Amazon took a huge step forward in their hardware offerings with new a new Kindle and multiple new Kindle Fires. Do you think these are worth upgrades? Do they excite you enough to order or are you waiting to see what the iPad mini has to offer? Let us know in the comments.
Yesterday was a smartphone lovers delight, to be sure. Piling on earlier announcements from other companies, Motorola had an event where they announced three cool looking new smartphones to add to their wildly popular Razr line-up. They updated the Droid Razr with Here are the basics: • DROID RAZR M: An impossibly compact smartphone that puts the world in the palm of your hand. A 4.3 inch edge-to-edge Super AMOLED Advanced offers 40 percent more screen space then the leading competitor. • DROID RAZR HD: This ultra-thin device shows you everything in stunning HD detail that beats the competition. Movies,…
The Apple/Samsung patent trial’s jury shocked everyone by returning a verdict extremely quickly on Friday afternoon. Once we had the full details, I asked the team here at Gear Diary what they thought. Was this a game changer for Android and smartphones in general, or just another chapter in “lawyers gone wild”? Bryan: Yeah but remember, some of us don’t want to hear it: 😉 (Sorry, couldn’t help myself! :)) Dan: Agreed. Not surprised but I do think people will debate the issue for a long time. After all, as we learn in the Jobs bio, much of what Apple did initially…
Over the weekend we heard about the founder of OnLive basically shuttering the company in order to protect himself and the property by using a California loophole that allowed better creditor repayment than bankruptcy, but for workers … they were totally screwed just as if the company went totally belly-up. But that doesn’t mean all is well for creditors and investors. Today we start to learn about more of the fallout of the OnLive collapse: specifically, that troubled smartphone maker HTC is losing $40 million due to the restructuring. This is the same HTC who recently posted a 58% net…
The Nexus 7 is no doubt one of the hottest tablets to hit the Android Community. Running a bloat free Google OS on top of a Tegra 3 platform has proven to be a crowd favorite. So why take the possibly “warranty voiding” steps to gain Root access to the device? Even if you are not an enthusiast there are many benefits to rooting the tablet past the obvious flashing of custom roms and themes. Some of the best Android apps require root access to work, so without root you can pretty much use the tablet to its full…
I have a Motorola Droid 4 – and I really love it. That said, it is lousy being not just one but TWO VERSIONS of Android behind … I mean, this is the sort of thing Google said they were eliminating. Anyway … that is about to end! Yesterday I read that the ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ update was finally approved and a ‘soak test’ commenced, meaning that the full update would be released soon (unless something bad happened). Then later last night I heard that it was starting to ‘roll out in phases’. Motorola Mobility tweeted about it: 4G LTE…
A short time ago I tried swapping my iPhone for a Windows Phone 7. If you read my posts on the subject, then you know I learned a lot of interesting things, good and bad, about the platform. This time I’m focused on my tablet. I’m back to try one of the most heavily discussed gadgets this year, the Google Nexus 7. A Little Perspective… I have always loved playing with new gadgets. That’s why I was interested in the Nexus 7. But understand this: I come into this as a die-hard iPad user. I have been one ever since…
Lately I’ve been in a funk. I thought, at first, it was an Apple funk. I thought it might be about the fact that Apple today doesn’t seem to have the same excitement and vision as it did under Steve Jobs. I thought it might be about a sequence of products that is becoming very evolutionary instead of revolutionary. I thought it was about Apple and where it might be heading. But it’s more than that. It’s about where the mobile industry as a whole is heading. It’s about what kinds of things we think are important (and it’s not…
Image courtesy of Amazon Android devices are usually pretty slow to adopt cases and accessories compared to the mind numbing amount available for Apple devices. If you picked up a shiny new Nexus 7 tablet, and are on the hunt for quality case without breaking the bank, then the Blurex Folio Slim might be the answer. There was nothing available for immediate purchase when the tablet came out, so I picked up a standard pleather folio case off of Amazon for a about $6 to my door. While this case has served me well the poor fit has been pretty…
Have you seen the recent U.S. Cellular campaign on Twitter? It is called #HelloBetter and it focuses on recent data showing how dissatisfied most people are with their carriers, and highlights how U.S. Cellular has the highest satisfaction ratings of any carrier. Unfortunately as a regional carrier, only certain folks have access to their service – but if you do, check this out! Recently it seems that smartphone makers are keen to get phones quickly into the hands of U.S. Cellular, as evidenced by the recent Samsung Galaxy SIII release, and now by two hot new phones coming from Motorola…
Here is the last installment of our ongoing Gear Chat from Gear Fest 2012 series. In it we touch on Android operating system updates, Samsung smartphone naming confusion and Apple’s consumer care. Apple’s walled garden may cause its fair number of issues but the fact that even the iPhone 3GS will get iOS 6.0 and most of its functionality has us pretty impressed.
