In a previous softModder guide, I detailed how to get the Jelly Bean 4.2 Photo Sphere Camera and Gallery on your HTC One running Sense 5, but that was quickly outdated with the release of the new Google Play Edition HTC One, which has a newer Camera that works great with our hardware.
So, now I’m going to show you how to install the newest GPE version of the Camera and Gallery apps, which is actually much easier than installing the older Android 4.2 versions. You won’t even have to be rooted!
Video: .
Step 1: Download the APK File
First, go ahead and download the app from either here or here… more
Just like the HTC One Google Play Edition, the recently released Samsung Galaxy S4 Google Play Edition ditches the manufacturer’s UI in favor of a pure Google experience, i.e. AOSP, but is also optimized specifically for the device’s hardware.
One specific optimization for the GS4 GPE was an update to the Google Camera app, the same one seen in the leaked Jelly Bean 4.3, and you don’t have to wait to get it. You can download and use it on your Samsung Galaxy S3 right now.
I’ve covered how to do this before, but this new Android 4.3. version should eliminate any FCs (Force Closes) and provide… more
OVERLAND PARK, Kan.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Sprint (NYS: S) will offer Samsung Galaxy S® 4 (16GB version) beginning on Saturday, April 27, for $249.99 (excluding taxes) with a new line or eligible upgrade and two-year service agreement. For a limited time only, new customers who switch their phone number to Sprint from another carrier will receive an additional $100 instant credit, reducing the price of Galaxy S 4 to $149.99 (excluding taxes).
Pre-order for Galaxy S 4 will open on Thursday, April 18, at www.sprint.com/galaxys4, while supplies last.
Galaxy S 4 will be available at Sprint Stores, Sprint Business Sales, Telesales (1-800-SPRINT1) and Web Sales (www.sprint.com), and comes in two color options – White Frost and Black Mist.
Sprint offers Truly UnlimitedSM 4G LTE data, text and calling to any mobile device with no metering, no throttling, and no overages, all while on the Sprint network, making it the ideal carrier for customers who want to use every single feature of their Galaxy S 4 every single day of the month without worry. Sprint 4G LTE is available in select markets.
“Galaxy S 4 is packed with incredible new features that will benefit from unlimited data plans on the Sprint 4G LTE network,” said Fared Adib, senior vice president – Product Development, Sprint. “Sprint encourages our customers to really use their smartphone to its full potential – from surfing the Web to listening to streaming music or watching YouTube videos – without worry about data caps, throttling or silly overage charges on their monthly bill. I know our customers will enjoy this device as much as I do.”
Manufactured by Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile), Galaxy S 4 is powered by Android™ 4.2.2, Jelly Bean, boasts a brilliant 5-inch full HD Super AMOLED™ touchscreen, 1.9GHz quad-core processor and access to the Sprint 4G LTE network. It also offers Multi Window, which allows the use of two apps side-by-side.
Galaxy S 4 is the perfect device for vividly capturing life’s most important
According to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, the search giant has clearly won the mobile platform war. That assertion is based in part on the sheer fact that Android is by far the dominant mobile operating system on the planet. That’s indisputable.
Over the past two years, Android doubled its global market share and now powers 70% of all smartphones sold worldwide. That rise is incredible, any way you slice it.
Source: IDC.
The thing is that while Google likes to tout those legitimately impressive headline figures, saying there are now more than 1.3 million Android devices activated every day, the truth is that there are currently so many different distinct Android camps that lumping them all together is somewhat specious where it counts.
Should Android be broken up?
A subtle admission Google has seemingly acknowledged this. The search giant subtly changed its methodology for measuring version distribution, which resulted in meaningful changes in its reported statistics. The aging Gingerbread fell from 44.2% to 39.8%, while the newest Jelly Bean soared from 16.5% to 25%.
Android version distribution. Source: Google.
The new method now measures the devices that visit the Google Play store instead of including all devices that check in to Google’s servers (i.e., activations). Google says “new data more accurately reflects those users who are most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem.”
Translation: Google wants to emphasize its own Android camp to developers, while minimizing the importance of Amazon.com‘s fork as well as all the Chinese OEM forks out there. Google uses the aggregate figures when they make for good headlines, but it concentrates on its sanctioned Android versions when it matters strategically.
Google doesn’t directly benefit from the different forks out there, and Amazon’s is by far the most successful in tablets. The e-tailer was the No. 3 tablet vendor in the fourth quarter, with 11.5% of the market, and none of those Kindle Fires feed into Google Play. That’s what Amazon’s Appstore for Android is for.
Facebook just launched its Home software suite, which I consider more of a “half-fork,” since Home still feeds into Google Play even though it emphasizes Facebook’s social services over Google’s. From the social network’s perspective, Home is still the right strategy, since Facebook knows better than to compete on a primary platform level.
