hardware


Samsung’s decision to leave the Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S out of the Ice Cream Sandwich update pool alienated a large number of Samsung customers — and they were not happy. Not only were they upset over Samsung’s unwillingness to update their device, but they were also unhappy with Samsung’s excuse. According to Samsung, they were not going to be updating the Galaxy Tab and the Galaxy S due to their limited memory (which TouchWiz needs). With the Galaxy S and the Nexus S having similar specs, and the Nexus S set to receive Android 4.0, it appeared the only thing keeping the Galaxy S from getting ICS was Touchwiz. While the majority of Galxy S users are all for being updated to the latest version of Android at the expense of TouchWiz, Samsung was not. That was until today.


Just when Logitech thought it was free and clear of any further Revue setbacks, a minor headache has them reaching for the aspirin — again. Apparently a small percentage of recently manufactured Logitech Revues where shipped with corrupted firmware as a number of customers are unable to contact Logitech’s EULA server for authentication. Customers were led to believe the issue was due to overloaded servers and consequently led them to voice their frustration on Logitech’s Revue forums. After a little digging by Logitech Senior Product Manager Peter McColgan, he has responded to complaints by informing customers that the issue is due to corrupted firmware on some of the recently manufactured Revues:


Ahhh, the unlocked bootloader aka the keys to the kingdom. An unlocked bootloader may or may not mean anything to you depending on your level of OS involvement, but having one “unlocked,” is always a good thing in my book. HTC also understands the importance of unlocked bootloaders, and how they help the developer community. This is why they started allowing users to “unlock” their device bootloader via the HTCdev website. Every so often HTC adds a new device to the official list and provides instructions on how to unlock it. Today, HTC has added two new devices to that list: the EVO View 4G and the MyTouch 4G Slide. Users of either of these devices now have an official way to unlock their bootloaders and begin tinkering with their device. So what exactly does “tinkering” mean, and is it something I want to do?


The man who made hundreds of Blackberry users search the term DingleBerry (a Blackberry Playbook Hack), spent his holiday rooting his tiny Christmas gift — the Motorola ACTV. While the rest of you were trying to figure out how to work your new Android 7.7″-10.1″ tablets, developer Chris Wade was busy playing Angry Birds on his brand new 1.6″ Motorola ACTV that he hacked Honeycomb onto.

This is just one of the many reasons I love Android so much. Here we had an underpowered Android UI slapped onto a wrist watch, and a clever developer has gone ahead and turned it into a working tablet UI capable of monitoring your heartrate as you dance to a youtube video. While many tasks will of course be less than optimal on a 1.6″ screen, it’s still cool.


We continue to hear from manufactures regarding their plans for updating their recent devices to Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich). This time it’s LG’s turn, giving us an updated timeline regarding their ICS updates. According to a post on Facebook, LG plans to start updating their 2011 line of phones starting Q2 of 2012.

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