Samsung makes changes to Galaxy smartphones to get around Dutch

Apple and Samsung are tied up in mortal patent combat and Apple has come out ahead in many instances in Europe and other places. Dutch courts ruled that Samsung smartphones did in fact infringe on one of Apple’s patents back in August. The violation was used to issue an injunction that kept Samsung Galaxy smartphones from being sold in the Netherlands after mid-month.

The patent that could keep the Galaxy devices out of Dutch hands had to do with a patented method of scrolling and browsing through photos held by Apple. Samsung has been fighting the injunction and appears at least in the Netherlands to be ready to capitulate to Apple to gets its devices back into the country. Samsung has announced that it will be making “upgrades” to three Galaxy smartphones.
A Samsung spokesman named James Chung has declined to give a specific date that the three upgraded smartphones will hit stores in the Netherlands. He did state, “We’ve fixed the technological problem and upgraded products to address the issue. They will be shortly available for sale.”
[via Reuters]

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Google ADK DIY project shows music beta song meta data

If you had, your hands on the Google ADK board a week or so ahead of its official launch what would you do? Sit and stare gleefully at your gear or get down to business by making a cool device using the board to show off how easy the Google ADK board is to use? A DIY modder going by [yergacheffe] did in fact have the Google ADK board early and set about making something cool.

The person used the ADK board along with some LED matrices and modding prowess to construct a display that can show the meta data for the songs playing via the music beta service from an Android device. The matrices were put inside a laser cut acrylic case and the music beta logo glows with LED light for extra bling.
With the complete project display, people can connect their smartphone to the display and it will show info about the tracks they are listening to. The modder says that only a couple lines of code were needed to get the Google ADK board to work with the display screen. Check out the video to see the finished project in action.

[via SlashGear]

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Samsung steals some iPhone 4S thunder down under

Samsung figured it would take the chance to do a little scrapping out behind the gym with Apple with the iPhone 4S set to launch in Australia this week. Samsung set up a little pop up store right next door to the big Apple Store in Sydney and then offered the very nice Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone in limited quantities for $2. Apparently, the geeks in Australia were more interested in the Android smartphone than the iPhone 4S.

According to reports, the line in front of the Samsung store is longer than the line in front of the iPhone store. I’m surprised that fights between the Android geeks and the iPhone 4S geeks didn’t break out. There was a catch to the smoking good Samsung deal though. There are only ten of the Galaxy S II smartphones offered at the bargain price each day.
Apparently, the Samsung store is up and running until this Friday and then it will close. You had better count the folks that are in line to be sure you need to stand around at all if you want one of the smartphones. The iPhone 4S will go on sale in Australia this Friday so the Samsung store is closing as the iPhone 4S gets ready to start selling.
[via SlashGear]

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A chocolate Android phone that won’t melt in your pocket

Sharp’s upcoming Q-Pod Android phone is aimed right at the rich, delicious center of the novelty market. The golden-colored phone’s back, front and the user interface inside all look as if they’re covered in half-melted chocolate, for some reason. It even comes with its own “Chocobed”, a charging dock that looks like a fancy chocolate box.


Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Q-Pod is that it also has some pretty solid specs. Android 2.3 runs on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor (mmm, chocolate and Gingerbread!) with 512MB of RAM. Unlike its real-world sugary counterpart, the housing of the phone is water-resistant, and the 8-megapixel rear camera should satisfy the pickiest of shooters. The 3.7-inch screen has a sharp 960 x 540 resolution – considerably higher than similar screens on US and European phones.

Carrier NTT DoCoMo isn’t saying how much the Q-Pod will cost, but with a limited run of 3000 units it won’t be cheap – and that’s before you buy a plane ticket to Japan to pick one up. If your heart is set on this unique device, better call you travel agent quick – the Sharp Q-Pod goes on sale October 18th. Just don’t make any calls before dinner or you’ll spoil your appetite. For more strangely themed Japanese handsets, check out the official Disney Android phone.

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Samsung Galaxy S II vs iPhone 4S browser comparison and load times [Video]

The iPhone 4S is finally here and while we don’t have a 5 to compare things to, we do have the 4S to throw up against the Samsung Galaxy S II for a few browser load times and overall performance tests as I’m sure plenty are interested in seeing the results. I always told myself I’d never use the word “iPhone” in a title here at Android Community but this isn’t about me — its for you, the readers. A little friendly competition is always nice right? Because where would we all be without it — probably still using Nokia candy bar phones daily. Enough of that, check out our video below.

