I’m definitely going to end up lactose intolerant by the end of CES. We fully expected to see plenty of tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich, but how about a TV? I thought it possible, and even made some bold predictions, but I didn’t expect to see something announced so soon. Lenovo made a pre-CES announcement regarding what could very well be the world’s first Smart TV powered by the Android 4.0 OS. They’re calling it the K91, and it is the world’s first smart TV powered by QualComm’s 8060 Snapdragon dual core CPU and running Android 4.0. There’s plenty to love about this Ice Cream Sandwich TV and we’ll let you know about it after the break.
We knew this would be the year of the quad-core at CES, and blasting right out of the gate was Acer, showing off it quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 Iconia Tab. At the end of their press event, Acer snuck in an unnamed Acer Iconia Tab which we found out later was the Iconia A700. The A700 is expected to feature a 10.1″ 1920 x 1080 resolution screen, NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3, dual cameras, microSD slot, HDMI port, a thin body, and Android 4.0. There hasn’t been an official press release yet, and other specs remain a mystery, but if Acer’s press event sets the tone for the rest of CES, we can expect lots of quad-core Ice Cream Sandwich tablets, Ultrabooks, and more cloud-storage.
A couple of weeks ago, football fans received the good news: “The Super Bowl, Pro Bowl And NBC’s Wild-Card Playoff Games Will Be Streamed On Mobile Phones For The First Time.” I was excited to hear the big game would be streamed via the NFL Mobile app on Verizon, and quickly began gloating about how I’d have “the game cued up on my brilliant Samsung Galaxy Nexus.” In a bit of irony, my premature excitement was soon squashed by none other than Verizon. Apparently the Galaxy Nexus was not a supported device of the NFL Mobile app, and I was left only to hope Verizon would fix this before Super Bowl Sunday.
Android 4.0 was created to help unify Android across all devices. Yesterday, Google took that goal of unification one step further. From here on out, any device running Android 4.0 with the Android Market, will require the inclusion of the unmodified Holo theme family. The Holo theme family consists of the themes Theme.Holo, Theme.Holo.Light, and Theme.Holo.Light.DarkActionBar. You can see examples of these three themes in the above image. These requirements will help better control the rampant “fragmentation” of Android and will allow manufactures to continue using their own custom themes, while providing a familiar experience.
