Ice Cream Sandwich now on 7.1 percent of all Android smartphones

Over the past little while we've started to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich make its way to quite a few devices and now Google has updated their latest Android platform version statistics to give us all a better look at the rate of adoption across the board. Gingerbread is still the run away leader here with a total of 65 percent but Ice Cream Sandwich has now reached 7.1 percent of Android smartphones out there. For some perspective, that's up from the 2.9 percent reported in April.

Source: Android Developers

Motorola ships 5.1 million smartphones in Q1, posts $121 million loss

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AppId is over the quota

Motorola this afternoon posted its Q1 2012 earnings, and things aren't all that rosy on the phone side of the biz. While revenue in its mobile device division was up 3 percent to $2.2 billion, Motorola Mobility still posted a $121 million (GAAP) operating loss for the quarter, some $32 million more than a year ago.

On the plus side, Moto shipped some 8.9 million mobile devices, with 5.1 million of them of the smartphone variety. 

Moto's bullet points for the quarter were the Droid RAZR MAXX and Droid 4, the Motoluxe (which is a bit of a hit outside the U.S.) and the Bubba Watson-branded MOTOACTV Golf Edition.

Source: Motorola Mobility

Android now found on 51% of U.S. smartphones

Android has finally broken the 50% market share hurdle, according to a quarterly report from comScore. Android continued its phenomenal level of growth for the quarter ending in March 2012, climbing 3.7% since the December survey. Android’s growth continues to come at the expense of RIM and Microsoft, who saw declines of 3.7% and 0.8% respectively. Apple’s iOS gained just over 1% to make up 30.7% of the U.S. market.

Android’s biggest challengers in the future will be Microsoft and RIM, who will both release major new platform revisions in the fall. With consumer sentiment increasingly against these companies, however, it appears the smartphone OS market will be a two-trick pony for at least the foreseeable future.

Can Android break 60% in coming months, or do you think we’ll start to see the market plateau after too long? Sound off in the comments.

U.S. Cellular discounts its Galaxy smartphones, adds new devices to its prepaid lineup

U.S.Cellular today announced its latest promotion, which features the carrier’s entire line of Galaxy S devices discounted up to $100 off their regular prices. The Galaxy S Aviator, the regional carrier’s flagship 4G device, is now available for $99 after mail-in rebate, though you’ll have to live in an area covered by U.S. Cellular’s LTE network to take advantage of the discount. The Samsung Mesmerize is down to $49.99 after instant savings, while the Galaxy S II, now available in white, is down to $179.99 after mail-in rebate.

The promotion also brings the addition of three heavy hitters to U.S. Cellular’s prepaid lineup. Starting today, the HTC Hero S, the Motorola Electrify, and the Samsung Galaxy S II are all available on prepaid plans; the Hero S will set you back $299.99, while the Electrify and the GSII will cost a cool $399.99.

No word on how long the “limited time promotion” will last, but if you’ve been holding out for your shiny new Samsung smartphone, this weekend might be high time to pull the trigger.

Source: U.S. Cellular

Almost half of the subscribers mobile U.S. have smartphones, survey finds, with Android make up half of that

Smartphones are large companies these days and the market isn't ' t all signs of slow down, nor is any planned in little time the next. New information from Nielsen suggest that smartphones are now in almost 50 per cent of us mobile subscriber households with Android claiming 48% of people who have a smartphone. has chosen to 32.1% Apple ' s iPhone and RIM ' BlackBerry s captured the remaining of 11.6%. Respondents in February who obtained their smartphone in the last three months, 48% have chosen Android with 43% opting for Apple ' s iPhone - is not good for RIM

Source: Nielsen

IMDb Movies & TV app updated to support HD streaming of movie trailers on tablets and smartphones

When we chose IMDb Movies & TV as the tablet app of the year in our 2011 Android Central Editors' Pick Awards it was a pretty fine looking app and in that time, IMDb has continued to improve upon the app overall. The last update brought a new layout and ICS features but now a new update is available for download.

Movie buffs will want to grab this one for sure as it addresses some long standing bugs but more importantly it adds HD streaming of trailers for both tablets and smartphones. Download is past the break for you all, also if you're checking it out let us know what movies you're looking forward to this summer in the comments.

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Google Drive screenshot hints at 5 GB of cloud storage for Android smartphones and tablets

Following up on rumors that Google would be offering a cloud service to access files and multimedia no matter what screen you're looking at, some pictures with details of Google Drive have emerged. Apparently Google Drive will be giving away 5 GB for free with the option to upgrade for more, and the source of this shot claims that it will be launching on April 16.

Google Drive (or something like it) has been rumored for a long time; if this service is actually nearing a launch, it's taken its sweet time. Obviously Google already has a ton of cloud services already synced up with Android, but the only real file locker they've pumped out for Android is Google Music. Being able to wirelessly sync individual files between mobile devices and computers is bound to garner lots of interest, not because it hasn't been done before, but because Google will be able to feed it deeply into the Android OS and make it make it completely seamless.

