Another leaked build has been released for the DROID RAZR. Do know, that after flashing this you will not be able to return to the official OTA and this might take you off the correct update path Motorola and Verizon has planned for consumers. You flash these at your own risk. In order to return back to stock, you will need to use RSD and fastboot. If you don’t know these terms, then we suggest going no further.
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The Galaxy Nexus online deal from Costco that we posted up yesterday is even better if you take it into a store from today through the 7th. Purchasing the phone in person at Costco will run you $219 thanks to a bonus $20 discount, plus they will also toss in the free extended battery. You will still have to mail off for the “bonus accessories,” but you won’t mind if it gets you a $60 battery, right?
Cheers ___!
If you purchased and then returned a Motorola XOOM WiFi any time between March and October of 2011, there is a chance that your unit was not fully refurbished properly and then sold again between October and December 2011 on Woot.com. That means that some of your personal information including pictures, documents, usernames or passwords could have been left on your returned device and then sold again to someone as a refurbished unit.
Motorola released a statement moments ago to address the situation. They are offering potentially affected customers a free 2-year Experian ProtectMyID Alert subscription just to be safe. So if you returned a WiFi XOOM to Amazon.com, Best Buy, BJ’s Wholesale, eBay, Office Max, Radio Shack, Sam’s Club, or Staples during that March to October stretch, you will need to contact Experian to get setup with this service.
More details after the break.
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One of our readers discovered yesterday that through a loophole in the Android Market and browser, you could install Google Wallet. After the community got a hold of this method, they quickly realized that this not only works for Wallet, but just about any app that a carrier has blocked from your phone. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was able to download and install both Google’s Car Home app and Wireless Tether.
There is a good chance that this will be patched before too long, so for now, feel free to load up just about any app that you would like. For the most part, this will get you into just about any tethering app you want, but there are bound to be other hidden options. In the comments, feel free to drop as many that you can think of to help out the rest of the community.
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Motorola won a pretty significant patent battle with Apple today in German courts. The initial “permanent injunction” forced the Cupertino giant to remove most of its products from its German-based online store including the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 3GS, and the iPhone 4 as well as any 3G-enabled iPads. The patent in question had to do with a “multiple pager status synchronization system and method” which Apple uses in its iCloud product. As you can see, that’s a big deal.
After all that went down early this morning and products were pulled, news is starting to spread that Apple has apparently put up a big enough chunk of change to license the patent from Motorola. Well, has potentially. The ban has been lifted and that’s the only guess that anyone has as to why it would be removed so quickly. It’s not clear what that amount was, especially after an Apple spokesperson took a shot at Moto for refusing “to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms.”
This is a developing story, indeed.
Via: FOSS Patents, (2), BBC, Engadget
Cheers Mclovin, Brian and Ben!
The Dropbox team released a new beta version of their Android app last night, bringing with it a handful of features that you will enjoy. The first and most important is the instant uploading of camera photos. You can set the app up to either upload everything you have taken in the past or just the new stuff going forward. Once you upload your first camera shot though, they’ll tack on another 500MB of storage to your account. They also removed the file limit size for uploads, opening your Dropbox world to all sorts of new possibilities.
The rest of the changes:
According to a new mobile app monitoring startup called Crittercism, iOS apps are crashing at a greater rate than your favorite Android apps. For a 2 month period, a ton of data was compiled and broken down by OS version and in some cases by app, and then into quartiles to give a better representation of the crashes. In the end, there was a clear winner (if you want to call it that), but some of the reasoning for this result is what we need to talk about.
Now, not to bring up that whole ridiculous “fragmentation” argument for the 1,010th time, but just take a quick glance at the chart above. As you can see, Android is not the only leading mobile OS on the planet that has its fair share of older builds floating around on devices. In fact, through this study, Crittercism discovered that there were at least 23 different versions of iOS and 33 of Android.
The second note that was discussed was the reasoning behind these crash rates, that seem to get higher as you get to a higher OS build. The obvious reaction is to assume that because the majority of people run the newest OS that the rate would have to be higher. This study doesn’t ignore that idea, but they also want to toss out the fact that many of the apps we use on a daily basis are simply not updated to be compatible with new releases. I would tend to agree that that is probably issue #1. How often do you find yourself on your Galaxy Nexus asking, “When is <insert favorite app> going to get Ice Cream Sandwich support?”
Lastly, the overall numbers that were presented are nothing for anyone to be overly concerned about. Sure, we can brag it up for the next few hours to our iOS counterparts about how their apps are less stable, but the truth is that apps on both platforms are crashing at less than a 1% rate. We aren’t talking about apps crashing 10-20% of the time or anything here. Both operating systems are stable, Android just happens to be slightly more stable.
+1 Android! (Sorry, had to.)
Via: Forbes
From Android Life
