Android

In addition to accessing faster network speeds, T-Mobile's Samsung Galaxy S 4G will also get another kind of access.

Phone owners who purchase movies and TV episodes through Samsung's Media Hub will now be able to lump those fees in with their monthly phone bills. 

Carrier billing is a convenience that ties phone-related expenditures to a service plan rather than to a separate credit card bill. As with renting movies from a cable TV provider in the home, costs can add up. Regardless, carrier billing is a provision many users have been wanting to gather more steam.… Read more

More than two months after making its debut with the Nexus S, Gingerbread is finally coming to the Nexus One.

Readers may recall hearing back in December that the HTC handset would see Android 2.3 within a "few weeks." The same time frame was given more than once, ultimately resulting in a few months' wait time.

However, the official word of the Gingerbread update came courtesy of the Google Nexus Twitter account last night, where it advised Nexus One owners to be patient. According to them, it may take a few weeks for the over-the-air update to … Read more

Doug from Pennsylvania inadvertently started another 404 Podcast meme in yesterday's video voice mail with his sign-off salute, "Tagger easy!" We dedicate today's show title to him and WhiteWhine, a Tumblr for First World problems.

More than 200 protesters in Libya have been killed with Qaddafi's machine guns and large-caliber weapons, but some nerds in America are more concerned with the future of .ly domains like Bitly. How will we shorten our links to a Tweet-appropriate size if Libya shuts down the Internet again?!

Don't freak out yet, because Internet restrictions by the Libyan government will not affect those domains, since most of the servers that give access to .ly links are located outside of Libya, and most administrators like Bitly CEO John Borthwick are already using precautionary measures to ensure their stability.… Read more

Developers looking to create apps for the newest Honeycomb version of Android can now grab the final SDK from Google.

The search giant released the software development kit for Android 3.0 yesterday, offering several new features that developers can incorporate into their mobile apps with the goal of publishing them directly to Google's Android Market. This final version follows the interim one that Google rolled out last month.

Honeycomb is the first Android OS designed specifically to take advantage of tablets and their larger-than-smartphone displays. As such, much of the functionality offered in the SDK can help developers … Read more

For all of the great things that Sony Ericsson has debuted over the last few weeks, one device it has yet to show off is a tablet.

With LG and Motorola gearing up with their first push and Samsung readying a larger Galaxy Tab, Sony Ericsson would be wise to jump on the emerging market, and according to a pair of recent Engadget articles that's exactly what the company has been doing. If the rumors hold true, we'll see two Honeycomb tablets bearing the Sony brand in time for the holiday shopping season.

While neither of these looks … Read more

As we near the debut of the Xoom tablet later this week, our Android focus shifts to the horizon beyond Honeycomb. What will happen beyond Android 3.0? Are handsets ever going to see Honeycomb or will we be left with two different versions of the same OS? As it turns out, the answer is a little of both.

Widely expected to be code-named Ice Cream or Ice Cream Sandwich, the next iteration of Android should resemble both Gingerbread and Honeycomb. Indeed, that's exactly what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during his keynote address at last week's Mobile … Read more

Jeff's dad, aka Sweet Lou Bakalar, is celebrating a birthday today, but unfortunately he can't be live on the show to go through his 10-item birthday wish list with us so we'll have to settle on a 10-minute voice mail instead. Lou's back, and he's cracking down on cyclists!

We'll play his voice mail right after the break, but before that we want to talk about two Facebook apps that plan to ruin (or strengthen!) as many relationships as they can. First up is a service called Breakup Notifier that automatically sends you an e-mail when your crush breaks up with his or her significant other, giving you the opportunity to turn your lurk into love.

There's also Social Harpoon, an anonymous "hot or not"-style ranking system just for your Facebook friends. The app shows you two friends and judges rating percentages based on the elo rating system to show how likely each person is to "win" against you.… Read more

Adobe announced its plans for Flash Player on tablets in time for Mobile World Congress last week. Now the company is fine-tuning its earlier news.

Adobe stated in a blog post on Monday that it expects the Motorola Xoom to be the first tablet to receive Flash Player 10.2. This latest Flash Player update is said to significantly reduce CPU usage and battery use when rendering Flash content.

As with previous versions of Flash Player, Adobe will preinstall Flash Player 10.2 on some tablets and will offer it as an over-the-air (OTA) download on others. The timeline still … Read more

Another Mobile World Congress is in the bag, and as the CNET crew leaves Barcelona we can take stock of the mobile madness that was. It was my fourth year attending the show, and I can report that 2011 was one the busiest I've seen, with a ton of new smartphones and tablets. It was a lot to handle, but Bonnie Cha of CNET Reviews; Ariel Nunez of CNET TV; and Maggie Reardon, Stephen Shankland, and Elinor Mills of CNET News were along for the ride.

As with any trade show, Mobile World Congress offered a series of satisfying devices and a couple of instances where companies fell short. Here's the report from Barcelona as we saw it. And don't forget to check out Maggie's insights in her Ask Maggie column. … Read more