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by Jaime Rivera | April 29, 2013 5:40 PMRead OnI need a beer, and I'm sure many of you need a drink as well. If this was five years ago, I'd be by my second pack of cigarettes, and it has to do with how furious I am right now. Let me explain why: For starters, I wish I could express in words how long it took me to love Android. My first device was a Google Nexus One, and man, even though I started off at the right foot, it rarely ever felt that way. What a gorgeous phone and what a great experience overall, as long as I didn't turn it on. Froyo and Gingerbread were just stale and cartoony no matter how much I tried to love the device. ...
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by Joe Levi | January 22, 2013 1:06 PMRead OnThe Android Open Kang Project (AOKP) is one of the front-runners when it comes to Android custom ROMs. Many have lauded their forward-thinking and rapid development schedule -- especially when compared to CyanogenMod. For those of you who don't remember, back when CyanogenMod was in its infancy we would see new features, tweaks, and changes being added to the ROM very frequently. Today the goals of the CM team have changed. They're aiming for a robust but stable feature-set, and compatibility with many devices as possible. AOKP, on the other hand, are much more like CyanogenMod of ...
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by Stephen Schenck | January 15, 2013 10:50 AMRead OnLast week, we began seeing signs that new Nexus 4 handsets appeared to be arriving from the factory with Android 4.2.2 installed. That created a bit of a mystery, as we hadn't seen Google release any such update for existing handsets, and it left us wondering just what might be changing. Today we might have at least a portion of the answer, upon learning of the resolution to a Jelly Bean glitch. Since the release of Android 4.2, users have been complaining about problematic Bluetooth audio streaming. Yesterday, a Google employee finally posted a note to the bug's comment page reporting ...
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by Stephen Schenck | January 4, 2013 12:28 PMRead OnWith 2012 now a wrap, Google has published its latest Android platform statistics, adding-in data from the final two weeks of the year. While it's still a bit disappointing to see so many devices still operating now-ancient versions of the platform, there is some cause for celebration, as the pace by which users are making the move to Android 4.x seems to be showing a recent uptick. Jelly Bean seems to be the most responsible for Android 4.x's new popularity, with Android 4.1 moving up to a 9% share from the less-than-6% it had just a month ago. 4.2 sees some more modest gains, and Ice ...
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by Joe Levi | December 13, 2012 1:59 PMRead OnAnother of my favorite features in Android Jelly Bean 4.2 is the new Quick Toggles panel. It's sort of like the Power Widget that some custom ROMs include in the notification shade, but devoted to its own panel. You get to it by pulling down on the notification bar with two fingers on smartphones (or by pulling down on the right side of the notification bar on tablets). Inside the Quick Toggles panel you're able to quickly check the status of various components like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and easily toggle them on or off. Unfortunately, there's currently no way for you to change what shows ...
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by Stephen Schenck | December 10, 2012 1:20 PMRead OnAndroid 4.2 introduced some new anti-malware protections, letting you scan locally-installed apps to see if they throw up any red flags that might indicate they're malicious. While that sounds like a smart step towards keeping our phones secure, it's really only any use if it actually works. Researchers at North Carolina State University have put Google's scanner through its paces, and the results they got are less than promising. The team threw 1260 malware samples at Android 4.2, and Google was only able to detect 193 of them, just over fifteen percent. That's a bit embarrassing, but ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | December 4, 2012 2:26 AMRead OnLast week when we told you about the first CyanogenMod releases for the Google Nexus 4 -- since then there are now six versions out there for you to play with -- we were promised a flavor for the Samsung-made Google Nexus 10 tablet too. There are already two versions up if you want to ditch stock Android 4.2 and check out betas of CyanogenMod. More devices will be added soon, as usual, but until then, if your Nexus 10 tablet is prepared, you can head over to the source link below and grab the nightly of your choice. As always, if you understand the risks, you should also acknowledge that ...
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by Joe Levi | December 3, 2012 3:29 PMRead OnIf you're like me you've just received your Nexus 4, or it's in the mail to you now. After the first day has past and you want to do some fun stuff with it, how do you get started? Before you go further, as with most stuff in life, what we're about to show you isn't without risk. You could break your phone. If you're willing to take the risk, go and grab a copy of the Nexus 4 Toolkit, and press play to see how to get into fastboot, unlock your bootloader, root, install a terminal emulator, and confirm that we do, indeed have root access. We'll also show you how to quickly install ...
