Gadgets, Android | featured news

Along with a small mountain of new Nexus devices, Google announced also Android 4.2 on Monday. It's still called Jelly Bean, just like the prior version, but it's made just a little bit sweeter by the addition of new features such as Photo Sphere, Gesture Typing, multi-user support and more.

Hurricane Sandy may have stopped Google's Android event, but it couldn't stop the Google website. There will be no swanky event in downtown New York City, but Google's Android team has taken to a blog post to announce the latest Android devices, including the long-rumored Nexus 4 phone made by LG and Nexus 10 tablet made by Samsung.

Google has just set an Oct. 29 event in New York centered on its Android mobile software. "The playground is open" is all it says, so we are left to figure out what might land on that playground.

The phone once coveted by the elite and the powerful is becoming an object of ridicule as Androids and iPhones corner the smartphone market.

Amazon says buyers of its new Kindle Fire HD tablet will get the option to turn off the advertisements that appear on its standby screen for $15. The online retailer showed off the tablet last week, and said there would be no option to turn off the ads. That was a departure from Amazon's previous policies. It has shipped Kindle e-readers with "Special Offers" ads on the standby screen, but users could pay to have them turned off.

Fans of the first Note, then, may be heartened to hear that Samsung is said to be planning to bump the screen up to 5.5 inches, according to a SlashGear report citing a Korean newspaper. The newspaper also reported that the phone being introduced Wednesday will have a 1.4 Ghz quadcore processor and may be running the very latest version of Android — Jelly Bean. The phone is also expected to have an 8 MP camera and 16GB or 32GB of storage.

Google has said that it does not want the ruling in the Apple-Samsung patent lawsuit to "limit" consumers' access to Android devices... There has been speculation that the news could encourage handset makers to install the rival Windows Phone system.

Apple Inc's worldwide legal crusade against the Android mobile operating system drew toward a climax on Tuesday as the iPhone maker's attorneys accused Samsung of taking a shortcut by copying Apple's designs after realizing it could not keep up.

The latest numbers are in: Android is on top, followed by iOS in a distant second. This word comes from Gartner, a top research firm for these sorts of things. Overall, within the last quarter, Android outsold iOS devices nearly three to one while capturing 64% of the worldwide market share. Samsung was the top dog accounting for 90M handset sales.

Nokia’s latest smartphones may be chasing the ubiquity of iPhones and Androids, but the Finnish phone maker hopes that vivid colors, simple form factor and the “instinctive” user interface on its latest Lumia range will help claw back thinning margins and faltering profits. The trick is to appeal to trend-setters, much like Apple‘s iMacs first did nearly 15 year ago. Are its designers and managers living in a parallel universe, or can they pull it off?