Ice Cream Sandwich includes game controller support

Google just made the classic console emulator crowd very, very happy. While digging around in the recently-released Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich SDK, some industrious developers discovered support for direct input game controllers via USB. That means your next Android smartphone or tablet (or even your current one, given a timely update) might be able to support PC or Xbox 360 controllers for your favorite games.

Android has included support for basic Human Input Devices like mice and keyboards since Froyo, but game controllers are something of an electronic oddity, and require some special attention. Not that it hasn’t been done before: one of the earliest widespread “hacks” for Android was connecting the friendly Wii Remote via Bluetooth, and with the aid of a special app, controlling popular emulators like Gameboid. In recent months PS3 and Xbox 360 controllers have found themselves in Android clutches, though in both cases, not without considerable effort and creativity.
With official support, the downright annoying world of touchscreen controls (at least in the opinion of yours truly) might give way to more robust gaming. There’s only so many simultaneous moves and functions you can program in for a multi-touch screen, but if you’ve played a game like Batman: Arkham Asylum, you know the control with umpteen buttons, triggers and sticks is night limitless. Sony’s official gaming support is possibly making the jump to other hardware soon, not to mention next-generation games like SHADOWGUN, so the news is very exciting indeed. With new advances like 720p screens and Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 on the horizon, who knows what lofty heights Android gaming might achieve in the very near future.

Read more »

HTC looking over Ice Cream Sandwich to determine upgrade plan

Just like most manufacturers probably are doing, HTC is looking over Ice Cream Sandwich as we speak and are trying to device and determine their upgrade plans. We can expect many of their newer device will most likely receive Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, otherwise many users will be angry and they don’t want to relive the Desire Gingerbread debacle.

Like mentioned above most devices that are fairly new should receive an update to Ice Cream Sandwich — although a few HTC Thunderbolt users waiting for Gingerbread might have a thing or two to say about that. Today HTC has updated everyone officially on their Facebook page and had this to say:

Since Google unveiled Ice Cream Sandwich earlier this week, HTC has been looking closely at the new OS’s features and functionality to determine our upgrade plans. We’re a recognized industry leader in providing fast and consistent upgrades to our Android devices, and Ice Cream Sandwich will be no different.
Upgrades require a careful balance of hardware and software to ensure the best possible performance and usability, so please stay tuned as we assess our product portfolio. Our goal is to upgrade as many HTC devices as possible and we’ll be sharing details on specific devices and timing in the coming weeks!

We didn’t expect to hear any sort of confirmation on any devices, or where they’re headed with the HTC Sense UI they are widely known for, but most likely we’ll still see it on ICS. With a user interface as gorgeous as Android 4.0 I don’t know why you’d want to skin it up with a different look, but HTC most likely feels different on this front. I have a feeling the Sense UI will need some serious re-working to be compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich so we’ll all just have to wait and see. We will be sure to update when we hear any additional details from HTC.

Read more »

Samsung Stratosphere hands on [Video]

The Samsung Stratosphere is the latest 4G phone from Verizon, and to the delight of certain parts of the Android world, it’s also a full QWERTY slider. The mid-range device is based on the last generation of Galaxy S phone, and as far as feel and dimensions go, it’s got a lot in common with its cousin the Epic 4G. It’s launching at a relatively cheap $149.99 – a song for an true LTE slider phone. Our initial impressions follow.

Like most sliders, the Stratosphere feels a little chunky in the hand. It’s not the thickest phone we’ve ever seen at 14mm, but it’s noticeably larger than the Motorola DROID 3 with the same screen size and form factor. It’s also lighter, which makes for a less cumbersome ride in your pocket. The textured plastic back sticks to your hand nicely, and the extra girth means that there’s no dramatic “Galaxy hump” on the back, making the phone lie flat on a table or dash.
The keyboard has its ups and downs. A full five rows means you don’t have to use modifier keys for number entry, which is convenient. But it means that the keys themselves are extremely narrow, and my (admittedly pudgy) fingers would easily strike the key above or below the one I wanted. After a few minutes I fount myself angling my fingernail uncomfortably for more precision.

If you’ve ever played with any of the original Galaxy S models, you know what to expect from the Stratosphere’s sliding AMOLED screen. It’s 800 x 480 screen isn’t the sharpest around now that 960 x 540 screens (and soon enough, full 720p screens as well) are out there, but it’s vivid and easy to read. The display will serve for all but the most demanding of phone users. And for this price, it’s hard to beat. a 5 megapixel rear camera and 1.3 front camera are standard, but 720p video recording is a nice addition.
TouchWiz has aged surprisingly well as it makes the shift to Gingerbread. Little touches like a power control bar integrated into the notification tray and a quick settings menu are nice enough to forget my preference for unhindered Android. The Gingerbread phone is responsive, thanks to a 1GHz single-processor. I only wish that fewer included apps came – if I wanted Blockbuster, NFL Mobile or Need For Speed, I’d download them from the Android Market.

The Stratosphere’s large 1800 mAh battery should help it power through a full workday, even if you spend some time on 4G. On that note, you can see that the Stratosphere is Verizon’s first LTE smartphone to use the new Micro-SIM standard. 4GB of internal storage isn’t great, but an included 4GB MicroSD card should fill it out, and you can easily find a cheap upgrade. We’ll have a full review of the Samsung Stratosphere in the next few days. Until then, check out our hands-on unboxing video below.

Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus hits retailers November 13, get yours for $399

It appears that Samsung is ready for another round of “It’s Time to Tab” commercials. Today Samsung has officially announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus will be available across a wide array of retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, Fry’s and many other retailers starting November 13th. The new Galaxy Tab 7 Plus features Android 3.2 Honeycomb and will come in both 16GB and 32GB variants. Pre-orders will start at select retailers on October 23rd.

Officially announced back in September we actually have already seen a few pre-orders for the new Tab and reported them already listed at Amazon just yesterday. For more details on the new Tab all the info is in the official announcement. We have a 7.0″ 1026 x 600 resolution display (no 1280 x 800 here), Android 3.2 Honeycomb, 3 megapixel camera around back and a 2MP shooter on the front. a 1.2 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and will come in a 16GB and 32GB model.

Along with the top of the line dual-core processor we have the usual proximity, accelerometer, digital compass, gyro and ambient light sensors. The Galaxy Tab Plus will come with the TouchWiz UI over 3.2 Honeycomb and we’ve also heard a 3G/4G connected version will be coming to shelves soon. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″ Plus starts at just $399 for the 16GB model and it can be yours on November 13th.
Who will be buying or is the low screen resolution enough to make you opt for something different?

Read more »

Samsung Stratosphere gets the first Verizon LTE Micro-SIM

Verizon’s latest Samsung phone, the Stratosphere, has an interesting surprise hiding underneath its battery cover. As far as we can tell, it’s the very first Verizon LTE phone to use the teensy Micro-SIM standard. The Micro-SIM will be Verizon’s standard phone identifier going forward – you can see a Micro-SIM slot on the DROID RAZR in our hands-on coverage.

This isn’t the first device to use the tiny SIM card on Verizon – that honor goes to the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The iPhone 4S also gets a Micro-SIM card that’s technically unlockable, although with Verizon’s unique CDMA bands, there’s nowhere to take it once you do. But the Stratosphere has the first Micro-SIM that uses Verizon’s ever-growing 4G LTE network, and if current trends are any indication, it will be the first of many.
The Stratosphere is Samsung’s latest QWERTY slider phone, a distant cousin of their original Galaxy line sporting Android Gingerbread. The overall design is a lot like the Epic 4G, including its Super AMOLED screen and 800 x 480 resolution. At $150 on-contract it’s a pretty good deal if you want a full QWERTY phone, instead of the thin slate form factor that seems to be all the rage. We’ll have some hands-on coverage of the Stratosphere soon.

Read more »

Angry Birds Seasons updates for “Ham’o'ween”

It was a dark and stormy night, that most wicked evening of All Hallows Eve, when a vengeful cry was heard across the land. It sounded like “Sqwaakk!”  That’s right, fans of suicidal avian destruction, the latest version of Angry Birds Seasons is available now. “Ham’o'ween!” pits the Birds against their old enemies in 45 new levels of physics-based carnage.

The latest version of the venerable mobile franchise includes new Halloween-themed levels set in pumpkin patches, haunted houses, and other generalized creepy locales. Some of the destructible environments include exploding pumpkins, jackolanterns, and the familiar precariously placed wood, stone and glass buildings. The puzzles are as fun (and frustrating) as ever, so if you’ve been jonesing for you next Angry hit, you won’t be disappointed.
Like all Android versions of Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons is a free download. So head on over to the Android Market to get your copy. Then say goodby to your productivity for the next few hours.

Read more »

Android scores 27% of worldwide tablet sales in Q3 2011

Things are looking up for Android’s tablet aspirations. Though the iPad is still the market leader, Android tablets are slowly carving out a space, to the tune of 4.5 million shipments in the last three months. That’s 26.9% of the worldwide market, edging up towards the iPad’s 66.6%. The growth is considerable, since not long ago the iPad made up a huge 80% chunk of sales.

