With Android 4.1 Jelly Bean now official, smartphone manufacturers have one more software update to fit on their calendar.
Things are not looking so bright for Android fans, especially for those who do not own an ICS-based device. Unfortunately, less than 10% of today’s Android smartphones do not run Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, instead they are powered by an older platform.
Although most companies promised to deliver the latest Android version for some of their top tier devices, it appears that Google was faster with Jelly Bean, the new iteration of Android.
However, Samsung is among the few handset makers that kept true to its word and managed to update some of their most popular smartphones before Android 4.1 Jelly Bean was officially announced last week.
Furthermore, the South Korean company plans to update some of its current Android devices to Jelly Bean, but more details on the schedule will be available soon.
In this regard, the folks over at Pocketnow have reached to Samsung for an official statement on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update, and here is what the company had to say:
“Samsung will soon announce which additional devices are eligible for the Jelly Bean update. As the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, Samsung leads the Android community with best-in-class devices like the Galaxy S III, and is creating new device categories with products like the Galaxy Note. Samsung has delivered the most Nexus-branded lead OS devices and we are pleased that Google will be bringing Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S customers the first experiences of Jelly Bean on a handheld device.”
Apparently, Samsung will be one of the first to offer an upgrade to Jelly Bean for a handful of products, and, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S put aside, the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note are likely to be among these devices as well. Stay tuned for more info on the matter.
Linus Torvalds announced yesterday, June 30th, that the fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.5 kernel is now available for download and testing.
Looking at the changelog, it appears that 60% of work on Linux kernel 3.5 RC5 is for updating drivers. The rest are media fixes, networking updates, and some minor arch updates (ARM, x86, PowerPC).
“The diffstat also looks uglier, because while *most* of it is nice and small, the printk fixes do stand out a bit. But it was a real regression from 3.4, so it's not like it's questionable.”
“UDF also got more careful about corrupted filesystems at mount-time, and that also shows in the diffstat, but that's at least partly because some of the checks were cleaned up an dmoved to a helper function while making them more complete. So the actual change is smaller than it looks.” - said Linus Torvalds in the email announcement.
Download Linux kernel 3.5 RC5 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it is intended for testing purposes only.
UMC is the foundry always playing second behind TSMC, but it seems that lately it has been on a track of important achievements and, if this trend continues, the company will edge its main competitor.
One of these achievements is the company’s pledge to invest over 8 billion dollars into developing and building new 28 nm manufacturing capacities.
This move seems to have attracted the looks of the semiconductor industry and now UMS has reportedly landed some orders from the world’s biggest fabless semiconductor designer.
We’re talking of course about Qualcomm and the orders are likely Snapdragon S4 mobile processors.
Seeing UMC’s commitment for new and advanced manufacturing technologies, other industry players want to start a collaboration with the foundry.
This time it’s IBM we’re talking about and the great R & D IT company is planning to work with UMC on designing FinFET transistor technology which UMC will manufacture in its future 20nm manufacturing process.
“We are happy to engage with a recognized technology leader such as IBM for this technology advancement effort.
Leveraging IBM’s technology expertise to shorten our 20nm and FinFET R&D cycle will create a win-win situation for UMC and our customers,” said UMC’s Vice President, I.C. Chen.
Today's script of the day is yet another CMS, phpwcms. It may not be that different from any other CMSs out there, but phpwcms is worth a look, at least for curiosity's sake.
phpwcms possesses all the regular CMS features, including a graphic installer, easy to use admin panel, WYSIWYG content editing, a file manager, user management features, spam filtering system, feeds, social sharing options, easy page management, is extendable via modules, and ships with lots of documentation.
The OpenSource CMS website provides an online demo for phpwcms, which you can access from here.
Current development is carried out via Google Code. Older version of phpwcms can be downloaded from its SourceForge page.
Download phpwcms from our Scripts section here. Check out more phpwcms screenshots here.
Made official back in February, a few days before Mobile World Congress 2012 trade fair's opening, the Optimus Vu has been released one month later in South Korea.
However, it appears that LG plans to release the Optimus Vu outside South Korea as well, which is probably the main reason the smartphone has been recently spotted at FCC (Federal Communications Commission).
Even though the smartphone that made its stop at FCC has a different name, the form factor strongly resembles the Optimus Vu. The folks over at Engadget have learned that the LG VS950 will be released in the United States via Verizon Wireless.
According to FCC's filings, the LG VS950 has been approved with LTE band 13 and GSM 850 / 1900 support, which comes in line with Verizon's networks.
In addition, the smartphone has been confirmed to feature NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, as well as Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP and High-Speed (HS) support.
Unfortunately, LG Optimus Vu will be shipped with Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread operating system, but hopefully, it will get the long-awaited Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade by the end of the year.
LG Optimus Vu is equipped with a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8660 Snapdragon processor, which is complemented by an Adreno 220 GPU and 1GB of RAM.
Although the smartphone packs 32GB of internal memory, the Optimus Vu does not come with an external microSD card slot, so there's no way to further enhance storage amount.
On the back, LG Optimus Vu sports 8-megapixel photo snapper with autofocus, LED flash and full HD (1080p) video recording, while in the front there's a secondary 1.3-megapixel camera for video calls.
It is also worth mentioning the smartphone drains energy from a high-capacity 2080 mAh Li-Ion battery, which has yet to be rated by the manufacturer. Stay tuned for more updates on the matter.
Motorola Mobility and major carrier Claro have just announced the immediate availability of the Motorola RAZR smartphone in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Although the carrier did not provide any details regarding the phone's pricing options, customers should take into consideration that this is Motorola’s Android flagship smartphone, which means it won't come for cheap.
