Want a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich a little ahead of tomorrow night’s announcement? An XDA member took the time to piece together a whole bunch of ICS work that developers have released and then we threw together a quick step-by-step guide on how to make your phone look like it’s running it. As you can see from the screenshot I just dropped above, my device now looks like it is running some sort of ICS port. And this literally took me 5 minutes to do.  

If you upgraded your XOOM over the past week to 4G but were not interested in adding on a data package to it, feel free to give it a go by using the 4G LTE SIM out of your current 4G phone. That’s right, if you have a Bionic, Thunderbolt, Charge, etc. you can power it down and toss its SIM card into your XOOM to get up and running on LTE in just a few minutes. While I have yet to send mine off for upgrade and could not try it myself, we have had two readers swap with no trouble.

Now, understand that with your SIM out of your phone you will not be able to receive calls. So have fun testing the power of 4G on your tablet, but make sure you don’t leave it in there for an extended amount of time or you may miss out on tonight’s toga party.

Also, we have no idea how Verizon plans to handle this. Tablets were supposed to have tiered data plans that start out at 2GB per month. By swapping over your SIM, this should just pull from your unlimited data plan without problem, but we just want you to be aware of a situation that will like change. Basically, be careful.

Cheers Bjorn and @Puerto_Rican_!

If you ever need to flash an SBF file for the DROID Bionic or you for some reason need to get into recovery, we wanted to share this trick with you to make the process seamless.  Like almost any other Android device, a simple key combination while the phone is off followed by a quick press of the Power button will get you into the Boot Menu.  As you can see in the picture above, the Boot Menu on the Bionic has a lot of new options as compared to older devices, something we hope one day we will be able to fully explore.

So to get into the Boot Menu, simply do the following:

1.  Power down your device.
2.  Press and hold both the Volume up and down buttons.
3.  Press Power.  Done.

From there, you can use the volume keys to switch between options, including Recovery.

To get into Recovery:

1.  Volume down to highlight “Recovery.”
2.  Press Volume up to select it.
3.  When the Android logo appears, press and release both Volume keys.
4.  You can now apply updates, wipe your phone, etc. in Recovery.

Cheers Todd!

A crafty DL reader with a new DROID Bionic and car dock decided he wanted webtop and Netflix from anywhere.  So what did he do?  Hacked the s.o.b. to work through his car’s entertainment system.  He now has webtop and HDMI mirroring throughout his entire car.  Sure it took some epoxy, an HDMI cable and a drill, but I’d say it was well worth the effort.

Here are his brief instructions:

- First I took apart the car dock and grinded/drilled an opening so I could fit the micro HDMI cable.
- Then I docked the phone. Then aligned and plugged in the micro HDMI into the phone.
- I then epoxied the HDMI onto the case and let it dry.
- The stock power port was adjusted to match with the HDMI port and epoxied that as well.
- I put everything back together.

Check out additional pics of Netflix and webtop after the jump.  

Ahh yes, PenTile RGBW displays again – boy do we love talking about these.  Instead of voicing our strong opinions on the use of these screens though, we wanted to try and stay positive this afternoon and pass along a tip that may help those of you with PenTile devices (Bionic, DROID3, DROIDX2).  Over at the PenTileBlog, a recent post discussed the best way to save/extend battery life based upon the type of wallpaper that you use.  As experts on the subject, they recommend that you choose wallpapers that use less highly saturated colors, meaning backgrounds withs lots of blacks or a mix of black and white are best:

In other words the worst case power consumption for a PenTile display is when you are displaying more than a minimal amount of highly saturated colors, regardless of whether it is red, green, blue or a combination of these colors.  This is true even if the image is largely dark.  The best power consumption, other than a totally black screen, would be to use unsaturated colors or simply black and white.  The worst case power consumption for OLED  is the best case power consumption for a PenTile RGBW display.

As an example, if you pop open the wallpaper app for your Bionic, you should try to skip almost all of them aside from the white and grey paper at the very end (pictured above).  And if you need some other options, feel free to check out the Oreo Slice wallpaper pack that we featured a few months back.

Via:  PenTileBlog

Just wanted to throw out one more tip this morning for new DROID Bionic owners to consider.  With the new version of Blur that Moto has decided to give us, comes a pretty overwhelming and at times slow, 3D animation between almost every screen transition.  When you jump from app to app or home to app or home to app drawer, you’ll notice this transition right away.  While it make look semi-pretty at first, you may realize that you can accomplish things much faster without it.  Thankfully Motorola built in a “No animations” toggle so you can rid your world of flashy fluff.

To turn off animations, start from your home screen and do the following:

Menu>Settings>Display>Animation

Once you tap on Animation, tap on “No animations” to make your phone even faster.

*Note – The only bad thing about doing this, is the fact that it also kills the CRT screen-off animation.  Not sure why Moto did not leave that as a standard option since it was built-in to Android 2.3, but we find that attempting to figure out why they have made certain decisions over the last few years has lead to an uncountable number of headaches.

*Note 2 – Since the Bionic haters took my “slow” comment to meaning the device sucks, let me clarify.  The phone isn’t slowed by the transitions, the transitions themselves are just annoyingly slow.  It’s just a part of Blur and has nothing to do with phone performance.

Anything else you can think of?

If you plan to pick up a DROID Bionic today, then here is a little tip for those of you not in 4G LTE areas yet and those of you that wish to save a little battery from time to time.  Unlike the Thunderbolt at launch (although it does now), the Bionic has a built-in network mode that allows you to toggle between having 4G LTE on or using CDMA (3G) only.

To turn off 4G LTE, do the following from your home screen:

Menu>Settings>Wireless & networks>Mobile networks>Network Mode

Once you tap on Network Mode, tell it to use either both 3G and LTE or just 3G.

Let us know if you run into any other tips!