Early (early early) this morning, Steve Kondick (Cyanogen) announced that the immensely popular CyanogenMod had reached 1 million unique downloads! CyanogenMod is just one of many custom firmwares based on the open-source Android operating system. The CyanogenMod Team consists of numerous devout developers and members who work hard to bring support and features to as many devices as humanly possible. They have extended the life of devices well beyond the realm of official support and have freed us from the chains of carrier induced crap. Custom Android firmware and the ability to have it, is just one of the many advantages of an open-source project such as Android.

Google’s goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to present a more unified and distinguishable platform UI from here on out. They’ve been hard at work trying to figure out ways to maintain their “open” approach, while also maintaining some sort of consistency. They want developers to know that they have worked hard on creating Ice Cream Sandwich UI with “the users’ best interests in mind,” and encourage them to apply and adapt these methods when developing for Android. To help guide developers on how to create a complimenting application for Android, they have opened up a new site called “Android Design.”

If you haven’t already heard, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is set to hit the Canadian wireless company TELUS tomorrow. To remind us of this tasty news, TELUS sent out a tweet confirming its arrival tomorrow, and a link on how to get it. This is exciting news for our northern friends, and I’m betting they can’t wait to get their hands on some Ice Cream Sandwich.

One day we’ll all look back and say “Hey, remember when we used to have 3G phones?” Of course our kids won’t have any idea of what we’re talking about, in fact, they’ll probably be calling them communicators by then. It seems Verizon is set in making 4G LTE the future of their network, so much, that they have announced from here on out, 4G LTE connectivity is a “hard requirement” for any manufacturer looking to have their phone on Big Red’s network. Of course for now, they will be making a few exceptions for “dumb” phones and phone’s that work on their push-to-talk network.

Sprint has announced a minor maintenance update for the HTC EVO 3D. Software update 2.17.651.5 should be available starting today for anyone who wishes to manually pull it up, otherwise an OTA should begin rolling out on Jan 17. To manually check for the update, simply hit Menu > Settings > System updates > HTC software update > Check now. This update is very minor and includes: