New Carrier IQ Class Action Lawsuit Sues More OEMs, Carriers

As accusations of fouplay within Carrier IQ have turned up due to research work done by Trevor Eckhart – who exposed the company for collecting user information that may be violating the Federal Wiretap Act – some lawsuits shortly followed.
One early class action lawsuit targeted HTC, Samsung and Carrier IQ. A new one filed by three lawfirms in a joint effort is targeted at HTC, Samsung, Apple, Motorola, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. Strangely enough, Carrier IQ itself isn’t being sued in this particular instance.

Carrier IQ has not been hit with a formal federal investigation yet but these lawsuits and pressure from government bodies all add nicely to a hopeful investigation sometime in the future.
Carrier IQ has admitted that their application may appear to be logging information that should be kept private, but they say it’s a byproduct of trying to send information to carriers and OEMs that is actually useful to helping them improve wireless service.
Saying it is one thing and proving it is another, though. Hopefully more of these lawsuits turn up and a big, bright spotlight will be put on the carriers and OEMs who use this service in order to put immense pressure on Carrier IQ to fully and accurately show what information really is or isn’t being transmitted from our phones.

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Verizon Galaxy Nexus phones arriving in stores, rumors still suggest December 9th

Here we go guys, Verizon is finally starting to maybe get ready to make some noise with the Galaxy Nexus. For all those awaiting its arrival the time may finally be coming. We are now seeing actual hardware devices and retail packaging for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus arriving in Verizon Wireless retail stores thanks to a tip from XDA Developers. Hopefully I can convince the pretty blonde at my local Verizon store to sell me one early — I’ll be taking flowers with me later today for good measure.

What we see here is that famous NEXUS symbol and the Verizon 4G LTE enabled Samsung Galaxy Nexus finally arriving actually in stores. This is a very good sign and I’m still holding strong with my promise for an occupy Verizon if they don’t announce it by the end of today. According to our latest sources Verizon is still aiming for December 9th as the official release date. Meaning there’s a good chance they’ll announce the device today and it will be available by the end of the week. This is still just a rumor along with the many we’ve previously seen so take it as you will.
There are a few more retail packaging photos in the gallery below and plenty of information at the XDA thread linked to above. With Samsung showing off the Verizon edition this weekend in NYC and the latest update to Android 4.1 I’d say things are finally ready for the green light. Don’t get too excited because we should all remember the DROID Bionic delays — just saying.
Stay tuned as we have a feeling an official announcement and some pre-order information could be showing up any day now. Who’s getting excited?

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Intel says smartphone and tablet hardware will run Android 4.0 next year

In an attempt to win back its place in the mobile market, Intel is hyping up its upcoming hardware designs with some Android flair. According to PC World, Intel-based smartphones and tablets running Android will be ready for next year. A version of Ice Cream Sandwich for the upcoming Atom Medfield system-on-a-chip is already at the production stage.

Intel is no stranger to the mobile market, though ARM and Qualcomm have been dominating it as of late. The chip maker hopes that x86 versions of Android will help revive its presence in the mobile space, allowing it to expand to the low-power netbook, tablet and smartphone markets. According to Intel, the first smartphones using its designs will hit the market in the first half of 2012. Intel has been working with Google behind closed doors on Gingerbread and Honeycomb products, none of which have made it past the experimental stage thus far.
Manufacturers already have pretty wide array of system-on-a-chip choices, though it’s all dominated by ARM’s underlying architecture. If Intel can extend its sizable presence into the mobile world with x86 and ARM-based products, it’ll be in a good position to stay healthy when the first ARM-based Windows 8 machines begin to surface, reportedly in 2013. Being part of two of the fastest-growing segments of the technology industry wouldn’t hurt, either.

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6-year-old HTC Universal gets Ice Cream Sandwich port

A few days ago I joked with my fellow Android Community writers that I’d like to see Ice Cream Sandwich ported to the Atari 2600, so I could use it to run an Atari 2600 emulator. That hasn’t happened, but in terms of wow factor, the latest ICS port isn’t that far off. The HTC Universal, the Taiwanese company’s gigantic flipping QWERTY Windows Mobile megadevice from 2005, has been given a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich via (where else?) the XDA Developers forum. The port is based off of CyanogenMod 9, the ICS version of the most popular custom Android ROM.

