Gadgets, Android | featured news

Hulu Plus brings movies and television shows the small screen of Android smartphones, but only six models are compatible for now. Sony Ericsson is leveraging HDTV technology for it's new Android phones while the iPhone appears to be chipping away at Android's popularity in the U.S.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is available in stores across the country today, and it seems the company has offered the best Android tablet on the market. The hardware on the tablet is great; it’s sleek and light with a great screen and is easily the best Android tablet I’ve played with so far. But what I — and non-Apple manufacturers, apparently — keep running up against is the iPad question. With the number of applications designed for tablets on Android, there’s just no comparison.

A number of Android smartphone makers who have turned their hand to Android tablets to try cash in on the tablet PC category dominated by the iPad are said to giving up. Instead, their focus has switched back from tablets to the development of larger, high-end smartphones with 4- to 5-inch displays. According to Digitimes, only Samsung has made any significant inroads into the segment, claiming a 10% share.

Bidding to differentiate itself in the increasingly competitive tablet-computer market, Samsung Electronics plans this year to launch an Android-based tablet running on fourth-generation network technology.

In our recent detailed coverage of Asus' ever-fab, Editor's Choice-winning Eee Pad Transformer tablet, we told you that even better things lie ahead as Google rolls out their 3.1 release of Android Honeycomb.  Little did we know that roll-out would be coming sooner than later. Today, a buzzy, fuzzy little Bumble Bee floated a new Transformer...

Research In Motion shares were sharply lower Friday, after the company issued a steep first-quarter earnings warning late Thursday, heightening fears that the BlackBerry maker is buckling amid competition from Apple and Google.

Apparently, the iPad isn't the only tablet in town capable of selling out. While the Asus Eee Pad Transformer might not have the big-name appeal of its Apple rival, the $399 16GB Honeycomb tablet managed to sell out online at Best Buy's website in its first day on sale.

Politicians and privacy experts demanded answers of Google and Apple Friday following the discovery that smartphone software from the tech giants regularly transmits information about a user's whereabouts back to the companies.

Apple will remain firmly in control of the tablet market through 2015, according to market research by Gartner, which also shows Google’s Android will take the baton from Nokia’s Symbian to dominate the smartphone market through the same time period. Experts agree, though, that it will be strong ecosystems, allowing for tablets and smartphones to deliver a combined experience, which will take the day, possibly weakening Research in Motion’s capacity to deliver in a new environment.

Much attention in the battle between Android and iPhone goes to the availability of apps on each platform. But one of the most important feature of a smartphone might not be the availability and performance of native apps but the performance of the mobile web browser.