Now I’m not going to get too crazy here or break down all the little things about Android or iOS, iPhone 4S or Galaxy S II, instead I’ll just show you all the video by our sister site and good man Vincent from SlashGear. Your humble narrator (me) wouldn’t be caught dead with an idevice so we’ll just have to take Vincents word for it. First off he compares the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S in a browser test or three just for fun and to see how well the new A5 dual-core processor chugs along in the “S”, then he moves on to the good stuff — Android. The first attempt with the Galaxy S II he doesn’t hit go, so don’t get discouraged and break anything just yet, watch the entire clip.
iPhone 4S vs Galaxy S II browser test


I myself am not in control of the testing here, but from initial results the iPhone 4S performs quite well, I’m sure everyone expected that as the original held its own pretty well too. One of the fastest processors around currently, the 1.5 GHz Qualcomm in the Galaxy S II performs very well but is just barely by a hair beat by the new A5 dual-core iPhone 4S in most tests. I’d rather have the SGSII perform 1 second slower and have a full flash experience personally. We could argue about this all day, flash or no flash, or try other sites but when it really comes down to it iOS is highly efficient as is Android — not to mention many many websites are designed with iOS in mind.
This is just one prime example that we don’t need blazing fast quad-core processors and huge 4.7″ displays to have an awesome experience. I can’t see myself browsing the web and reading websites with that puny little 3.5″ display, but that is just me. Android has came a long ways over the past few years and is growing daily. The rapid growth and development of the entire ecosystem is just one more reason to be completely excited about things to come. The iPhone 4S may slightly be faster by a tiny hair at the moment, but wait for those quad-core processors to start hitting the streets and this will be an entire different story. I know I mentioned we don’t need the quad-cores, and we still don’t, but I sure would love to have one.
In the end both sides will remain extremely competitive, they will drive innovation and Samsung and Android will continue to rise and rise. Do take note that Android 2.3 Gingerbread is well over a year old, and iOS 5 was just released. Once we get the newer, bigger, better, and faster Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich powered Samsung Galaxy Nexus I’d love to run these tests again and see who’s boss (and we will).
For now we’ll just have to agree that while they didn’t release a newer and bigger iPhone 5, Apple’s done a decent job with the new iPhone 4S. Apparently there is more to it than just the S so the upgrade kit I was planning to sell pictured below might not work after all.

What do you think of the video? We would love to see your comments in the appropriate section below.

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U.S. now has more cellphones than people

The CTIA has released the latest statistics on cellphone users in the U.S., and it claims that there are 327.6 million cellphone subscriptions in America, a penetration rate of 103.9 percent compared to the U.S. population of 315.5 million. Of those 327.6 million subscriptions, 95.8 million are for smartphones.
Americans are putting good use to those 327.6 million active cellphones as well, as text messaging use has increased 16 percent for the year, with 1.138 trillion messages being sent in the past 12 months. Interestingly, only 28.2 billion MMS messages were sent, down from the previous year's number of 32.1 billion. Data traffic unsurprisingly surged, growing 111 percent year over year.
The 327.6 million subscribers represent a nine percent growth over what the U.S. had last year, and up from the 302.9 million connections that the CTIA reported back in March. [via Fierce Wireless]

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Oh no, another patent suit, this time against Amazon’s Kindle Fire

Amazon has just released the Kindle Fire just two weeks ago, has sold over 95,000 units in day one only. You would think that they’ll have a smooth ride but it didn’t take long for them to get hit with a lawsuit from patent licensing company Acacia Research which is basically a patent troll and make a living on suing others.
Acacia Research Crop. claims that the Kindle Fire infringes U.S. Patent 6,956,562 which is related to the act of hitting or tapping an icon make the tablet perform a specific action. The patent licensing company also added that the Kindle Fire encroaches the “System And Method For Displaying And Manipulating Multiple Calendars On A Personal Digital Assistant” patent as well as three additional ones. We haven’t heard anything from Amazon about this matter and here’s to hoping a reform of the patent system is in the works because this becoming a bit ridiculous.
Source Paid Content
via BGR

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BOLT Browser leaves beta, v3.0 now available in Android Market

Today the popular browser for Android called BOLT Browser has finally left the private beta and is ready to be bolted into the wild. Just as the name suggests “Bolt” browser is being touted as one of the fastest around and very speedy. Being improved to version 3.0 and finally available for users in the Android Market you can give it a try right now.