If you’ve been following the mobile tech world for a while, you may have drooled over the HTC Universal way back when, just like I did. (Not that I could do much more than drool, being in high school at the time.) Naturally the Windows Mobile hardware isn’t ideal for running the modern version of Android – at 64 or 128 megabytes of RAM, compared to the 25gMB of the original G1 and a full gigabyte for the Galaxy Nexus. Like other Windows Mobile ports, this one has to be initiated from the MicroSD card.
After some tweaking by creator “notime2d8″, the image seems to work well enough, if slowly. Not surprising, since the entire system is running off of RAM and using a 528Mhz ARM processor. If you’re lucky enough to have an HTC Universal gathering dust, be sure to try out the port. Good on ya, Android mod developers – now how’s about that Atari version?

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ComScore: 41 million US smartphone owners use Android

Android is dominating the worldwide smartphone game, and while there are markets where it’s even more dominant than it is in the United States, a combination of population and smartphone interest makes it one of the hottest markets on the planet. Android’s continuing gains were highlighted by Nielsen last month, and comScore backs up their numbers with the latest reports on the US mobile market. According to comScore’s math, 41.6 million Americans now use Android-powered smartphones.

That’s 46.3% of all US smartphones,which now number approximately 90 million. The second banana is Apple’s iOS, which has 28.1% of the market, which figures out to 25.3 million iPhones. Unsurprisingly, BlackBerry and Windows-based phones fell again, to 17.2% and 5.6%, respectively. These statistics are for the month of October 2011, when total smartphone ownership in the U.S. grew 10% overall from the last quarter. Android and iOS together made up two-thirds of the smartphone userbase.
There’s two things that we can take away from this report: one, total smartphone adoption in the US is growing fast enough for multiple OS and device makers to increase their sales at the same time, and two, Android may be approaching a saturation point within the next year. With nearly half the smartphone market running Google’s OS, and Apple controlling a the majority of what’s left, the two giants are essentially fighting over users that are abandoning the arguably weaker platforms of Windows Mobile/Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Symbian and others.
If you extrapolated that in the next year, half of all users from other platforms switched to Android, a quarter switched to iOS and another quarter stayed put, that would give Android a 59.1% share of the market, with iOS trailing at 34.5. That’s a very optimistic projection from an Android point of view (and, just to be clear, absolutely unscientific). That said, the continued expansion of the smartphone market in the US and worldwide makes it an imperative for just about every manufacturer and developer.
[via Fierce Mobile Content]

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Google Engineer Sets Facts Straight on Android Hardware Acceleration

With the release of Android Honeycomb and now Ice Cream Sandwich, we have heard a lot of talk about hardware acceleration in Android in recent months. Some of this talk has led to confusion over how Android handles graphics and rendering, confusion that Google engineer Dianne Hackborn is tired is tired of dealing with. She took to Google+ to set the record straight and offered a bulleted list of “facts” for interested readers to peruse. Older versions of Android relied on software rendering at the CPU level, an inefficient method that leads to poor performance and responsiveness on devices with slower processors. Android Honeycomb introduced GPU-level hardware acceleration, and Ice Cream Sandwich further improves on the technical challenges associated with the shift from software to hardware graphics processing.
Hackborn clarifies that Android has always had some sort of hardware acceleration dating back all the way to before version 1.0, including the rendering of menus, pop-ups, and dialogs. Hardware could always render the window that held content, but the “full” hardware acceleration brought about in Android 3.0 deals with rendering the content within a window. However, “hardware accelerated drawing,” Hackborn states, “is not all full of win.” Rather than offer a full paraphrasing of the lengthy writeup she has posted, I suggest you head over to the Google+ source link below to read a more detailed breakdown, that is, if talking nuts and bolts about smartphone software and hardware is of keen interest to you.
[Google+ via The Verge]

