U.S. Cellular isn’t one of the major carriers you’re used to hearing about, but they do serve about 6.1 million customers in 26 U.S. states. That’s why, whenever they have the opportunity to add some top-notch Android devices to their lineup, it gets everyone excited. While there hasn’t been any official announcement, a screenshot of their ESN system shows both the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Samsung Galaxy S II, which is usually a good indication that these devices will be available soon.
Christmas day has historically been a record shattering day in terms of new device activations and app downloads. This Christmas was no different according to these recent stats published by Flurry Analytics. Using a baseline average taken from the first 20 days of December, Flurry showed that new Android and iOS device activations rose 353% on Christmas day. While averaging around 1.5 million activations during the month of December, activations jumped to more than 6.8 million on Christmas day. Ho, ho, ho — ly rising reindeer! That’s a staggering increase and to get a better feel for just how impressive those numbers are, only 2.8 million devices were activated last Christmas day.
You may remember us talking about the HTCdev site which helps HTC owners unlock their device’s bootloader. That site while “official,” takes quite some time to update its list of unlockable devices. That is why xda-developer forum user frigid decided to go ahead an create his own utility to speed things up. Picture the HTCdev unlockable list on steroids and that’s what you get with the unofficial HTC Super Tool.
One of the more gimmicky features in Android 4.0 is that of face unlock. While it’s cool and makes for a great party trick, it’s really not the most secure (can be unlocked with a photo). When Nexus S owners were treated to Android 4.0, Face Unlock was omitted due to insufficient hardware but that didn’t stop the Android community from getting it anyways. Apparently the “insufficient hardware” was nothing more than the VGA quality of the front facing camera on the Nexus S. It is fully capable of performing Face Unlock but perhaps Google was worried about its accuracy with the low res camera. Either way, it’s now available thanks to a custom ROM that can be flashed by any rooted soul.
We live in a day and age where having a home phone basically means having your smartphone in your home. While many have abandoned the home phone in lieu of having one phone bill to worry about, there are still a large number of people who either don’t have good cell service in their home, or simply don’t want an expensive cellular service bill. Now, thanks to ARCHOS and Android, those people can have a home phone that is a smartphone, without the worry of an expensive cell contract. Introducing the ARCHOS 35 Smart Home PHone.