Unfortunately a large percentage of Android tablets are still running on Gingerbread or Froyo, essentially translating a smartphone interface into a 7-10″ screen. According to Google’s latest activation and OS percentage numbers, only 3.4 million Android devices are running Honeycomb, despite a worldwide total of 6 million. Smaller, cheaper tablets are still firmly in the Gingerbread space, even for new offerings from the likes of ViewSonic and Velocity Micro.
But there’s hope on the horizon for cheap Android tablet everywhere in the form of Android 4.0. Ice Cream Sandwich features a scalable interface equally suited to smartphones and tablets, and according to Google engineers, the OS will be open-sourced by the end of the year. After that, it won’t be long before OEMs begin to make new tablets to take advantage of Ice Cream Sandwich, and the Android developer community won’t take long to get Ice Cream Sandwich onto current tablets of all sizes and price points. The upcoming Asus Transformer Prime is suspected to be the first commercial tablet with Ice Cream Sandwich.

Read more »

Apple iPhone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy Nexus

We see how the new Galaxy Nexus from Samsung holds up against Apple's updated iPhone 4S

We compare Apple’s new baby, the iPhone 4S, to Samsung’s latest Galaxy Nexus handset.

Form:
Samsung Galaxy Nexus - 135.5x67.9x8.9mm, 135g
Apple iPhone 4S - 115.2x58.6x9.3mm, 140g
The iPhone 4S hasn’t changed a bit from the previous iPhone 4 on the outside, it’s pretty much exactly the same.
For iPhone fans this isn’t too much of a problem but we’ve become rather bored of its plain design.
The Galaxy Nexus is the nicest looking Nexus phone so far as it’s been stretched out and enlarged compared to its predecessors.
In part this is to accommodate a large screen, but these larger proportions are more flattering and help the phone to avoid looking too ‘bubbly’.
Often with ‘softer’ handsets with an abundance of rounded corners and curved edges the look becomes boring or odd.
While the Galaxy Nexus may not be our favourite handset visually it’s a better looking phone than the iPhone 4S.
Winner – Samsung Galaxy Nexus

DisplayApple has been leading the pack for some time on display technology with its acclaimed Retina display, but the main problem has always been the limited size.
At 3.5-inches the iPhone 4S’ screen is certainly at the lower end of what many now expect from a full-sized smartphone.
The iPhone 4S uses an LED-backlit IPS TFT capacitive touchscreen at a resolution of 640x960 pixels, which gives a very high pixel density of 330 pixels-per-inch (ppi).
Display features include scratch-resistant glass with an oleophobic surface to repel fingerprints, as well as multi-touch input support, a three axis gyroscope sensor and an accelerometer.
Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus has one of the larger screens on the market at 4.6-inches but unlike many other large displays Samsung has managed to keep the pixel density at a high 316ppi thanks to an impressive screen resolution of 720x1280 pixels.
The Galaxy Nexus uses Samsung’s own Super Amoled technology and also features the same oleophobic coating, multi-touch input, accelerometer and gyro sensors as its rival.
Choosing a winner in this round is pretty difficult, both have impressively high pixel densities which are more or less unrivalled by other smartphones.
The iPhone 4S has the higher pixel density but the Galaxy Nexus makes up for it by having a much larger touchscreen than the iPhone’s rather small display.
Winner – Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Storage
Apple’s handset comes in three storage variants with a choice of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Any model you pick will have 512MB of RAM but true to form Apple hasn’t included a card slot on this device.
With the Galaxy Nexus there’s only the first two options for 16GB or 32GB of in-built capacity and like its opponent it has no card support. Samsung’s handset does better on RAM though with 1GB to help the processor.
This is a trade-off which depends on your preferences, a 64GB upper limit on the iPhone 4S is great, though it’ll cost you a pretty penny to get hold of this variant.
However, you lose out on RAM with Apple’s handset.
On the opposite end of the spectrum the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t have the lofty 64GB option, but 32GB is still a lot to play with and it has twice the RAM of the iPhone.
Winner - Draw