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by Joe Levi | December 1, 2012 12:25 PMRead OnIf you've got an Android tablet, chances are you've let someone else use your tablet. Tablets seem to lend themselves to being used by more than one person -- at least when compared to smartphones. In my house our kids constantly want to borrow the tablets. That wouldn't be a problem but some of us are fairly proud of our save-games, and others don't want children sending emails to people in our address books. To remedy those situations Google introduced multi-user support for tablets starting with Android 4.2 (smartphones were left out). If you've wondered about multi-users and didn't ...
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by Jaime Rivera | November 30, 2012 7:00 PMRead OnWatch today's Pocketnow Daily as we talk about Google's exclusive offer to new Nexus customers. We then talk about certain issues many of us have detected with Android 4.2. Asus makes the news with their possible $99 Nexus variant. Microsoft is also working on a probably Surface 2 combo of tablets, and this time the design and concept changes dramatically. We end today's show by talking about Nokia's recent job posting and how this could mean either Nokia Maps info on Android, or Android powered Nokia smartphones. All this and more after the break. Links: - Google’s Got Some Free TV ...
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by Stephen Schenck | November 30, 2012 1:26 PMRead OnAndroid 4.2 sure seems to be developing a reputation as one of the more glitch-filled Android release in recent memory, with issues like the embarrassing missing-December bug already prompting the release of a 4.2.1 update. The latest to be brought to our attention seems to have something to do with the new multi-user support, and it's making graphics render with some unintended transparencies. From what users have been able to work out, the issue only pops-up when you're using an app through the tablet's non-primary account. In certain circumstances, it will fail to render a screen with ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | November 29, 2012 3:09 AMRead OnThe Nexus 4, just like any other Nexus, is meant for hacking, that is aside from offering the pure Google experience, and CyanogenMod is one of those ROMs that needs no introduction at all. The latest Nexus phone (and tablet) come pre-loaded with Android 4.2 but a little bit of CyanogenMod treatment never hurts. Nightlies are out for the LG-made Google-phone (already two, to be more specific) in case you want to give them a try. The Nexus 10 tablet will join the party as soon as it will be ready, according to the team (which shouldn't take too long though). Head over to the source link ...
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by Michael Fisher | November 26, 2012 7:08 PMRead OnMy recent jump to Windows Phone for my daily driver, in concert with my continued love affair with the Nexus 7 and endless respect for Apple's iPad, have provided an interesting opportunity to compare the three platforms in a number of ways. The OSes have many distinctions setting them apart, but maybe none so evident as their respective approaches to voice dictation. I'm not talking about Siri or S Voice or Google Now here; just the stock speech-to-text dictation software you'd use if you were drafting an email or text message by voice, or speaking a shopping list out loud for your ...
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by Stephen Schenck | November 23, 2012 7:50 PMRead OnAndroid 4.2 brought with its arrival a number of changes to the platform, many of which we detailed late last month. Not everyone's a fan of everything that's new, though, and if some of the new functionality Google brought to the Android lockscreen just isn't your cup of tea, we've got some good news for you: one developer has cooked-up a free app to quickly revert those tweaks to the way the lockscreen used to work. Lockscreen Policy, as its dev has named the app, is nothing if not straightforward. It provides a pair of toggles, allowing you to disable the new camera access, lockscreen ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | November 23, 2012 3:08 AMRead OnIf you were disappointed that Google or LG (or both) released the latest Nexus phone, the Nexus 4, without LTE support, let us tell you that you are not alone! A recent teardown of the device confirmed the existence of an LTE chip and we thought it might have been because of the shared internals with the LG Optimus G. However, it turns out that the Nexus 4 can reportedly do LTE (at least in Canada, on Telus with 1700/2100MHz bands). What you need to do to test this out is to go into the Dialer app and input *#*#4636#*#* (that is *#*#INFO#*#*) and forcibly choose and automatic mode which ...
Posts tagged with: Android 4.2