So, any of you already hooked up with sync services like DropBox - would you be willing to switch to Google Drive for the sake of something a little more native? 

Source: TalkAndroid

Sprint Data Storm Sweepstakes - Win one of 30 Galaxy Nexus smartphones from Sprint

On Sprint and want the chance to win yourself a Samsung Galaxy Nexus? Now you can get the chance to do so. Seems Sprint is throwing a little bit of a celebration and giving away 30 of them. You can head on over to their Sprint Data Storm Sweepstakes site and get enetered today. Before anyone else points it out, yes -- the contest does close on April 5, 2012 so take from that what you will. In other words, it may be the release date or it may not -- we don't know.

Source: Sprint

Samsung Doubles SDRAM Speed With LPDDR3, Available in Smartphones This Year

Samsung Doubles SDRAM Speed With LPDDR3, Available in Smartphones This Year
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AppId is over the quota

Samsung  just announced its LPDDR3 SDRAM, the next-generation low-power-consumption mobile memory chip. The company states that this DRAM will be the mainstream memory used in smartphones later this year.

With Android phones getting more advanced, manufacturers are starting to push their user interface overlays further, requiring more memory in the process. This is why HTC’s latest Sense UI, for example, only runs on the company’s latest and greatest hardware.

Our current crop of smartphones and tablets use LP (Low Power) DDR2 SDRAM, which has a maximum data transmission rate of 3.2GB/sec for the entire chip. Samsung’s new LPDDR3 effectively doubles the transmission rate to 6.4GB/sec, all without increasing the power requirement. This equates to a chip that is twice as fast and more efficient. However, this seems to be only a step toward last year’s announcement of a 12.8GB/sec DRAM chip from Samsung.

With the increasing demands of high definition video and 3D gaming on mobile devices, the need for faster memory is growing. Battery technology is much slower to evolve, however, so being able to increase performance without impacting battery life is a real feat.

Let’s hope we start seeing devices with these chips sooner than later.

» See more articles by Ed Caggiani

Categorized as Android Manufacturers

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The bustling, boring world of smartphones

The bustling, boring world of smartphones
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AppId is over the quota
Summary: The regular appearance of new smartphones has become rather boring, and that is evident in the scrambling we see OEMs doing to set their products apart from the crowd.

Smartphones are like opinions, everybody has one. That’s the way it seems anyway with touch screens being tapped everywhere you look. The adoption of the smartphone has been happening at a rapid pace as they have hit the market by the gross over the past few years. The activity in the smartphone world has been hectic, with new phones being released seemingly every week. All of this movement drove the adoption of the smartphone to high levels, but it’s having another effect. The smartphone world has become boring of late.

I love smartphones, don’t get me wrong. Different platforms are vying for market share with different looks on the home screen, and a lot of companies are pushing really good phones at consumers. The problem is they are all basically the same. Nice displays, fast processors, and lots of apps. Smartphone makers have apparently hit the wall of design innovation, and phones for the most part look the same and do the same things, in the same way. It’s boring.

Take the Android smartphone space, there are still lots of models being released all the time, but nothing to set any of them apart from the others. They are all great phones with a phenomenal amount of computing power inside, but even the OEMs have trouble convincing us that individual handsets can stand apart from the crowd.

You know companies are having a hard time making their latest and greatest phone stand out when one of the biggest players releases something like the Galaxy Note. Samsung produces a lot of Android phones, all more or less the same, and it took building a massive smartphone to stand apart. The Galaxy Note has been termed the “phablet”, or cross between phone and tablet, due to the giant 5-inch screen. Samsung even threw in a stylus to try and set the Note apart from the field. It smacks of Samsung realizing how boring the space has become, thus the need to shake things up.

I’m not singling Android out here, just laying blame for the boredom at its feet. It seems like hundreds of Android phones have been released the past few years, thus the desensitizing of us to them. Now a new release seems like just another phone as we’re a bit numb to the process.

This malaise may be hurting Microsoft’s efforts with Windows Phone. While the platform is nice and much different from Android and iOS, the hardware is roughly the same as all the other handsets. That boredom is preventing consumers from taking a serious look at Windows Phone because there just doesn’t seem to be anything special setting them apart from the crowd. And a big crowd of smartphones it is.

Hopefully some company will come along and produce something to catch us by surprise. Something radically different from all the other phones that rekindles the excitement we all felt about smartphones not that long ago. It’s not clear what that might be, but a giant 5-inch phone doesn’t seem to be it.

Of interest:

James Kendrick has been using mobile devices since they weighed 30 pounds, and has been sharing his insights on mobile technology for almost that long.

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