Hasta La Gadget!

Flippin’ finally, right? Verizon Wireless put the long-awaited Android 2.1 update on hold for its cadre of Motorola Droid owners earlier in the month, with an all-too-vague “TBD” as the only detail as to when we could look for it to actually, really land. We’ve just happened upon what looks to be an internal Verizon email that went out this morning, and sure enough, it sounds as if the update will at long last begin hitting Droid owners in just a few minutes. At noon on 3/30 (that’s today, vaquero), a grand total of 1,000 users will receive notification of the update, while 9,000 more will get a similar alert just before midnight. If all goes well, the rest of ya will see v2.1 slide down starting on Thursday, though it looks as if patience will be your only friend as you await your turn. Head on past the break for the full memo, but don’t get your hopes up too high — wouldn’t want to be let down again, would you buttercup?

Continue reading Verizon begins Android 2.1 update rollout for Motorola Droid

Verizon begins Android 2.1 update rollout for Motorola Droid originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US. With the EVO 4G and Galaxy S rapidly approaching, we wouldn’t be surprised by the little green droid stealing away the US share crown, at least until Apple counters with its next slice of magical machinery. Looking at the global stage, Android has also recently skipped ahead of Symbian, with a 24 percent share versus 18 percent for the smartphone leader. Together with BlackBerry OS, Symbian is still the predominant operating system in terms of smartphone sales, but it’s interesting to see both falling behind in the field of web or application usage, which is what this metric seeks to measure. Figures from Net Applications (to be found at the TheAppleBlog link) and ArsTechnica‘s own mobile user numbers corroborate these findings.

Stats: iPhone OS is still king of the mobile web space, but Android is nipping at its heels originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The HTC Desire is spreading its wings today with the announcement of a distribution deal with Japan’s SoftBank. One of the big heavies over on that most famous archipelago, SoftBank will carry a WCDMA version of the handset with the standard Android 2.1 with Sense software and brownish externals. Sorry to disappoint our dear readers yearning for a silver or black option. Maybe in the future, eh? We don’t know what reaction to expect from the Japanese audience, but we suspect the language of effortless responsiveness and snazzy AMOLED screens will prove to be universally understood.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

HTC Desire turning Japanese with SoftBank in late April originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When we got some hands-on time with the recently announced Samsung Galaxy S, it was painfully apparent that the thing has some serious power under the hood. Now we have a better idea of just how much power, with reports indicating that it has the graphics oomph (thanks to its PowerVR SGX540 GPU) to push 90 million triangles per second. Compare that to the Snapdragon platform, which manages 22 million polygons, and the iPhone 3GS’s 28 million from the earlier SGX535, and you get a feel for the muscle lurking behind that gorgeous Super AMOLED screen. Of course, polygon counts aren’t everything when it comes to graphical power these days, and 300 million triangles won’t help you if your handset gets laggy after you install every single Bejeweled clone in the Android Market, but forgive us if we’re a little excited about the rapidly brewing mobile GPU war.

[Thanks, Robert]

Samsung’s Galaxy S has four times the polygon power of Snapdragon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 06:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We just spent a tick talking with Verizon Wireless‘ Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer Tony Melone (shown speaking) after the company’s LTE roundtable here at CTIA, and while we’ve heard a lot through the grapevine recently, we wanted to set a few things straight for ourselves. For starters, VZW affirmed that data-centric devices would be splashing down on its commercial LTE network first, possibly as early as the end of this year. When we asked specifically what kinds of devices he meant, he stated that “aircards, USB data sticks and MiFi-type devices” would be first out of the chunnel, with smartphones being “about a quarter behind.” Naturally, we asked why there would be a delay, and he stated that getting a smartphone onto a new network is more difficult than a simple data-only product; there are obvious voice-related issues to work through that aren’t present when you’re only sucking down torrents, and it’ll take some time before full-on phones join the fray. He assured us the earlier data-only device launches wouldn’t be “a public trial,” and he noted that a conservative estimate as to when we’d see LTE phones on Verizon would be “the first half of 2011.” Though, he did confess that folks would likely be pushing for earlier ship dates, and we may see a few phones drop closer to January than July if all the stars align.

Verizon talks commercial LTE deployment details: data devices first, smartphones in ‘1H 2011’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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