Hasta La Gadget!

After “a whirlwind trip to Asia” visiting Android partners, Google’s SVP Sundar Pichai has just confirmed — by way of the above photo — that the next version of his mobile OS is called KitKat aka Android 4.4. The exec shared this geeky nugget on both Google+ and Twitter, while his company has updated the Android developer site with a page chronicling Android’s milestones so far. Details are light at the moment, and Google teases its upcoming release with just the following line:

“It’s our goal with Android KitKat to make an amazing Android experience available for everybody.”

Pichai also announced that there are now over one billion Android device activations, surpassing the 900 million mark back in May this year. This is well ahead of the end-of-year target that Chairman Eric Schmidt predicted back in April. Just to recap, here are all the previous dessert-based names that contributed to these figures: Cupcake (1.5), Donut (1.6), Eclair (2.0), Froyo (2.2), Gingerbread (2.3), Honeycomb (3.0), Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), and Jelly Bean (4.1-4.3). Naturally, it’s “K” after “J” now. More after the break (pun intended).

Update: We’ve added Nestle’s wacky promo video as well.

Update 2: Go ahead and grab the kids, because you’ll now find a short clip of the KitKat statue’s unveiling. So… is anyone gonna break off a piece of that, or what?

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

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Source: Google+, @SundarPichai (Twitter), Google, BBC

Google’s always cooking something up, and the company has our undivided attention when the press gets invited over for a breakfast featuring Sundar Pichai, the man in charge of Chrome and Android. While the invite doesn’t indicate anything specific, we’re expecting to hear some sort of announcement next Wednesday. We’d love to get some more details on the elusive Android 4.3 or perhaps a new Nexus 7 (heck, a new Nexus anything would be just fine with us), but we’ll just have to wait and see what Sundar has in store.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Google

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Via: Twitter

Speaking to Walt Mossberg at D11 this morning, Google’s Sundar Pichai offered glorious news for anyone who loves the HTC One but craves an untouched Android experience: he confirmed that there is indeed a stock Android 4.2.2 version of the flagship device One coming, and it will be fully unlocked for T-Mobile and AT&T at the solid price of $599. It’ll go on sale in the Google Play Store on June 26th, the same date as its $649 counterpart, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 stock edition. The new version of the device — which will be sold in the US initially — will come SIM-unlocked, with an unlocked bootloader and 32GB storage. In terms of radios, it will offer quadband LTE (700/850/AWS/1900), triband HSPA+ (850/1900/2100) and the usual quadband GSM / EDGE. Sadly, this means that T-Mobile users will enjoy LTE and EDGE, but won’t be able to take advantage of AWS on the 3G side.

There is some give and take involved with such a device, of course; since it’s pure stock, Sense-specific features (BlinkFeed, Zoe and so on) won’t be included, since they aren’t optimized to work on vanilla Android. Still, we’re quite excited to see companies like HTC and Samsung embrace the “Nexus experience” and offer choice to its users, and we’re hoping this is just the beginning of a new trend.

Update: HTC confirmed to us that the Google Edition will retain the same two-button setup, and they’ll have the same functions as before: short press of Home for Home, long press for Google Now and double tap for Recent Apps. The back button will also remain the same, and the black menu bar that plagues third-party apps that haven’t complied with Google’s design specifications isn’t going anywhere. We were also told that Beats Audio will still be integrated into the device as a hardware optimization, but the visual indicator — currently found in the status bar on the original One — won’t be there.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, HTC, Google, AT&T, T-Mobile

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Source: HTC

Sundar Pichai, Andy Rubin’s replacement as Android chief, has been talking to Wired about his new job. He poured ice water on the idea that we’ll see a raft of new hardware at Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference. Instead, he said that this year’s show will focus on “all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things” for Android and Chrome OS. He also let slip that his daily driver is a Galaxy S 4, but that he’s never even used the flagship’s much-hyped eye-tracking feature — an admission which’ll surely go down well with HTC One fans.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Google

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Source: Wired