Android

Consumers who buy Motorola's new Xoom tablet when it hits stores today will have to send their tablets back to Motorola if they want to upgrade to 4G LTE, according to Verizon Wireless.

Support information posted on Verizon's site details the steps a Xoom owner must go through to make the leap from the current 3G connectivity to 4G when that option becomes available in the second quarter.

Here are the steps: after backing up files and personal data on the tablet to a PC, users are encouraged to either encrypt that information or perform a factory reset … Read more

The Motorola Xoom tablet is easily the best competition Apple's iPad has ever seen. Sporting a 10.1-inch screen, front and rear cameras, HDMI output, a dual-core processor, and Google's tablet-optimized version of Android, the Xoom is entering the tablet wars with guns blazing.

Priced at $800 off-contract or $600 with a two-year commitment from Verizon, the Xoom isn't out to win frugal customers. Instead, Motorola is taking the approach used with its successful line of Droid smartphones--emphasizing the device's horsepower and the many capabilities not found on its Apple counterpart.

To this end, the Xoom'… Read more

On Thursday, Motorola's long awaited--and CNET's Best of CES 2011 winner--Xoom tablet will be released. At the time of this writing, only a handful of tablets already released are fit to compete with the Xoom in terms of features, usability, and specs.

Those include the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Apple iPad. I've gathered them here with what I feel are their most important specs, which we'll now take a deeper look at. … Read more

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