Sprint now announcing Nexus S 4G, EVO 3D, and EVO View tablet at CTIA?

The media -- yours truly included -- has been trying to figure out why Sprint has booked an insane two-and-a-half hour slot at CTIA later this month. That's not the kind of event you throw together just to rehash the devices you've introduced over the last half year -- something's up, and if our source is correct, they're up to something big.

First, we're hearing that the carrier will launch the Nexus S 4G from Samsung, and judging from the name, the phone should be something akin to a Nexus S with WiMAX. It seems this one could be either the SPH-D600 or SPH-D720, both of which have recently received certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance, though the SPH-D720 is more likely; the D600 shows WPS support, which is available in TouchWiz-skinned devices but not in stock Gingerbread. You might recall that Sprint came very, very close to launching its own version of the Nexus One before dropping it in favor of the EVO 4G last year, so maybe they're ready to do the deed this time.

Next, a couple that we don't have much detail on: the EVO 3D, which is... well, a 3D-capable EVO of some sort. 2011 is certainly shaping up to be the year of 3D phones and tablets, so that wouldn't be much of a surprise. The other unit in the mix is the EVO View, a tablet that we're guessing will shape up to be something of a CDMA-powered Flyer. If this all pans out, it's looking like Sprint could own this show. CES was a bit of a dud for them, you might recall -- the EVO Shift 4G was the only handset announcement there -- so they're overdue.

Android 2.3.2 Gingerbread leaking for Samsung Galaxy S

Not every Galaxy S user around the globe even has Froyo yet -- but Samsung's ready to move on, it seems, crafting a ROM based on Android 2.3.2 (in other words, quite recently) for the i9000 model that just leaked across the giant faucet better known as the internet. The darned thing is nearly a quarter gigabyte in size, so Samsung's not playing here, but users haven't fleshed out everything that's changed just yet. Of course, if you're using one of the millions of Galaxy S devices that aren't an i9000, you've got more waiting to do... but we're certain hackers are already well underway tearing this bad boy apart and crafting custom ROMs for various SKUs. Hang tight!

HTC Incredible S, Desire HD, News : Desire Z and original Desire will all be eating Gingerbread by the end of June

When it launched the Incredible S at MWC a couple of weeks ago, HTC promised the new 4-inch device would be quick to get a Gingerbread update and now it's giving us a definitive schedule for it by saying that Android 2.3 will be distributed to its new flagship phone by the end of Q2 2011. We're not sure four months of sitting by the window waiting for the OTA update to float in necessarily matches up to our definition of "quick," but there are much better news for owners of HTC's older devices. The Desire HD and Desire Z -- both released in September 2010 -- will also be leaping away from Froyo and up to Gingerbread and will be joined by the original Desire, which was announced way back at last year's MWC. That handset was essentially HTC's own-brand Nexus One, so we already knew it was capable of running Gingerbread, but it's still rare to see a device go through two significant Android updates (the Desire began life with Android 2.1). All these old Desires are placed on the same update schedule as the Incredible S, whereas the newly announced Desire S and Wildfire S will ship with Gingerbread preloaded.

HTC Incredible S now shipping this week in UK, will come with Froyo to start

Though it'd originally been pegged for the second quarter, it seems HTC's bumping that up a smidge with the launch of its new flagship -- the Incredible S -- in the UK this week. Pre-orders are going on as we speak with shipments promised for tomorrow, but there's a catch: rather than shipping withGingerbread, the phones will come with Froyo to start with an upgrade to Gingerbread promised for the near future. Buyers, we've got a little homework for you: if you're feeling adventurous and in a warranty-voiding mood, try to figure out what's going on with those auto-rotating capacitive buttons, alright?

Editorial: Motorola, sorting Blur out or giving it up

As thoroughly as I try to review phones, the phone that I carry for personal use always teaches me things about hardware, software, workflow, and -- quite frankly -- myself that I can never learn from a transient device that's merely passing through my home (and pocket) for a few short days. This week, I purchased a Motorola Atrix 4G to replace my aging (I kid, I kid) Nexus S, and let's just put it this way: it's been a rollercoaster of emotions ever since. 

Let's start this on a high note: the Atrix may very well represent the pinnacle of smartphone hardware today. Make no mistake that the engineers at Motorola are stone cold experts at engineering devices. Sure, they've had a miss here and there -- haven't we all? -- but by and large, strictly from a hardware perspective, this company has pumped out winner after winner for many years predating its Android days. As we said in our review, the device feels positively rock solid, and it exudes a vaguely muscular, high-tech appearance that pretty accurately conveys the maxed-out specifications under the hood.

