SOURCE via Reddit

Hate that Google has announced Gingerbread for months now, and you’re still stuck with Éclair? That’s the best part about Android smartphones, fragmentation at its best. There’s not much that Google could do about it, but they’re at least taking note of this issue and is stepping up the game to help out, as the developer of Android. Google has just announced at their Google I/O a coalition of manufacturers and carriers committed to making sure their Android devices receive the very latest updates. All four major US carriers (and Vodafone) as well as HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola are on board, and all will guarantee you timely upgrades to the latest version of Android for eighteen months after release, provided the hardware’s capable. Hopefully this will speed up things, though I think 18 months is still quite ridiculous. Google should’ve pushed it into 12 months. Yiha!

SOURCE via Engadget

Is Google going to be Skynet? Yes, they are. “One OS that runs everywhere.” That sounds very convincing. This is the tagline for the next update to Android, which will be called Ice Cream Sandwich. Sounds very delicious, and seem to be feature rich too. Ice Cream Sandwich will be a sort of universal OS that will run from tiny budget Android phones to flagship Android phones to 10-inch Android tablets and will intelligently adapt to each form factor with things like a resizable status bar. Probably will show up on your smart fridge too. Some other fancy new additions were demonstrated during Google’s I/O 2011 keynote, including face-tracking and camera focus shifting based on voice recognition, but most of the salient details remain under lock and key for now.

Remember HTC announcing two phones with a dedicated Facebook button? And also, one of them got into trouble with its name. Right, time has sure fly, and it’s now May. Wadayaknow, Amazon UK has suddenly listed both new Salsa and ChaCha handsets for pre-order, and a June 26th delivery.

The ChaCha’s equipped with a portrait QWERTY keyboard and a 2.6-inch touchscreen, while the Salsa stretches out to 3.4 inches and eschews the physical keys. Both feature 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processors and 512MB of RAM, which are used to run Android with Sense laid over the top.

The unsubsidized prices are set at £250 ($409) for the ChaCha and £320 ($524) for the Salsa, which still sounds rather pricey for something so simple. But I’m sure they’ll be free, if you sign a 2-years contract with a carrier.

SOURCE via Amazon UK (ChaCha), Amazon UK (Salsa)

Google always have crazy ideas, but sometimes their ideas also require some sacrifices. During their Google I/O event, they announced collaboration with Ford to improve our driving experiences.

You see, our driving habits affect the gas mileage we get, and if our cars could predict our preferred travel patterns they could optimize powertrain performance to max out our MPGs. That’s why the Blue Oval Boys plan to use Google’s Prediction API to learn our driving habits and combine that data with real time traffic info to make its cars increasingly efficient.

Sounds familiar? Well, soon Google will have a massive database of our driving habits, driving locations, and even records of our driving speed. I’m looking forward to see some people yelling “privacy invasion” soon when they implement this.

The system isn’t yet ready for showrooms, as there is work to be done securing the personal data and location awareness information it collects, so that means there are still quite some time before Android really invades our dashboards.

SOURCE via CNET

The iPod nano sure evolved a lot. It used to be so tiny, with a little buttons, then it turned even smaller, with only one power button and that’s it. Then it changed again, also with a button but then gained a super tiny touchscreen panel, making it a watch. Now, Steve Jobs is going to squeeze yet another camera into the already-very-small iPod Nano.

The folks from Taiwan’s Apple.pro website have got hold of a photo of something that resembles the next generation iPod nano. the big change here is the addition of a built-in camera that’s said to be 1.3 megapixels, which appears to have also shoved the clip out of the way, although there does seem to be a faint outline where one could be. Of course, the key word here is purported, thus there is no guarantee that this will be the final design.

But still, since there’s most probably no iPhone to announce at WWDC 2011, it’s quite impossible for Steve Jobs to only be talking about iOS and apps right? There’s a missing magic for his trademark “and one last thing”.

SOURCE via Apple.pro

Oh my Gawd! Lucky bitches! Google ain’t just announcing and demoing software over at their Google I/O. they’re also giving free stuff to developers who attended their event. This ain’t no free mugs and stickers and Android figures. This is a freaking limited edition Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Yes, this is the super slim version, and has a special white-color back surface, with Honeycomb 3.0 in it, possibly a vanilla version without the TouchWiz UI layer on top. 5,000 conference attendees will be getting it gratis from Google. The tablet is said to get an update to 3.1 on the coming weeks.

Read more…

Google started the NFC hype with their Nexus S handset, but all you can do with that is to check-in at Google Place, and also is featured at such limited places. But now they’re going to bring more features to NFC in the upcoming Android, which is called Ice Cream Sandwich.

Ice Cream Sandwich will have a new feature called peer-to-peer sharing using NFC. Imagine 0-click contact, web page, and YouTube video sharing between your NFC-equipped Android smartphones and tablets. Just bring the devices together and voila, data shared without launching an application or navigating through the UI. Google plans to build this functionality into as many systems apps as it can while providing the API to developers to 0-click enable their third-party applications.

Can’t understand what I’m talking about? Well, let Google explain to you at the video below. Note: Skip over to the 14-minute mark, as the video is about an hour long.

Read more…