ProcessorIt’s dual core devices all round here, which is a first for an Apple phone, not so much for Samsung though which is why we feel the company could have pushed the boat out a bit more on the chipset and graphics processing unit (GPU).
Both are using ARM Cortex-A9 processors, the iPhone 4S is clocked at 1GHz while the Galaxy Nexus comes in at 1.2GHz.
The iPhone 4S uses Apple’s own A5 chipset and a PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU, a combination previously used in the iPad 2 to good effect.
Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus runs a TI OMAP 4460 chipset and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU, which while competent enough isn’t as highly powered as some other ‘premium’ Android phones such as the Galaxy S2, and the GPU is the same as one used in the previous Nexus S phone, which launched at the end of 2010.
The ace up iPhone’s sleeve is that, despite the Galaxy Nexus having an extra 200MHz on the clock, Apple is particularly adept at optimising its operating system to its processors and other hardware, so we should see some pretty slick performance just as we did on the iPad 2.
The Galaxy Nexus is sure to still power through things, however, though it has to be said it won’t blitz gaming and intensive multimedia as much as we hoped.
Winner - Draw

Operating SystemThe iPhone 4S is the debut device for Apple’s new iOS 5 operating system, while the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the first handset to run Google’s new Android Ice Cream Sandwich platform, version 4.0.
iOS 5 has a number of new improvements, including the iMessage service, expanding messaging from just SMS and MMS text to include a BlackBerry Messenger style service between iPhones.
The browser has also been enhanced and is much faster, it also features some new viewing modes for either storing web pages to view later or stripping them down to raw text for easier reading.
Twitter has been more extensively integrated, though you still have to download and install it to take advantage of these features. There’s also the Newsstand app which aggregates all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions into one place and supports background downloads.
Unique to the iPhone 4S is the Siri Assistant, a voice operated assistant which can help you organise your calendar and allows you to set reminders, read text messages, reply, make phone calls and search for information.
Android Ice Cream Sandwich brings many of the changes made in the tablet-specific 3.0 Honeycomb to the smartphone platform.
This includes faster web browsing with smoother touch control and tab functionality, an enhanced Google voice search (though not as advanced as Siri), a completely re-designed interface and improved customisation, app switching and multi-tasking controls.
Both systems are the most advanced iterations we've seen from their respective developers so far, but we don’t feel one is necessarily better than the other, it’s a case of personal preference.
Winner - Draw

Camera
The Galaxy Nexus is a little disappointing when it comes to the camera as it only uses a 5-megapixel primary at 2592x1936 pixels.
Video capture is at 1080p and there’s a secondary 13-megapixel front-facing camera with video-call support.
It features an LED flash, autofocus, touch focus, geo-tagging and face detection.
Apple has upgraded the iPhone’s camera to an 8-megapixel primary at 3264x2448 pixels, but it’s not just the megapixel count and resolution which has been ramped up.
A fifth lens has been added and an improved aperture to allow in more light and improve photo quality.
The iPhone 4S supports video calling over Wi-Fi and features a front-facing VGA secondary camera.
It has an LED flash and video light, autofocus, touch focus, image and video stabilisation, face detection and geo-tagging.
Apple’s decision to upgrade the camera in the iPhone 4S means it wins this round easily against Samsung’s lacklustre offering.
Winner – Apple iPhone 4S

Final Thoughts
Both phones have decent specs and fit in nicely at the higher end of the current phone market, however, considering all the build up and hype neither are the ‘game changers’ we were expecting.
Both have processors which will handle most of what you can throw at them, although the Galaxy Nexus could have opted for better chipset and GPU architecture to make it a truly excellent smartphone.
The other area where the Galaxy Nexus lacks is the camera which just isn’t anywhere near good enough for a flagship device these days.
We’re disappointed that both handsets have rejected micro SD functionality, but both have considerable onboard storage space.
It might only be a problem having no card capability if you store a ton of music or eBooks but let’s face it this scenario is becoming increasingly the norm for many phone users.
Both displays are excellent, the iPhone has a higher pixel density but the Galaxy Nexus isn’t far behind and has a far larger screen with a higher resolution.
In conclusion, we're calling this one a draw but we feel that both are 'good enough' premium phones rather than anything exceptional.

Read more »

Google opens streaming film rentals to UK Android users

If you are an Android fan in the US, you have been able to rent and stream movies from Google via the Android Market for a long time. If you were an Android user in the UK the only way you could stream those rentals is by using a hack. We talked about that hack to let the streaming work in the UK back in August. You no longer need to hack things to rent movies on your Android device right from the Android Market in the UK.

Google has announced that its movie streaming service has now launched officially in the UK on Android phones. The films are offered on the Android Market starting from £2.49 each. To start users in the UK will have a library of 1000 films they can rent and stream. Android fans in the UK will need to install the Video app to watch the mobiles and once you purchase a film you can watch it anytime over the first 30 days of purchase.
The rentals are also available online from the Android Market as well. The rented films will be offered on any device that the user can log into during the rental. That means you can watch it on your Android smartphone, Android tablet, office computer, and the HTPC at home.
[via Telegraph]

Read more »