So far, so good. It's the software that kills me. I understand that complaints about Motoblur are nothing new; heck, I've been bellyaching about it in my own reviews for as long as it's been around. But it hasn't improved -- in fact, it's gotten worse in some respects -- and I'm afraid it's time that I dial up the volume in the hope that someone at Motorola will hear me.

On some level, we need to give Motorola credit where credit's due. Blur was engineered and introduced at a time when deep social integration was first becoming very trendy in the mobile industry -- manufacturers and platform vendors weren't yet becoming social network aggregators or managing their own clouds on any sort of large scale. Indeed, the concept was way ahead of the curve: in late 2009 at the Cliq's announcement, only webOS Synergy was vaguely on the same page. Even today, iOS hasn't gotten on board.

The problem is that in the year and a half since, Android has advanced in countless ways. Google's oft-maligned pace of development on the platform has run circles around OEMs, Motorola included. Many of those advancements have deprecated key features of Blur, and so I can't explain why those features of Blur continue to appear in new devices -- essentially unmodified -- other than foolish corporate pride or the company's wrongheaded belief that it should carry forward outdated functionality in the name of consistency. It's illogical, it's maddening, and it detracts from these amazing phones that the company keeps releasing.

Allow me to give you an obvious example. Blur's Facebook and Twitter integration are famously bad, forcing local contact synchronization and offering views and update mechanisms that don't generally line up with how people use either service in the real world. Fortunately, since Blur's introduction, Android has added native contact integration with third-party services -- and both Facebook and Twitter have produced their own applications that directly interface with that capability. Though you might argue that those apps aren't the best in the Market, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone that believes they aren't better than Blur. Alas, Motorola has continued with its own wonky integration, either unaware or unwilling to admit that there's no longer any reason for its own integration to exist. Even in a best-case scenario, as these services evolve, Motorola will never be able to iterate these integration points as quickly as Facebook, Twitter, TweetDeck, Twidroyd, TweetCaster, or any of the other standalone apps out there. That's nothing to be ashamed of -- Motorola is not a provider of social networking apps. It's a phone manufacturer, and a damn good one. I just wish it'd stop pretending to be the former.

What in the world is going on here?

Who inside Motorola -- what UX designer -- green-lighted this?

Let's take a look at another (somewhat related) example -- accounts. Android decoupled the user's Google account from the phone and shuffled it into a separate Accounts screen somewhere around Eclair, if memory serves me correctly. Again, Blur was doing the account management thing way back in Cupcake, and credit should be given where credit is due. It was ahead of its time. But for goodness' sake, Motorola, it's time to give it up. Look at that screen up there: nowadays, Blur simply piggybacks on Android's in-built Accounts screen with its own array of account types that sync to Motorola's cloud. It's perhaps the single most confusing, unforgivable screen on the phone. Who inside Motorola -- what UX designer -- green-lighted this? I'm looking at two different, unrelated types of Facebook and Twitter accounts on the same screen. If I'm not a tech-savvy user who understands some fairly deep ins and outs of Android and Blur, I don't have a prayer of appreciating what's going on here, or what type of account I should choose (hint: it's always the non-Blur type).

I can't speak for bugs in the version of Blur that's loaded on the Atrix, but I know they're there. Modern software is never perfect. I'm not saying that because I don't believe in software engineers, I'm saying that because it's statistically impossible to create perfect software at the levels of complexity we see today (without immense validation costs that are reserved for intensely mission-critical things like space shuttles). And let's not lose sight of the fact that Blur is built on top of a foundation that is itself imperfect. And, of course, skins like Blur slow the process of delivering fixes to that foundation in a timely fashion, which makes this an incredibly complex set of moving parts that are all quickly forgotten and left to crumble as soon as manufacturers and carriers no longer find it financially beneficial to patch and improve.

What's my point? Mainly, it's that I don't really trust Blur to handle my contacts, and that's a huge problem. Data synchronization is an immensely complicated task that very few devices and software packages over the years have managed to get right; stock Android still hasn't managed to do it, but if you just use Google Contacts, you can sort of reach a happy balance these days. You can make it work and place a decent level of trust in it. When you add Blur on top -- which wants to synchronize my contacts to multiple locations, some of which I don't understand, don't want, and can't be removed -- that trust no longer exists. Frankly, I don't know what I'd do if the Atrix borked my Google Contacts, but it would probably involve a long string of obscenities I can't print here, followed by several hours of sobbing, followed by the realization that I don't have a great way to piece all that information back together in a timely fashion.

