Our LG Optimus 2X got its Android 2.3.4 update at the start of this month and we’ve playing with it ever since. And since the LG former flagship is once again becoming a smartphone many are considering (this time due to the lower price, not top functionality), we thought we might give you a rundown of the improvements we noticed.

The truth is, Gingerbread is by far not as major an update as Froyo was and the Optimus 2X doesn’t feel like a completely different phone after you get it – the overall experience is similar. However, you are free to disagree with us if the updated bits and pieces were just the one bothering you. Read more »

We’ve got the battery tests results of yet another smartphone to share with you. The HTC Sensation XL will try and protect the honor of the company after the rather disappointing performance of the HTC Radar yesterday.

If you are just looking at the specs, you wouldn’t back the Sensation XL to do too greatly. A 1600 mAh battery and a 4.7″ LCD seemingly put the XL at a disadvantage, but maybe it has an ace up its sleeves. Read more »

The quad-core Transformer Prime is all but official by now but Asus have went that extra distance and setup a dedicated product page for their premium slate over at their website complete with specs and features.

And if you’re a UK resident, not so keen on quad-core and think dual-core is good enough, you’re in luck as the first-gen Transformer just got a special price cut in some retail shops (Best Buy and HMV) for the 16GB model – now starting at £299 (80 quid lower than the launch asking price). The deal is set to expire on December 4 so you’d best hurry up before all the units have been cleaned from the shelves. Read more »

Apple has scored a point in their ongoing court match against HTC. The US International Trade Commission has ruled that the Cupertino-based company doesn’t infringe any of the HTC-owned patents.

Earlier, ITC declared that Apple was, in fact, violating some of the patents that HTC acquired with its purchase of S3 Graphics. However, it was OS X, rather than iOS, which was found in the wrong and Apple has obviously done enough to fix that. Read more »

You may have already forgotten all about the HTC HD2, but the hacking community clearly hasn’t. The Windows Mobile (that’s BC in Microsoft speak) smartphone got its lifetime extended way beyond what its manufacturer expected thanks to the efforts of some indie developers, who keep porting the latest versions of Android to it.

Now, the HTC HD2 is even ready to run the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, long before most Android smartphones can do so. An HD2 ROM based on the AOSP release of Ice Cream Sandwich is available for download and you can try it right now. Read more »

Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik has announced that his extremely popular ROM series CyanogenMod will be coming to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 when his group upgrades their ROM base to Android Ice Cream Sandwich in version 9.

The CM9 (7 is for Gingerbread and 8 for Honeycomb) is already in the works and the CM team expects the first stable versions to arrive early next year. Read more »

Ever since people have gotten their hands on the Galaxy Nexus, we have been hearing reports of the device not supporting the USB Mass Storage (UMS) protocol that allows you to mount the internal memory on your computer. Since this is the first Ice Cream Sandwich device, this peculiarity was attributed to the OS lacking the particular feature. But as Google engineer Dan Morrill explains, that is not the case.

As it happens, Ice Cream Sandwich does support UMS, it’s just that the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t. Instead, it uses MTP or Media Transfer Protocol, which is natively supported on Windows and commonly used by devices such as media players to sync with Windows Media Player. Read more »

We thought Samsung left the GPS issues behind after they replaced the original Galaxy S as their flagship device, but it turns out that the Galaxy S II has some issues with its GPS connectivity, too. It appears that the units distributed by Vodafone have a faulty GPS configuration file, which prevents them from acquiring satellite lock quickly.

There are several lengthy threads in the Vodafone support forums dedicated to the issue, but the carrier is still unable to come up with a solution. Even the Android 2.3.5 update, which was released just a few weeks ago didn’t address the faulty file. Read more »

Samsung’s Made for Germany Galaxy Tab 10.1N will soon be hitting the German shelves. But before that we have a video for you of the device getting a thorough rundown in a typical Teutonic fashion.

In the video below by NewGadgets.de, we can see the new Galaxy Tab 10.1N first getting unboxed. After spending some time explaining the new design the video moves on to the software and the performance of the device in gaming and web browsing. From there it moves on to benchmarking and finally end it with a comparison with rival tablets. Read more »

A hardware QWERTY device is probably the last missing piece from Samsung’s impressive, dual-core Android lineup in the United States. Today, we have the Samsung Captivate Glide for AT&T on out hands. With a slide-out QWERTY on board, the smartphone should be the answer to the prayers of quite a few users out there.

In terms of specs, the Captivate Glide Read more »

Well, it seems the first person in the US to get a Galaxy Nexus is none other than Apple co-founder, Steve “Woz” Wozniak. As strange as that may sound, that’s exactly what’s happened at Google’s campus in Mountain View, California.

What happened is this; Woz tweeted that he was looking to get a Galaxy Nexus but as you may know it isn’t currently available in the US. After that he probably got an invite from Google to come over to their campus, where he was given a shiny new Galaxy Nexus and an Ice Cream Sandwich T-shirt. Read more »

True, you have seen us put the Samsung Galaxy S II battery thought its paces before, but we thought you might be interested to see how it does over our new testing course. So here goes the Samsung Galaxy S II battery life test, revisited.

The Android smartphone comes with a 1650 mAh battery and a pretty large 4.3″ screen. Judging by those specs alone, we probably shouldn’t expect the Galaxy S II to top our charts, but the power-efficient Super AMOLED Plus might help it put in a decent performance. Plus, its latest Android update is said to improve battery performance, so who knows. Read more »

What you see here is one of the coolest USB sticks we’ve ever come across. Called Cotton Candy, it carries a fully functional chipset running the Android operating system inside it. All it needs is a USB cable to draw power and an HDMI cable to connect to a screen of some sort.

Thanks to this creation of the Norwegians from FXI technologies, you can turn any available screen into an Android device. Your TV and computer monitor can grow brains of their own with this stick. Read more »

The first ever buyer of the first every official Ice Cream Sandwich phone was a certain Alex Ioannou in the UK. He seemed rather happy with his purchase in the picture that was tweeted from Samsung UK’s Twitter account.

Unfortunately for him, his happiness was short lived because when he switched on his new Galaxy Nexus, he discovered he had gotten something that he hadn’t really paid for. Read more »

Looking at all the leaks that come out of HTC, whoever is in charge of keeping secrets there is obviously doing a very poor job. The latest leak is the upcoming tablet from HTC called the HTC Quattro. It’s a 10.1-inch tablet and will have the new quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. This is probably the same tablet we heard about a few days back.

The device will be running Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box and have 16GB internal memory, 1GB of RAM, 8 megapixel camera, Beats audio and will come in 3G and Wi-Fi editions. The tablet is said to be only 9mm thick but there are already thinner tablets out on the market. Read more »