Here comes an impressive milestone for you. Google Maps for Android has provided 50 billion kilometers of turn-by-turn navigation to its users. Quick calculations show that this is the distance you would cover if you traveled to the Sun and back 334 times.

To celebrate the occasion, Google has released Google Maps 6.5 for Android with a refreshed UI look and feel. The home screen in the Navigation part of the app is completely redesigned for Android 4.0+ devices and features a more intuitive and easier to use interface. Read more »

After some hesitation, Samsung is finally delivering the promised Value pack update for the original Galaxy S. The new firmware adds some Ice Cream Sandwich features to the Gingerbread-tasting Galaxy, including Face unlock.

It turns out, though, the Face unlock is actually better than the one present in the stock Android ICS, which is easy to bypass with a photo. Samsung’s team responsible for the value pack heard those concerns and made this unlock option more secure. Read more »

Yesterday we first heard the Samsung I9300 might be called Galaxy M and belong to the mid-range and now we already got our first glance of its specs. The new rumors have little facts to back them up, so you probably shouldn’t bet the farm on them coming up true, but they are more exciting enough to be worth checking out.

According to our source, the device might even drop the Galaxy branding and go by Samsung M. What’s more interesting, though, are few neat little tricks up its sleeve, including eye-monitoring feature, which will keep the display turned on if it recognizes you are looking at it. Read more »

Amazon has pushed the 6.3 update to Kindle Fire. One of the new features that have been added is the ability to share the contents of the book that you’re reading. Users can highlight a particular passage from a book and then share it on a social network of their choice, without having to leave the book. These passages will also be available to other Kindle readers reading the same book.

Another new feature is Book Extras. It provides the user with additional content on a particular book, such as description of the characters, information on the author, etc. and is powered by the community driven book encyclopedia called Shelfari. Think of it as the special features in a DVD, but for your ebooks. Read more »

The LTE sporting HTC Vivid for AT&T is the first handset from the Taiwanese company’s U.S. lineup to get an update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The older HTC Sense 3.0 got a bump as well – its version is now 3.6.

Quite naturally, we were curious to put the HTC take on Google’s latest OS through its paces. After all, the HTC Sense 3.6 flavored Android 4.0 ICS will find its way (it actually is already in some parts of the world) to the company’s dual-core Android lineup from last year. Therefore, if you happen to own a member of the aforementioned group of devices, read on to get an idea what will your phone’s interface look like after the major OS update. Read more »

After getting Ice Cream Sandwich in the beginning of the year, the Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi has now beat everyone to the chase, even Google’s own Galaxy Nexus, and has starting to receive an update to Android 4.04.

That being said, the update is incremental and doesn’t bring major new features, rather small bugfixes and enhancements. Read more »

The extremely popular memo app, Evernote, just got a pretty major update in its Android reincarnation. Version 3.6 brings speech-to-text support a new theme and several new widgets, which should help it serve its role as an extension of your brain even better.

So from now on you will be able to dictate your notes, rather than create them with the on-screen keyboard. Naturally, voice notes are also supported, but there are times when you need to have the memo’s text, rather than just an audio file. Read more »

ASUS US just announced that the Transformer Prime is getting “awesome new features” thanks to an upcoming update. However, it didn’t provide any details about the said update so ASUS Italy had to come to the rescue and reveal the mystery.

And the news are heart-warming indeed. ASUS will launch an important update tomorrow, March 29 which will bring support for a new accessory called “Prime LAN cable”. Yes, the Transformer Prime will be able to rock an Ethernet LAN connection thus getting one step closer to being a full-fledged netbook. Read more »

Opera just released the latest version of its server-accelerated Mini web browser for Android. Opera Mini 7 brings several new features, including improved hardware acceleration, which should drastically improve its smoothness.

The Speed Dial screen has also been updated and you are now allowed to select the number of buttons you see there. Previously, Speed Dial was set to show 9 of your bookmarks and there was no way to alter that. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Note is quite popular with people – Samsung just announced thatover 5 million Notes were shipped. Not all of them went to humans though – at least one elephant is quite happy with his Galaxy Note.

Peter the Elephant uses the Note to play some music, browse photos (even snap a few himself) and the S Pen proved to be well-designed for use with a trunk, too. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G for T-Mobile has a rather impressive spec sheet, which means that its battery will have a lot of features to power. And while its 1750 mAh capacity is a noticeable improvement over the 1500 mAh found in the original I9000, it now has an extra CPU core, faster 3G network, as well as NFC to deal with.

As always we will kick things off with a closer look at the telephony endurance of the smartphone. Read more »

Remember BlueStacks App Player? Sure you do, it’s the software allowing you to run all of the 450,000 Android apps on Windows and tablets, and the great news is that it has gone out of its alpha stage to the undergo final beta testing.

The beta update boasts a few updates such as LayerCake, allowing for ARM-designed apps to run on an x86 environment, hardware accelerated graphics and virtual accelerometer support. Read more »

When I first read through the headlines, at first I thought Rockstar has decided to port the LA Noire to Android, but it’s not the case. OnLive has updated the LA Noire game with touch-optimized controls and interface so you can play it on almost every Android tablet out there.

OnLive is a paid service where you can rent or buy games and play them on tablets, PCs, Macs or even TVs. The actual playing is done on the OnLive serves, you just get the picture via HD streaming. Read more »

The Samsung-employed advertising agents have had no shortage of creativity recently. We covered all sorts of cool videos that they produced over the past few weeks, but it turns out the coolest was yet to come.

The Portuguese Samsung branch came up with one of the most impressive clips we have seen for quite some time, while trying to promote the unassuming Galaxy Y Duos smartphone. The video only took this guy, who was used as a screen, a projector and, well, plenty of inspiration to make. Read more »

The droid version of Angry Birds Rio just got an update bringing users 12 new bonus levels.

Those are unlocked by collecting in-game achievements like collecting all the fruit in an episode or passing all the levels. Read more »