And let me make this problem more real for you: right now, the Atrix dialer is showing seven more contacts than I have in the My Contacts group in Google. I have no idea what those are, or why they're there. My guess is they're coming in from Blur Contacts (which I don't use and I wish didn't exist), but that's pure speculation. For that matter, I don't even know where the dialer is getting its data, because it has no options for choosing the source -- though I do know that changes I make in Google Contacts are instantly reflected there, so that's a clue. Meanwhile, the phone's actual Contacts app -- which inexplicably has no relation to the contacts list in the dialer -- is just an insane list of thousands of random names culled from Google, Twitter, and whatever other services you've configured through Blur. You can filter down to Google alone, but not My Contacts, which renders the list useless.

As for Blur's look and feel, I know that this is an intensely personal opinion. When it came out in 2009, I thought it looked pretty sharp, and it's still the least "cartoonish" replacement UI offered by any major manufacturer. Since then, it's aged, and today I prefer stock Gingerbread by a wide margin. Frankly, I think we've lost this battle -- manufacturers will insist on differentiating their Android devices by making custom UIs for as long as they're producing Android devices. I'm resigned to that, and it doesn't bother me too much. It's the functionality of the device that has me fired up, not the appearance.

So, Motorola, let me make this very simple: if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

So, Motorola, let me make this very simple: if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. With Google's immense engineering staff all cranking on Android, you can't be blamed for failing to keep up. No OEM can. But that doesn't give you a free pass to produce devices with half-baked add-ons. Remove things that don't work or don't make sense, and don't add them back in until they do work. And furthermore, while there might be some isolated cases where carriers are asking for tamper-resistant bootloaders, using eFuse or a similar technology on a device with a buggy, deeply-flawed ROM is a jerk move (I'd like to use stronger language here, but this is a family site). You're already making some of the finest phone hardware in the world -- now let's get the software into the same league.

Android 2.3.3 giving you another reason to want it: WebM support

Our first indication of a delivery date for the Gingerbread iteration of Android came way back in May when we were perusing the FAQ to Google's then newly announced WebM video format. There should be no expressions of shock, therefore, to hear that WebM support has indeed been added into Google's mobile OS, with the lowest compatible version being today's freshly introduced Android 2.3.3. Google has already demonstrated its intention to brute-force this format into our lives, which we'll be quite happy to accept just as soon as Gingerbread starts appearing on more devices than its own Nexi.

HTC ChaCha video demo from Mobile World Congress revealed

HTC has released its new Android Gingerbread Facebook smartphone, the ChaCha, at Mobile World Congress 2011. The ChaCha features a full QWERTY keyboard, below which is a button for dedicated Facebook access. This button allows users to quickly update their status, tell their friends what music they are listening to, or share their photos on Facebook, all with a single press. The HTC ChaCha also features a 2.6-inch touchscreen, a 5 megapixel camera, and a 600MHz processor, which is all powered by a 1250mAh battery.

Google details some of the Honeycomb features now coming to Ice Cream: action bar, 'hologram' visual style

Google has already confirmed that its Honeycomb and Gingerbread iterations of Android would becombined in the next version of OS -- dubbed Ice Cream by all accounts -- and it's now also providing a few more details about what Honeycomb features will be carried over to smartphones. Speaking toPhone Scoop, Google Android Engineering Director Dave Burke said that the contextual "action bar" at the top of the screen on Honeycomb tablets will be used on phones as well, but that the system bar at the bottom of Honeycomb might not make the transition. You can apparently expect the so-called "hologram" visual style of Honeycomb to carry over though, along with the multitasking app switcher that provides a snapshot of each app running. That's about all the details there are at the moment, but you can be sure we'll be digging for more.

ANDROID 2.4 ICE CREAM SOON COMING THIS SUMMER

Android 2.4 will be announced somewhere around Google’s IO conference at the beginning of May 2011, and will launch in June or July. As you may know, the name fits as the alphabetical names do add up to an I: Doughnut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, then Ice Cream. If history repeats itself, most other Android phones won't get the update until the fall or winter, if at all. So what's actually new in Android 2.4? No one really knows. If Android 2.4 arrives this summer, it will compete with the anticipated iPhone 5. What about Honeycomb (3.0)? Many believe that Android Honeycomb will never make it to smartphones in it’s current form, and that it will stay solely on tablet devices. That leaves the door open for a different OS version for smartphones later on down the line. Splitting Android like that isn’t likely to quiet those decrying fragmentation. But at this point, it’s nothing more than speculation save for the new information regarding Android 2.4 (Ice Cream). Stay tuned, the announcement for Ice Cream is rumored to be at the Google I/O conference in the not too distant future. source: androidcommunity.com, gadgetsteria.com