The AT&T exclusive Sony Xperia ion was the talk of CES six months ago. Developed specifically with the lucrative US market in mind, the handset one ups its sibling, the Sony Xperia S on a couple of major occasions – it packs a bigger screen and offers expandable memory. Boy, were we itching to get our hands on it when we saw it break cover.

Well, here it is folks. A cool six months later, sans the flagship aura, and with an affordable $99.99 price tag, the Sony Xperia ion made it to our office. Here’s what the handset has to offer. Read more »

At the announcement of the latest iteration of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google unveiled their updated Voice Search engine. It’s not exactly a virtual personal assistant but we decided to just go with it and see how it stacks up against one of the best ones out there – Apple’s Siri.

Google’s Voice Search in Jelly Bean, as its name suggests, is limited at doing web searches, and setting up the occasional alarm. Siri, on the other hand, is a full-blown virtual assistant – able to open applications (iOS6-only) set up meetings and even crack you up with a joke. We’ll be comparing the two in a series of web search tests and a side task to see how they fare. Read more »

If you’ve missed the live stream of the Android keynote from Google I/O, it’s now available on YouTube.

It’ll show you all the impressive Android statistics, as well as the Jelly Bean announcement and Google Nexus 7 unveil. Read more »

The Google Nexus 7 that was announced couple of days ago is currently on pre-order only in black, with reports coming in from Google I/O revealing that some developers got a white Nexus 7 as part of the developer gift pack.

However, we got an anonymous tip with a screenshot of the Carphone Warehouse inventory system showing that a brown version of the seven incher might be in the works as well. Read more »

There has hardly been any doubt that the freshly announced Google Nexus 7 would be a solid performer on the benchmark arena. After all, NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset with four CPU cores is a well known powerhouse by now. However, we couldn’t help but be curious about the way Google’s slate would stack up against the well-established, higher priced players on the tablet market.

As you probably know by now, the Google Nexus 7 CPU cores are clocked at 1.3GHz each – that’s a tad less than the typical 1.5GHz, which we’ve seen on other Tegra 3 devices. Read more »

Just as expected, the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean ROMs for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus are already out – both officially and unofficially – but the HTC One X gets to join in on the action too.

Initially based on the SDK, the ROM created by an XDA-Developers member is now based on the Galaxy Nexus images. Read more »

Google has a traditionally been incorporating an Easter egg inside every version of Android, that can be viewed by repeatedly tapping the Android version number within the Settings app. In Ice Cream Sandwich, you could find the Android Ice Cream Sandwich logo and if you touch and hold it, it would expand and eventually you’d see a Nyan Cat style animation of the logo.

In Android 4.1, you see a Jelly Bean with the tell-tale Android antennae on the top and if you press and hold the image, a large number of cel-shaded jelly beans appear on the screen and you can flick them around as much as you like. You can catch a video of this in action after the break. Read more »

The Google Play Store website already offered a super convenient way to just push apps to your device but now Google has taken it a couple of steps further.

Google has updated the ‘My Android Apps’, which until now only displayed some of the apps that you have downloaded on your device, to include the option to remotely update apps as well as uninstall them. Read more »

The Google Maps app isn’t the only one getting a major update today. Google has also released updates for the YouTube and Google+ apps on Android that bring some slick new interface design to both the apps.

Let’s start with the YouTube app, which you’ll notice has a new UI that looks similar to the recently released Google+ apps. The app shows you new videos from your subscribed channels with large thumbnail images spanning the width of the display. Read more »

The Google Nexus 7 tablet is finally official and it’s time to see if it can do the job it’s meant for – be a real-world alternative to the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0.

The Android tablet manufacturers (except for Asus and its Transformer prime) learned the hard way that their tablets need to be as affordable as possible to gain some traction. Amazon led the way pricing its Kindle Fire at $199 and made a huge impact, but eight months later there has only been one slate to come close to its price point, while still offering decent hardware – the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. Read more »

One of the first people to get the Google Nexus 7 tablet are the developers and attendees at the Google I/O conference, which is currently taking place in San Francisco.

It’s a sweet déjà vu from a year before, when Google gave away free 32GB Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung Nexus S and Samsung Chromebook to each attending developer. Now the company is doing it again, but this time with its own, freshly announced Nexus 7 tablet, a brand new Galaxy Nexus and the innovative Nexus Q. Read more »

Google obviously has invested a lot in delivering all the content for their Google Play store – especially, the videos and the music. So much that they actually had to design and build their own hardware device that allows you to consume the Google play digital content right on the biggest screen in your house.

Enter Google Q, the web-connected, “social” box that runs Android. It’s meant to stream content for you from the cloud, where supposedly you have all your digital content. Read more »

Google’s new tablet, the Nexus 7, will be the first device that will come with the mobile Google Chrome as its default browser. Google’s presenters were mum on what that means for other devices.

Nexus 7 is also the first Jelly Bean device, so it’s possible that JB will drop the current browser and use Chrome. Since it would be a while since any of us not present at the Google I/O gets one, I suggest you head to the Google Play app store to get the latest version of the Chrome browser for Android. It just graduated from beta. Read more »

We already had a look at how many new Androids are activated a day, now it’s time to look at the Google Play store. There are now 600,000 apps and games in the store and users do 1.5 billion installs each month. Google have tallied the score and there have been 20 billion installs in total.

It’s not just the number of apps though, the way apps are handled has been improved and the Play Store now offers magazines and TV shows. Read more »

Google’s I/O is just starting up and there are a ton of exciting news to come. But Hugo Barra opened up with how far Android has come so far – and it’s quite far as it turns out.

400 million Android devices have been activated already – that’s a four-fold increase in just one year. Read more »