The Webkit-based browser claims that website loading times can be 25% – 50% faster than its competitors and that they offer the fastest web page load times on any Android device. With features such as Social tags and always-on access to Facebook and more this browser is both fast, and social. With flash and HTML compression, tabbed browsing, URL auto-complete, a download manager, web history, cookies, option to save page images to view offline and more.

With tons of options outlined above you can also choose image and video quality for better load times. They even offer pinch-to-zoom and RSS support. The browser has a decent array of options and settings and they claim to have a modern user interface. Personally I feel the entire UI is very outdated and could use some serious polishing, just look at Dolphin.
We do have a customizable home screen with the popular “panel” interface for favorites and bookmarks, they didn’t seem to want to be re-arranged for me and I had to delete them all to get what was important at the top, it does come with popular sites pre-loaded like GetJar for Android Apps, ESPN GO, Facebook and a few others so that was a nice touch although nothing we haven’t seen before. So far personally the experience has been a bit “meh” for me.
Next up I want to mention speed. They tout this as the fastest browser for Android with the quickest load times, and I either am crazy or they are still working to improve things because I experienced no such speeds. Android Community.com took well over 15 seconds to load, every time, and others took slightly less but depends on flash heavy content of course. Nothing seemed extremely snappy or fluid for me and I’d much rather just use the standard browser — or better yet, Dolphin. With compressed pages and flash the amount of data being used by BOLT will be much lower than other browsers so this is one area where data conscious users will benefit. Obviously BOLT Browser is still in its beta stages and has just been released out of private beta today so we should expect a few bugs or issues to still need working out. For now, personally, I’ll wait until they improve things a bit more.
Give BOLT Browser a try and let us know what your results are like in the comment section below. You can get it from the market right now by clicking here.

[via BOLT Browser]

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TeleNav GPS Navigator 7.1 update coming soon

Our friends from TeleNav are all set to launch the new and improved GPS Navigator version 7.1 for Android devices soon. TeleNav has been working hard to bring the most wanted and requested features to the popular navigation tool and this update will do just that. First available for WiMAX devices it will soon follow to other carriers and options as TeleNav comes pre-loaded with many popular smartphones available today. See below for a list of all the newly announced features and more.

TeleNav GPS Navigator 7.1 will bring many new changes and one of the biggest is the new feature and homescreen called “My Dashboard,” for quick and easy access to what on-the-go people need every single day. It will feature real-time traffic overlays with dedicated home or work buttons for easy and quick toggling, as well as give full drive times based on live traffic. TeleNav has also developed three new Android homescreen widgets for the 7.1 update, and drivers now have the option to use fun, custom car icons such as a sports car, hot rod, tank, space ship, motorcycle and more. I think I’ll take the Tank icon please.

We also have local voice search, stay safe and keep your hands on the wheel while using your voice to search over 22 million places and even get user-generated ratings and reviews to quickly decide where to go. You can use voice search to get up-to-date gas prices and even have TeleNav re-route you around a traffic jam, some of these updates sure sound great right? With improved maps and rendering the new version 7.1 should be faster and better than ever. Here is a live demo of the latest from TeleNav.


Here is a list of some key features we can expect to see coming shortly from the folks at TeleNav.
- Multi Route: Recommends up to three routes to your destination with distance and estimated drive times based on traffic conditions
- Favorite and Recent Destinations: Drive to your favorite and recent destinations more quickly and easily with one-touch access on My Dashboard
- Daily Commute: Current drive times based on live traffic right on the home screen
- Live Traffic: Save time with live traffic updates that automatically reroutes you around traffic jams or road congestion
- Local Search: Search 22 million Places and get user-generated ratings and reviews to quickly decide where to go
- Local Reviews: Rate and review your favorite Place all from your phone
- Gas Prices: Search up-to-date gas prices by location and price to save money
- Voice Search: Stay safe and keep your hands on the wheel with voice-activated commands
- Local Weather: Get real-time weather and seven day forecasts for your current location
- Voice Guidance: Clear, easy-to-understand driving directions spoken by a real human voice

We can expect to see the latest version of TeleNav GPS Navigator 7.1 coming shortly and will launch pre-installed and be offered free on many Android devices, with optional premium features such as lane assist, speed trap, red light camera, speed limit notification and commute reports available for an additional $4.99 per month. For more details and to give TeleNav a run head down to the Android Market and give it a try by clicking here.

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