Just as it seemed we might be seeing some critical mass in the move towards updating Android devices to ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ almost nine months after release, ‘Jelly Bean’ arrived and threw things back into a fragmented turmoil where the overwhelming majority of devices are TWO VERSIONS BEHIND. Oh well, at least we continue to see updates rolling out on pretty much a weekly basis. The HTC Flyer was an intriguing 7″ tablet that combined excellent performance from a single core chip with a full HTC Sense-ified Android 2.3 Gingerbread interface. Late in 2011 OS updates were initiated by HTC…
iPad-junkies Mike and Dan both purchased 8GB Nexus 7s. Mike took one for the team. He put away his iPad and is in the midst of a week-long Nexus Challenge. In other words, he is going full in with the Nexus 7 for a few more days. Dan also got a Nexus 7 so the two jumped on video to talk about the tablet, Mike’s challenge and how two devoted iPad-users are finding the newest Android tablet. As mentioned, this was the third attempt to get our first video-podcast put together, and as such there were a few things that…
Amazon Prime Streaming “Ronin” on Nexus 7 Flash is dead…or is it? Although Adobe Flash is no longer support on the latest version of Android 4.1 (Jellybean), that does not mean you can’t enjoy the benefits of Flash content and movies. The move from flash-based content to HTML5 has been long underway but the truth is that the internet is still riddled with flash content including the one of the “King’s of Media”, Amazon Prime. Without Flash it is simply impossible to stream Amazon content to your new Nexus 7 tablet. When you go to the Play Store and…
By now, anyone who tracks mobile technology has heard something about the ASUS-made Google Nexus 7. We’ve already heard it alternately described as a ‘Kindle Fire Killer’, an ‘iPad Killer’, or “just another 7″ tablet to toss on the pile”. Let’s take a quick look at the Nexus 7, and the challenge I am undertaking! The Hype: For a limited time, includes $25 of credit to spend in the Play store, as well as some great free content like your own copy of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. THIN, LIGHT AND PORTABLE: Nexus 7 is a no compromise Android tablet that’s designed to…
When it was announced that the Google Nexus 7 was going to have the nVidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor and a multi-core high-performance GPU, I had a very simple thought go through my mind: mmmmmmmm Games … Now that I have the Nexus 7, I was able to put it through the gaming paces – and within a few hours I noted performance good enough that I decided to do a separate look at several games rather than just embed it into my overall review. Here are the games I looked at along with links to Google Play: – ShadowGun…
While in the past it seemed that phones were rolled out to a variety of carriers over the course of months (the Samsung Galaxy SII took nearly a year between the international release and some US carrier launches), we are now seeing more handset makers working to launch on as many carriers as quickly as possible. Case in point – the Samsung Galaxy SIII is launching all over the place right about now – and this week U.S. Cellular has the Galaxy SIII available to buy! Why is this a good thing? Because it allows smartphone users to make their…
OK, so this was a post I started writing three months ago – when we first started hearing about a $199 Google Nexus Tablet. At the time I thought it was a bad idea – and we didn’t even know who was making it or what the specs might be like at the time! Now that we know that it is an ASUS device, with a footprint essentially similar to the Kindle Fire/Nook Tablet/Samsung Galaxy Tab/etc, with some decent sounding hardware compromises for the price, and the newly announced Android OS 4.1. And guess what – I am more convinced…
Just saw this on Google+ just a moment ago right before Vic Gundotra took the stage at Google IO. The Nexus Q is a social streaming media player made for Google Play at home. When you have an Android phone or tablet on your home wifi network, you and your friends can send songs to the Nexus Q and modify the playlist as it’s playing. The Nexus Q will be available in 2-3 weeks and should be about $299. Update: Some more features have come up during the keynote about the Nexus Q. The Nexus Q will also allow multiple devices to stream simultaneously….
In a few hours, Google will have the opening keynote for the 2012 edition of Google I/O and you can watch it right here on Gear Diary. What will they announce? The only thing we know for sure is that Android 4.1 will probably be talked about, since they have the statue erected at the Googleplex. In fact, Google has released a really cool video of Googlers assembling the statue. So, for now, take a look at that. Comment below as the keynote unfolds, and look for a summary of the announcements later today right here on Gear Diary.
In case you didn’t know, every time Google is ready to issue a new version of Android, there’s a new statue that shows up outside of the Googleplex. We had Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s been all around the web that the next version would be code-named Jellybean, and that it will be version 4.1 with the Galaxy Neuxs getting it first. Well, today the Jellybean statue has shown up at the Googleplex, leaving all but the official announcements for sometime tomorrow during Google I/O. Also, they will likely be introducing the first Nexus tablet, named the Nexus 7….