Even BlackBerry is now piggybacking on Android’s dominance, using ported Android apps to pad its app counts. BlackBerry devices still rely on BlackBerry World for their app fix, and developers have to manually port their apps to the platform to run inside an emulator, so those smartphones were never getting included in Google’s figures. BlackBerry has made some progress getting developers to go native, but the company serves as another example of a third party riding Android’s success with no benefit to Google.
You can’t have one without the other Device fragmentation has long been cited
If you’ve been eager to replace your start screen with a scrolling Facebook feed, your day has finally come. The HTC First is the first smartphone with deep enough Facebook integration to be dubbed the “Facebook phone.” It uses an Android OS primed with Facebook’s baby-blue interface, sending you directly to the familiar news feed, photo service, and messaging system that used to hide in a dedicated app.
Reviews for the HTC First “Facebook phone” started appearing on the web today, with largely positive reactions. Its specs are on par with what smartphone users expect, and some have expressed an appreciation for the way it puts Facebook front-and-center without making it difficult to use other Android programs.
Early comparisons to the Samsung Galaxy S4 are pitting the HTC First against stiff competition, and showing serious promise for the fledgling smartphone. Although not full 1080 HD like the S4, it does run at 720p on a 4.3-inch screen. A 5 MP primary camera and 1.6 MP secondary camera, 16 GB of storage, and Jelly Bean 4.1 OS run on a cutting-edge Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core processor, with an Adreno 305 GPU and 1 GB of RAM.
Since a Facebook app has been available for a long time, the HTC First doesn’t have an entirely unique selling point, except that Facebook comes preloaded and dominates the interface. The appeal may lie mostly with extremely active Facebook fans, but with Facebook reporting more than 1 billion active users, that may be more than enough.
Just the other day, Google reworked how it determines which Android users are using which platform. The change caused the percentage of Android users on Jelly Bean to jump from 16% to 25%. But what does this change really mean?
The largest group of people who will most likely care about the change is Android app developers. Instead of gathering Android platform information when users access a Google server, the company is now looking at when a device accesses the Google Play store. This is relevant data for app developers who need to know which platform versions are most likely to download apps, so they can create apps that are compatible with the greatest number of Android devices.
Let’s take a look at how the Android devices break down:
I’ve written before about which devices developers want to create apps for, and these numbers play a key role in that decision. The smartphone wars aren’t just about bigger screens and better cameras — they’re also about whose operating system is the best and how many people are using it.
More than just numbers There’s a back-and-forth battle going on between Apple and Google about how up-to-date their smartphone customers are. The problem for Android is that there’s major fragmentation across all of the platforms.
According to BGR, Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0) was supposed to be the unified platform that brought consistency to Android tablets and smartphones. But after launching in October 2011, only about 30% of Android users are on it, while almost 40% are on a version that was first released in 2010. In contrast, research firm Chitika reported at the end of February that 83% of iPhone users in North America are using iOS, Apple’s latest operating system.
Apple benefits from disjointed Android operating systems, given that smartphone user experience is a selling point for new devices. Lack off apps or apps that don’t update because the platform is outdated both hurt a user’s experience on that device.
But despite the varying Android operating systems on the market, Apple is fighting an uphill battle against the sheer number of Android phones on the market. Although Apple is typically more concerned about revenue market share and than shipment or sales market share, investors should take note that some users simply may not care which OS version they’re running. Time will tell whether or not fragmented Android versions will work in Apple’s favor, but for now I think the lack of cohesiveness among the Android versions and devices will eventually hurt Apple competitors.
There’s no doubt that Apple is at the center of technology’s largest revolution ever, and that longtime shareholders have been handsomely rewarded with over 1,000% gains. However, there is a debate raging as to whether Apple remains a buy. The Motley Fool’s senior technology analyst and managing bureau chief, Eric Bleeker, is prepared to fill you in on both …read more
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Thursday. Zuckerberg says the company isn’t building a phone or an operating system. Rather, Facebook is introducing a new experience for Android phones.
Facebook fans who were expecting the social network to unveil its own proprietary smartphone Thursday have a long wait ahead of them, seeing the as company isn’t building a phone or an operating system.
Rather, explained CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a press conference at the company’s headquarters, Facebook (FB) is introducing a mobile experience it’s calling “Home,” which makes the social network the hub of any smartphone that runs Google Inc.’s (GOOG) Android operating system.
Zuckerberg said the goal is put “people before apps.” To achieve that, Home replaces users’ home screen on their phones and includes a suite of applications, or apps. As Engadget explains:
It’s not just a new user-interface for launching apps, however. It replaces the “lockscreen” with cover feed and prioritizes updates from people instead of apps. There is a standard paginated launcher that is always just a swipe away. But the focus is on the full-screen images that are your new welcome screen.
“What Facebook wants is to put itself at the front of the Android user experience for as many Facebook users as possible and make Facebook more elemental to their customers’ experience,” Forrester analyst Charles Golvin told The Associated Press.
