Exactly one week ago, Google’s Eric Schmidt stepped on stage during Motorola’s On Display event and announced that Android activations had surpassed 480 million. He also confirmed that there were 1.3 million daily activations of new Android devices.

Yesterday, the director of product management for Android, Hugo Barra, confirmed that the platform has shot past the 500 million mark. This means that about 20 million new Android devices have been purchased over the past six days alone, or about 3.3 million per day. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S III Jelly Bean ROM leaks continue and today we get the latest iteration, version XXDLI5. Early adopters have reported no major bugs so far, so we might be getting near to an official release.

Keep in mind, that while the ROM is Samsung-made it’s not meant for public distribution and installing it will void your warranty. That said, the XXDLI5 Jelly Bean ROM for the Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III is the most stable so far and is fully capable of serving as your daily driver. Read more »

Today we got the chance to sit down with Samsung’s team and have a more thorough look at its recently announced products.

First off, it was the Samsung Galaxy Camera. We tried it first-hand without the messy wires and we’re quite happy with how it felt. It has 21x optical zoom and at its widest end, the lens has an ultra wide angle of 23mm in 35mm terms and there’s a back-lit sensor behind it, which is impressive enough combo, even without counting the Android smart functionality. Read more »

Samsung has announced two new additions to its lineup of memory cards. The company has confirmed that it will be launching 64GB UHS-1 microSD and SD cards in mid-October, which is just a month and a half away now.

The cards will be part of the Pro family, sporting a maximum read speed of up to 104MB/s. Of course you’ll need an UHS-1-enabled host device to achieve that kind of speed. Read more »

Samsung have just released the source code of the ICS kernel of their Galaxy R Android smartphone. This will presumably open the floodgates and custom ROMs and kernels for the device will now start appearing at a rapid rate.

Samsung engineers took their time with the Galaxy R ICS update, delivering it several months after the release for the Galaxy S II, but that was to be expected given the difference in popularity (and price) between the two handsets. Read more »

It certainly took longer than usual, but the LG Optimus 4X HD defenses are finally breached and you can now gain root access to its system. A guy called qaz753 from the all-conquering XDA-developers community did the trick and was kind enough to share the magic with the rest of the 4X HD owners.

The method is a bit more complicated than on some other smartphones, but luckily there’s a step-by-step tutorial courtesy of our tipster that should be quite easy to follow. Read more »

Manufacturers are still taking their time with the official Jelly Bean updates, but the guys over at XDA-developers have been quite busy porting the latest Android distribution to various smartphones and already have quite a lot to show for their efforts.

The most recent achievement of the indie dev community is quite impressive though. The Samsung Galaxy Ace and Gio – two smartphones based on the older-gen ARMv6 CPU – got CM10 ports, which will certainly be their only chance of tasting Jelly Bean. Read more »

Virtual personal assistant app Speaktoit Assistant has just landed in the Windows Marketplace. The app has been well received on both Android where it scored 3.5 million downloads and a user rating of 4.6 and iOS (where its latest version has a rating of 4.5 stars.

The app is compatible with all smartphones running WP version 7.5 or higher and the developers will be making the first 10,000 downloads free. If you don’t make it on time, you will need to pay $0.99 to get it. Read more »

Asus have just confirmed that they will be delivering an Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update to three of their tablets. The company’s Finnish branch confirmed on their Facebook page that the Asus Transformer Pad 300, the Transformer Pad Prime and the Transformer Pad Infinity will all be treated to the latest version of Android.

The announcement is hardly surprising, given that all three slates are powered by the Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset with the powerful 4-PLUS-1 CPU at its heart which should easily be able to run Android 4.1. It’s always good to get an official confirmation from the manufacturer though. Read more »

With a price tag like that, the Google Nexus 7 was always going to be a hot-selling device. However it appears that the demand for the Tegra 3-packing slate managed to surprise even Google themselves, as the company was forced to temporarily suspend the orders for its 16GB version.

The device is currently unavailable for purchase from the Google Play store, leaving third party retailers as your only option if you want to order it now. And we suspect supplies won’t last too long there either, so you might want to hurry up if you want to be among the first to have a Nexus 7. Read more »

Remember when Samsung said that the I9000 Galaxy S simply doesn’t have enough power to run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich? What if we told you that not only is that untrue, but the smartphone can also handle Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

The proof was, as usual, delivered by the omnipotent indie devs over at XDA-developers and came in the form of a Jelly Bean-based ROM, which performs flawlessly but for a couple of minor bugs. Read more »

The Krait powered Qualcomm S4 chipsets are great, right? They give you the best per-core performance of any architecture out there and have the best power efficiency thanks to that 28nm manufacturing process. The only problem is that Krait-powered chipsets are only available in dual-core flavor for now, while competing solutions give you twice that.

It seems as though that this might change sooner than you think, as Qualcomm have just previewed their first S4 Pro chipset (the MSM8960 belonged to the lower-standing S4 Plus series). The Qualcomm APQ8064 was shown powering a development tablet with its four Krait cores and Adreno 320 GPU. Read more »

Hours after it officially started making its way to customers in US and UK, the Google Nexus 7 got its first OTA update. It’s a pretty minor deal, the download weighing in at under 1MB and it takes just seconds to apply.

As you would expect from such a minor file, it brings no major changes to the user experience whatsoever. So far, the only differences spotted are some extra info in the “About” screen in settings and the change in build number from JRO03C to JRO03D. Read more »

So HTC is definitely not out of the tablet race just yet. Shortly after a spokesperson from the Taiwanese company confirmed HTC’s intent of bringing a new slate to the UK soon, we now have the first actual proof of its existence.

The tablet is apparently going to be called the HTC Vertex and it’s going to be powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 chipset. The screen of the Android ICS-running slate is of yet unknown size, but we know it’s going to have a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. Read more »

We think you’ll all agree that currently existing car headlights are really bad when faced with heavy rain or snow. The light they emit gets reflected from raindrops and snow flakes and obstruct a clear view of the road.

What if we told you that there is already a solution to this problem thanks to the latest invention by some Carnegie Mellon scientists. Using some impressively accurate cameras and super-fast computers they managed to predict the trajectory of each rain drop and stream the light between them. Read more »