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Android 4.0 for $100: NOVO7 is the cheapest Ice Cream Sandwich tablet around

Android’s open source nature lends itself to a staggering variety of form factors and price points, but if Chinese manufacturer MIPS Technologies is to be believed, it’s breaking into the low-end in a huge way today. The company is promoting its brand new NOVO7 device as “the first Ice Cream Sandwich tablet”, and has priced it at a staggering $99 USD. The specs aren’t amazing and the hardware won’t turn heads, but if you’ve got to have ICS right now (and can’t bring yourself to try out a custom ROM) this would seem to be the cheapest way to do so.

The NOVO7 is your basic 7-inch cheapo tablet, not altogether unlike the Polaroid models that were on sale everywhere on Black Friday. A “power-efficient” 1GHz processor it twinned to a 444Mhz GPU. A 2-megapixel rear camera and a front-facing cam of indeterminate quality cover the absolute basics. The 7-inch screen is thankfully capacitive, not resistive, but the marketing materials omit a resolution – I’d guess either 1024 x 600 or 840 x 400.
The manufacturer is quick to tout the tablet’s low-power status, claiming a power draw of less than 400mA during web browsing and a 30-hour standby time. An actual mAh battery rating is absent, but you get expandable storage via the microSD card slot. The tablet comes with 4GB of on-board storage. Wireless is limited to WiFi, but MIPS highlights support for “external 3G”. Obviously the Android Market is nowhere to be seen, but the ad mentions Google CTS Certification, so you can probably get the Market, Gmail, etc. running if you’re up for a little aftermarket hacking. The NOVO7 will offer support for Gameloft titles, including the pre-installed Spider-man.

So, how do you get one? Just click on the “$99″ link on the image-only website to be directed straight to a PayPal order form. But be ready for a nasty shock in the form of $60 shipping and handling, bringing the total price up to $159. That’s Nook Color territory, and even considering that it ships straight from China (with no assurance of a date, by the way) it seems a little stiff. I’d steer clear of this one for your holiday shopping, and wait for ICS tablets or updated software from more established brands. But if you’re feeling adventurous, head on over there and check it out. This is only the first of many Chinese ICS tablets set to hit the market very soon.

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Microsoft to show off Windows 8 app store tomorrow

Microsoft will be making the app store a part of the Windows 8 experience, but until now we don’t really know much about it except that it will be the exclusive way for developers to distribute new-style Windows 8 apps. The store will support free and paid apps, trial versions as well as in-app payments, and it won’t sell older-style (classic) Windows apps that work on Windows 8 and older versions of Windows.
Other than the aforementioned details, we don’t really know much about the Windows Store, but I guess we’re about to find out more. Microsoft will be holding an event tomorrow (December 6^th) in San Francisco – titled the Windows Store Preview, where it will show off for the first time what the store is about. Stay tuned for more details and we’ll keep you posted.

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LG Optimus Net looks to be an affordable dual-SIM Android smartphone

Juggling personal and business mobile phone accounts can be quite tiring and troublesome, especially if you have to carry around with you more than one device. LG’s Optimus Net appears to solve that problem for you in the form of a budget-friendly Android smartphone with dual-SIM card capabilities, allowing you to swap between mobile phone accounts and carriers at whim.
Now don’t expect anything fancy from the LG Optimus Net – in fact one could almost think of it as superseding the LG Optimus One. With an 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM under the hood, a 3.2” HVGA display, a 3.2MP camera, with 512MB of internal memory (comes bundled with a 2GB memory card) and Android’s Gingerbread 2.3 on board, we don’t expect the LG Optimus Net to be breaking the bank any time soon.
The device will also feature a SIM switch key which will replace the search key on the phone, allowing the user to quickly change between the SIM cards. It is expected to cost around $290 and will be debuting in Russia first. It will also debut in Brazil under the LG Optimus Net Dual moniker but no word if there are plans for it to arrive stateside or anywhere else for that matter.

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