Amazon are today celebrating their Android Appstore’s first birthday and in light of this fact, they’ve come over all generous. As well as a number of discounts on popular paid apps, they’re also giving away eight Kindle Fire’s between now and the end of March.

As well as the week-long app discounts, the company also revealed a number of stats which they’ve been able to pull over the course of the year. For one, there are now some 31,000+ applications available to download from the Appstore up from 4000 last year, but lets talk more about those deals. Read more »

The HTC One S has joined the One X in the elite ranks of devices which have been rooted before actually being available for purchase on the market!

Both devices can be rooted fairly easily, save for one little caveat: they require an unlocked bootloader to do so. Read more »

Initially Mozilla took a firm stance when it came to HTML5′s video tag – only open-source video codecs are welcome, proprietary stuff like h.264 will not be supported. Now however, their position has softened – Firefox will support whatever media codecs the host OS has in addition to Theora (which was there from the start).

The change will first be implemented in their experimental Boot 2 Gecko mobile OS (which we saw in action at the MWC) and later added to the Android version of Firefox. Desktop Firefox might prove a bigger challenge, however. Read more »

According to the folks at Engadget, who recently visited Samsung’s Korean headquarters, Samsung is considering adopting an open operating system for their cameras. And when we hear ‘open’, the first thing that comes to our minds these days is Android.

Now of course, Samsung could use any of the other open OSes out there. Two such examples are Samsung’s own Tizen and Bada. But practically speaking, Android makes the most sense right now. Read more »

As the Droid RAZR quickly became a seriously popular smartphone, it is no surprise that Motorola took its looks and solid build quality to its tablet lineup as well. The LTE packing Droid XYBOARD 8.2 for Verizon Wireless is part of this group. The slate has taken the good looks of the RAZR family to go with its impressive build quality.

The Droid XYBOARD 8.2 packs the same TI OMAP 4430 chipset with two 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 cores, and PowerVR SGX540 GPU as its RAZR relatives. Read more »

Yesterday Sony unveiled the Xperia sola – one of the most interesting mid-range droids that we have seen for a long time. Featuring the new hover touch technology (we only saw that on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, previously) and a cool distinctive design, the Xperia sola has arguably the best potential of all smartphones in the company lineup.

We are now giving you the official Sony promo video for the Xperia sola, which takes a closer look at the hover touch and a few of the other highlights of the smartphone. Read more »

Ever since we got our hands on the HTC One S we noticed that its aluminum unibody felt somewhat different and much nicer to touch. That special feel is because of something called Micro Arc Oxidation, which looks about a gazillion times cooler than it sounds.

So HTC decided to give us a sneak peak of how the process works and why is it better than standard aluminum used in most of their old devices. Read more »

The analysts from IDC just published their report on the global tablet market in the last quarter of last year and it appears that the picture was pretty much what we saw throughout 2011. Android is improving rapidly, but Apple’s iOS is still the king of the hill, accounting for more than half of all sales.

Apple managed to ship 15.4 million units in Q4 of last year, which secured them a market share of 54.7% (down from 61.5% in Q3). The best performer of the quarter was obviously the Amazon Kindle Fire, which got a share of 16.8% even though it was only on sale for a month and a half. Read more »

Speaking at the SXSW today, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger said that the Android version of the popular Instagram app is coming very soon. In fact, Systrom even said that in some ways the Android version of the app is even better than their iOS app and that it will be the most amazing Android app we’ll ever see.

Now we have been hearing about this Android version of Instagram for quite a while now when Instagram itself mentioned it on their blog a few months ago but we did not have any concrete date for the launch. Unfortunately, we still don’t have that yet but it’s nice to know that it will be coming shortly. Read more »

Although there is no dearth of third-party keyboards for Android, this one in particular stands out from the rest due to the inclusion of some nifty shortcut keys that you can use to enter commonly typed phrases with just a single tap. The keyboard presents you with a bunch of icons, each of which has a handful of commonly used phrases assigned to it. You just press the relevant buttons and the phrases are automatically entered into the text box. With just a couple of clicks you can have an entire message ready to send. You get a whole bunch of icons with several phrases that you can customize and you can also download additional sets from within the app.

Another cool feature is the way it lets you enter time. Instead of typing out the entire time or date into a message you just click on the clock icon and select the time on the clock or the date you want on the calendar and the keyboard enters it for you in the text box. Read more »

Back at CES, Asus unveiled its $250 quad-core Memo tablet and got everyone quite excited by the possibility to have a powerful tablet with a proper OS on the cheap. Then came the cold shower and the news that the Memo won’t be available in the UK, as Asus believes the Padfone will be better suited to that market.

Those led some of us to believe that the Asus Padfone price will be at least close to what the Memo will be going for, but here comes another disappointment. According to reports, based on insider information, the Padfone will hit British stores costing £699.98. Read more »

As a proper rugged device, the battery life of the AT&T exclusive Samsung Rugby Smart is among its most important features. After all, finding a charging spot when outdoors is not necessarily the easiest thing to do, right?

The smartphone features a 1650mAh battery, which is the same as the unit found in the Samsung Galaxy S II. In the case of the Rugby Smart however, the spec sheet is significantly more modest, so we did expect a commendable performance. Read more »

There’s a particularly juicy rumor for you – we might see the official announcement of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 slate tomorrow. The tablet, which is said to feature an 11.6″ LCD with the insanely sounding resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels might be unveiled at the SXSW event in Austin, Texas.

The rumor is based on an unnamed source close to the matter, who confirmed to Pocket-lint that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6 will be announced at an even in Texas. The Korean company mentioned earlier that it will be making a “special announcement” at the event tomorrow and the rest is simply a matter of connecting the dots. Read more »

There is a new update for Chrome for Android Beta, the mobile version of the popular Chrome browser from Google. (No, they haven’t added Flash support)

Keep in mind that this is still a beta, so some issues may still be expected. Read more »

Usually, new Apple product announcements generate lots of commotion and make a stir in the tech community. The new iPad unveiling is another case in point, but this time Samsung and Nvidia have something to say for themselves in response to Apple’s claims on the iPad event yesterday.

Samsung has felt the need to make a short comparison table, not close to our in-depth one, and put their Galaxy Note 10.1 and the new iPad face to face and see how they differ on some key (according to Samsung) points. Nvidia on the other hand, feel that the comparison between their Tegra 3 chip and the Apple’s A5X won’t win any awards for authenticity. Read more »