Once one of the thinnest smartphones on the market, Motorola RAZR is only 7.1 millimeters thick but features premium materials and a slim candybar form factor.
The back cover of the phone is made of KEVLAR fiber, while the front part of the device features Corning Gorilla Glass coating for extra protection. On the inside, Motorola RAZR comes with splash-guard coating.
Software-wise, Motorola RAZR is powered by Google's Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, but the handset maker already confirmed the smartphone will soon receive an Ice Cream Sandwich update.
Even though the RAZR is among Motorola’s most powerful Android phones, it cannot be put against current quad-core smartphones available on the market.
Motorola RAZR is equipped with a 1.2 GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4430 processor, which is complemented by a PowerVR SGX540 GPU and 1GB of RAM.
In addition, the device packs 16GB of RAM and microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB). There's also an 8-megapixel rear camera with autofocus and LED flash, as well as a secondary 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls.
Unlike the RAZR MAXX which is powered by a high-capacity 3300 mAh Li-Ion battery, Motorola RAZR features only an 1780 mAh Li-Ion battery that should provide up to 304 hours of standby time or up to 9 hours of talk time.
“The original Motorola RAZR managed to turn a functional need into an object of desire. Now we’ve done it again by creating the next impossibly thin smartphone – a head-turning design with the power to carry your life with you,” says Alfonso Cleaves Gutiérrez, commercial director, Motorola Mobility Central America.
The following Linux-based operating systems have been announced last week: PureOS 5.0, Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2 and Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce. In other news: CodeWeavers released CrossOver 11.2 with support for Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010; Google released Google Chrome 20 web browser. Softpedia Linux Blog news includes articles about Linux kernel 3.5 RC4, siduction 12.1.1, LibreOffice 3.6.0 Beta 2, PS3 Media Server 1.54.0, Empathy 3.5.3, Parted Magic 2012_06_26, SolusOS 2 Alpha 5, KDE SC 4.9 RC1, Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-67, Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.3, AMD Catalyst 12.6, Calibre 0.8.58, Phoronix Test Suite 4.0 Milestone 4, NetworkManager 0.9.6 Alpha, , and much more. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the new and updated Linux distributions, and the development releases.
On June 24th, Marc Poirette proudly announced that the PureOS 5.0 Linux operating system is available for download. Powered by Linux kernel 3.3.6 and based on the latest Debian Testing packages, PureOS 5.0 comes now with the GNOME 3.4.2 desktop environment, providing both GNOME Shell and GNOME Classic desktop sessions.
Highlights of PureOS 5.0:
· Based on Debian Testing; · Linux kernel 3.3.6;
· GNOME 3.4.2 desktop environment; · LibreOffice 3.5.4 office suite (includes Calc, Impress, Writer and Draw); · GIMP 2.8.0 image editor; · Iceweasel 13.0 web browser; · Icedove 10.0 email client; · Transmission 2.52 torrent downloader; · FileZilla 3.5.3 FTP client; · Banshee 2.4.1 music player and organizer; · VLC Media Player 2.0.1; · Brasero 3.2.0 CD/DVD writer; · Evince 3.4.0 document viewer; · Eye of Gnome 3.4.1 image viewer; · GParted 0.11.0 hard drive partitioner; · CUPS 1.5.3 printing server; · GCC 4.7.0 compiler; · Added the smxi and sgfxi scripts; · Added the following Nautilus actions and scripts for module management: debs2lzm, activate, debs2lzm-file, lzm2dir, dir2lzm and find2lzm.
On June 28th, Canonical announced that the second Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system is now available for download. Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2 is now powered by the Linux kernel 3.5.0-2.2 packages, based on the Linux 3.5 RC4 kernel upstream release, and the latest development version of the upcoming GNOME 3.6 desktop environment.
The following important filesystem utilities have been updated in Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2: e2fsprogs 1.42.4, mdadm 3.2.5, autofs 2012-06-01, and btrfs-tools 2012-03-28. Also, there's now a new version of the ATI video driver. Moreover, the Mozilla Firefox 14.0 Beta web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 14.0 Beta email client were added in this development release of Ubuntu 12.10.
Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2
Download Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 2 now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an alpha release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.
On June 29th, Clement Lefebvre announced that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 13 Xfce Edition operating system is available for download and testing. Being based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce is built on top of the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment, it is powered by Linux kernel 3.2, and distributed as a DVD ISO image for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
Highlights of Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce:
· Based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS; · Linux kernel 3.2; · Xfce 4.10; · MATE and mintMenu applets; · Mint Display Manager; · Artwork improvements; · Search engines.
Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce
Download Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should not be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.
Other News:
· On June 25th, CodeWeavers announced that the CrossOver 11.2.0 software has been officially released for both Linux and Mac OS X platforms, bringing support for Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010. Based on Wine 1.4.1, CrossOver 11.2.0 comes with lots of general improvements for various applications, as well as support for the upcoming Apple Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) operating system. Read more about it here.
· On June 26th, Google proudly announced that they have unleashed the stable and final version of the Google Chrome 20 web browser for Linux, Macintosh, Windows and Chrome Frame platforms. There's no information about the Google Chrome 20 (the actual version is 20.0.1132.43) web browser, except the fact that it brings a lots of bugfixes and various stability improvements over previous releases. Read more about it here.
· For this week we've posted an 720p HD video clip that showcases the features of the Linux Mint 13 RC Xfce Edition operating system. The video has 7 minutes and 31 seconds, and it was posted by sneekylinux.
