OS updates

Owners of Samsung's Galaxy S smartphone and the 7-inch Galaxy Tab tablet will finally receive an upgrade to Android 2.3 Gingerbread starting very soon.

Samsung announced today that the Gingerbread upgrade would also extend to its Galaxy Ace, Gio, Fit, and mini phones.

The company will kick off with an upgrade to the Galaxy S in the U.K. and Nordic countries starting as soon as the middle of this month. The upgrade would then travel through the rest of the world, reaching other European countries, North America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and then other regions.… Read more

Editor's note: This story was published before the event had taken place. We used Cover It Live to report live during the event itself. To see the text of that live blog, replay it in the Cover It Live module below. You can also watch CNET Reviews editor Donald Bell's first take on the Samsung Chromebook in the video here.

SAN FRANCISCO--Samsung is one of two Google partners to sell the very first Chrome-based laptops starting this summer.

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome at Google, announced the new Chromebooks at the Google I/O developer conference on Wednesday. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--On the second day of Google's developer conference here, the Google team announced a feature that lets developers add one-touch in-app purchasing to their Chrome Web Store apps, using Google's payment system.

Now with a single click, app users can make a purchase and then jump right back to the application, be it a comic book, game, or whatever else.

In addition to making it easy for users to make one-touch payments, said Google's Vikas Gupta, the company wanted to make it simple for developers to add the feature--it requires the addition of only a single … Read more

Google's long-awaited cloud music service has arrived. It's called Music Beta; it's free (for now, and currently invite-only); and after giving it a test-drive, I'm happy to report that the whole system is fairly smooth.

From the perspective of the end-user, the payoff of Music Beta is to have your entire music collection in the cloud, available to stream instantly from any browser or Android-based device (phone, tablet, Google TV). Out of the box, a new Android smartphone or tablet can tap into your music collection within minutes, with no computer syncing required. That's pretty … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Android, Google's top developer priority, hogged the spotlight at Google I/O today--in part as the foundation for new Google music and video services.

Among the Google I/O announcements today:

• Google announced Android 3.1, an update to Honeycomb that adds new interface options, lets people plug in USB devices, and sports a movie rental service that works directly from the device. Android 3.1 comes to Motorola Xoom owners today and other tablets later.

• After Honeycomb comes Ice Cream Sandwich in the fourth quarter, which incorporates Honeycomb features but works on phones and Google TV … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Google today is releasing Android 3.1, an upgrade to its Honeycomb tablet OS, and will bring its features to mobile phones with the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the OS set for the fourth quarter.

Honeycomb is geared for Android tablets, which thus far haven't yet attained the popularity of Apple's iPad. Upgrading from 3.0 to 3.1 should offers user interface refinements, a new movie rental service, and the ability to plug in USB devices such as keyboards and game controllers.

The Motorola Xoom tablet on Verizon's 3G service--the inaugural Honeycomb device with … Read more

With Google I/O 2011 less than two weeks away, I wanted to take this opportunity to round up a few potential Android-related announcements. The annual Google developer event has grown to include more Android news each year, and this event will follow suit. Indeed, Android is listed in at least 21 of the sessions scheduled for May 10-11, with topics ranging from Honeycomb and 3D gaming to NFC and Android Market tools. Two keynotes will be covered live by CNET; expect tomorrow's session to focus on Android with Wednesday's session switching to Chrome. And on that note, … Read more

The 404 co-host and known iPhone user Wilson Tang joins us this week and gives us Android guys a fresh perspective on this week's Android news. Speaking of the news, getting around your carrier's tethering restrictions just got a bit harder with carriers blocking tethering apps in the Android Market; Amazon and Barnes & Noble prepare to go head-to-head in the next round of the tablet/e-reader war; and we get news of a whole slew of upcoming Android phones, including a massive 4.5-inch model and the first Android phone targeted specifically at women. All of that, plus the answers to your emails, on this week's episode of Android Atlas Weekly with Antuan Goodwin and Justin Eckhouse. … Read more

Verizon Wireless's first 4G LTE handset, the HTC Thunderbolt, is set to receive its first software update. And while it's not a major update such as Gingerbread, it should be enough to satisfy most users.

Once installed, this 1.13.605.7 build will provide "enhanced data connectivity when accessing the Verizon 3G network." In other words, there should now be a hand-off between the carrier's 4G LTE and 3G networks. As early adopters recently learned the hard way, the Thunderbolt does not let its users toggle between the two networks.

Other details in the … Read more