Phone 8 when coming from the stock flavor of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. The real question is this: Is it good enough?

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Little more than four months ago, Team Win Recovery Project introduced the last major iteration of the popular Android custom recovery TWRP. Now there is a new version available that packs features as well as bug fixes.

After switching from libtar instead of busybox's implementation, TWRP 2.4 can now create TAR files larger than 2GB. The popular custom recovery also introduces support for memory cards formatted as exFAT as well as support for decrypting internal and external storage on Samsung devices sporting a TouchWiz encryption.

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Little more than two weeks after the beta version debuted, the new Carbon backup app has made its way onto the Play Store. The biggest change comes for Android users with non-rooted devices as they can now also perform app and data backups, a feat previously exclusive to those running the little green droid with elevated permissions.

Carbon is the work of ClockworkMod and ROM Manager developer Koushik Dutta who, with the help of 12,000 beta testers, has managed to squash out most of the bugs from previous versions of the app. Dutta, however, warns that due to the way Motorola handles the adb backup functionality (also known as the built-in backup feature in Android) the Google subsidiary's smartphones are prevented from installing Carbon.

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On Wednesday, popular cloud-based voicemail provider YouMail unveiled a new premium service aimed at businesses and professionals. Dubbed Business Edition, it comes with a host of exclusive features ranging from more customizable greetings to the removal of in-app ads.

YouMail Business Edition runs for $6.99 per user, per month, and builds atop of the currently available functionality. Subscribers can choose to implement "smart business greetings" which can accommodate the user's full name and company, as well as other information.

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