When Nuance acquired Swype back in October it was only a matter of time for the company’s award-winning voice to text conversion technology would find its way into the Swype keyboard. So now the keyboard which pioneered the swipe gesture-based typing method that has later been adopted by countless other keyboards now includes Nuance’s Dragon Dictation feature.

This feature is part of the new beta that was just released and also comes with support for 50+ languages. It also has “improved advanced language modelling” and “automatic updates”. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S got decent support from its manufacturer. The smartphone launched with Android 2.1 Eclair, but got a Froyo update shortly after and eventually got a pass to the land of Gingerbread.

Sadly, with the latest release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Sammy is pulling the plug on the Galaxy S and the company won’t be releasing an update for the year-and-a-half old smartphone. But fret not, the independent Android devs community came to the rescue and released a stable, fully functioning, fast running Ice Cream Sandwich ROM for the Galaxy S in surprisingly little time. Read more »

The only thing we love more than high-quality apps are high-quality apps for free. And thanks to the latest GetJar promotion you will be able to get more than a 100 of those on your droid.

All you need to do is visit GetJar’s mobile website and download their Android app. From there you can browse the hundred free titles (including some pretty nice game) and download the ones you are interested in. Read more »

The U.S. version of the hottest Android smartphone of the year made it in front of our camera, folks. The Verizon Wireless exclusive (at least for the time being) Samsung Galaxy Nexus is practically identical to its GSM sibling, save for the CDMA/LTE radio on board.

The smartphone features a Read more »

The Amazon Kindle Fire gets listed in the same column as the rest of the Android tablets, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a highly customized version of Android and works differently than the rest. Take the silent auto-updates for example – the Fire will install the latest available firmware version 6.2.1 without asking, which will break root and make the tablet immune to SuperOneClick rooting.

The update does bring several goodies, the most valuable of which is probably the ability to remove items from the homescreen carousel. Read more »

Asus delivered on their promise to make the Transformer Prime available on 19th December and users who placed a pre-order on Amazon.com got their shipping notifications over the past couple of days. The quad-core tablet is now on its way to its first US adopters and just as rumors, takers aren’t in short supply.

The other major retailer that will sell the Transformer Prime in the US, Best Buy, is also expected to start shipping the first orders this week, so units should arrive in time for Christmas. Read more »

Now that Google has officially released the source code for Ice Cream Sandwich we are going to see it on a lot more devices. A couple of days ago we saw it running on the original Xoom and now the developers on xda-developers have managed to get it working on the Samsung Ace too.

I use the term ‘working’ loosely here because the ROM is far from being stable or even usable. Which explains why even before you start reading about it you can see the words “Only for developers!” and “IT CAN KILL YOUR PHONE!” being written on top of the post. Read more »

So, you’ve got yourself a cool new droid with a beefy GPU but then you find out that GTA 3 was optimized for common Androids and their paltry graphics. Luckily, it turns out that the game supports much better graphics, you just need to enable them through slightly unconventional means.

It’s as simple as replacing the right file with a customized one and you can get much improved visuals from the game if your phone’s GPU is up to it. There are a couple of more before/after pics after the jump. Read more »

You know what’s a byword for Christmas? Presents. And Google likes to give them to its employees come Christmas and this years’ is no exception.

As a “Thank you for your hard work throughout the year”, every Google employee in the company’s offices in London and Zurich has received a special Christmas gift in the form of an exclusive Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Read more »

The third member of AT&T’s rather impressive LTE lineup made it to our office. The HTC Vivid surely has presence – even when dressed in a stealthy black color scheme. With a massive 4.5″ screen and a solid metal back, the smartphone cannot help but be noticed.

Now on with a look at the spec sheet. The HTC Vivid packs Read more »

It’s been just a day since Google released the Android 4.0.3 update and the folks over at xda-developers have managed to get it working on the original Motorola Xoom already.

While this may sound like exciting news, it’s still pretty much a work in progress, which means things are not working quite as well as they should. The camera is not working and there is a green overlay from time to time. Read more »

We caught wind of Fructel’s Bluetooth games controller not long ago, designed to give any Android device a little more gaming freedom with its dedicated gaming controls.

Well, now we’ve actually had the chance to take the Gametel games controller for a spin so we can really tell you what it’s all about. Read more »

By popular request, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo V is our newest guest at the office. It’s the same phone (even the colour) we met a few months back, but the V (as in the Roman number 5, not the alphabet letter) version comes with a downgraded camera (5MP) and the company’s latest version of Android.

Let’s start with a some live pictures: Read more »

Ainol Novo 7″ is a 7-inch tablet with Android 3.2 Honeycomb preinstalled that retails for $145 (down from $206.61) at McBub online retailer.

What you get for your money is a 7″ WVGA (800 x 480) resolution multi-touch display, a single-core Ingenic JZ4770 Xburst 1 GHz processor, 512 MB worth of RAM, 8 gig storage, 2 MP back and VGA front cameras and, most notably, Android Honeycomb 3.2 preinstalled. Read more »

It came as a bit of a surprise when it turned out that the Android Flash Player doesn’t work on the Ice Cream Sandwich-running Galaxy Nexus a few weeks back. But Adobe have been hard at work to fix that and they’ve released what could be one of the very last updates for the Android player.

Let’s hope it’s not the last update, because while the Flash Player may be working correctly for the most part, some bugs are present in this release (several of which show up only on ICS). Read more »