At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Google all but confirmed that Android’s next iteration would be named Jelly Bean. Of course it’s still unofficial, but even Benson Lin, Asus’ Corporate Vice President, is talking about it and has every intention of being the first on the upgrade list.
The latest ruling to come out of the ridiculous patent game comes in favor of Apple and awards them an injunction on Motorola Android products found to infringe on an Apple patent regarding scrolling behavior in the photo gallery application. What does this ruling actually mean for German users? Nothing really. Motorola will simply push an update to change the scrolling behavior and that will be the end of that. Will German Motorola users notice the change? Most likely not. So what was the point? The same point of everything that involves lawyers — money.
The heavily backed Isis mobile payment system is set to take on Google Wallet this summer and will be available to 100 Million U.S. cardholders. Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard have all signed on with Isis to enable their credit, debit and prepaid cards to be placed into the Isis Mobile Wallet. Isis is a joint venture created by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless and is the reason why Google Wallet was blocked on the Verizon Galaxy Nexus (which is anti-competitive IMO but we have a fix for that).
While Siri seems to get all the attention when it comes to voice actions, Motorola wants to remind people that Android not only does voice actions, but does them extremely well, if not better. At least that’s the message we’re getting out of Motorola’s latest campaign pitting Android’s voice actions against its top contender Siri. Motorola runs through a slew of voice action challenges using three different Motorola phones and the results are impressive. I’m blown away by how fast both OS’s perform the tasks given and it’s an excellent reminder of the fact that Android has been perfecting voice actions for quite some time. I’m betting there are a lot of you that didn’t even realize your phone could do the things your about to see. Check out the videos after the break.
You may have noticed that Google likes to name its Android versions after delicious treats. Starting with Cupcake, Google has followed alphabetically with Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and Ice Cream Sandwich. Are you drooling yet? Up next is the letter J and its been rumored that the next version will be called Jelly Bean. It makes sense considering the lack of J-lettered treats and it makes even more sense thanks to Google’s private meeting area at MWC.