As Fortune notes, Home is a way for Facebook to supplant Google by pushing the search-engine giant’s prized services, including search maps and Gmail, into the background on Android phones, pushing users to use Facebook’s offerings instead.
Home will be limited to phones running the Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean versions of Android — i.e., 4.0 and later. That covers phones made or updated during the past year or so.
Initially, the app will be limited to specific Android models — about a half-dozen of them, including Samsung’s Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 2. It will also work on the upcoming Galaxy S IV. In addition, HTC‘s upcoming First phone will come with Home.
But the move could also help boost mobile advertising, a fast-growing field — thanks largely to Facebook and Twitter. Research firm eMarketer expects U.S. mobile ad spending to grow 77 percent this year to $7.29 billion, from $4.11 billion last year.
Showing more mobile ads to users poses challenges for Facebook, however, since the promotional ads may annoy or alienate Facebook users.
Check out Facebook’s Home:
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Threat families and variants by platform. Source: F-Secure. J2ME = Java 2, Micro Edition.
The rise was attributed to Android’s dominant market share position, since unsavory types tend to target the widest audiences. By that rationale, it makes sense that hackers are giving up on Nokia‘s Symbian platform, since the Finnish company has effectively abandoned it also in favor of Microsoft Windows Phone. The security threats on Symbian have declined steadily in accordance with its market share.
Time well spent? Schiller’s been busy making the rounds at undermining Android. At the same time, Apple’s marketing campaigns have
With just hours to go ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy S IV unveiling, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller has stepped out into the spotlight in an attempt to rain on Google Android’s parade.
Tim Cook’s Apple is very different than Steve Jobs’ Apple in many ways; one such way is that the company is much more talkative and engaged with the press. Cook himself did a couple of media interviews three months ago with NBC and Bloomberg Businessweek, and Apple issues more press releases nowadays to increase communication with the public.
How low can you go? The executive called Android a “free replacement for a feature phone,” which is certainly true in many cases since the open-source platform is able to target remarkably low price points at times. Of course, there are plenty of high-end flagship devices running Android, and everything in between.
Schiller says that when you first open an Android gadget, you’re required to sign up with “nine” different accounts with different companies just to get the same experience that one single iOS login delivers. Since so many companies pitch in to the end product, all of the different aspects “don’t work seamlessly together” either.
Version burn When speaking with Reuters, Schiller added that by Google’s own estimates, 16% of users are on an Android version that’s a year old, with over 50% on versions that are two years old. Even when Samsung’s Galaxy S IV launches, it will already be dated since it runs a software version that’s a year old, according to Schiller.
Source: Google. Data collected during a 14-day period ending March 4, 2013.
Jelly Bean is Android’s latest and greatest, but is only on 16.5% of devices. Gingerbread was initially released in December 2010, and is now over two years old. Gingerbread and older versions still comprise 53.7% of devices, since third-party carriers and OEMs bottleneck software updates.
Schiller cites the iPhone maker’s internal research data as indicating that four times as many consumers switch from Android to iOS than vice versa. That may be in part because Apple’s ecosystem has been shown to be much stickier than Google’s. iOS users have a much higher propensity to spend money on apps and content, which dramatically increases switching costs should they ever wish to defect.
Tech Radar: There’s a new Jelly Bean in town, and it’s on its way to an Android device near you – but first, a quick stop at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
The update is for the Wi-Fi versions of the devices and finally brings Samsung’s tablets current with Jelly Bean, after the company slowly rolled out Android 4.1 to its phones in the fall. Android 4.2 has already begun appearing on some Nexus tablets.
The more intriguing features, however, come from the Samsung Premium Suite, with special attention to the capabilities of the stylus.
The Galaxy Note 10.1 was the first in the company’s line to support a multiwindows feature so you can run two apps side by side on screen. The feature later trickled through to the Note smartphones and Galaxy S III phone. Now, Samsung has updated this feature for the Note 10.1 with a cascade view, which lets you freely resize, move, and pin selected apps in multiple views, running simultaneously.
By Todd Hixon, Contributor Google Launches FieldTrip, A Location-Aware App That Helps You Find Cool Stuff Around You | TechCrunch. Field Trip App Icon; image via TechCrunch When Android 4.1 (aka “Jelly Bean“) arrived on my phone last spring*, I concluded that Android had finally produced an OS that is serious competition for Apple’s iOS (more). The […] Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Samsung will begin pushing Android Jelly Bean to its Galaxy S II model in February, according to a notice posted to the company’s Korean website.
The notice has since been removed, but not before a Korean Android enthusiast site, Hong Goon, captured it with a screen grab, CNET reported.
The Jelly Bean upgrade will start in Singapore then gradually rolled out to the rest of the world, according to CNET. Updates will be performed through Samsung’s sync service, Kies. Over-the-air updates won’t be supported.
The new Android version includes a number of new features including Smart Stay, which will keep the handset’s display on as long as the phone detects that you’re looking at the screen.
