Hasta La Gadget!

Look, if you buy a carrier-branded Android handset, you should know good and well that you may never see the first Android update. It ain’t easy to hear, but as mama always said, the truth ain’t always painless. That said, there’s still some research you should do before picking a phone and carrier, and ComputerWorld has seemingly done just that for you. The methodology is all explained down in the source link, but the long and short of it is this: in the last half of 2010, Verizon upgraded 33 percent of its sub-2.2 phones to Froyo, while Sprint updated just 28.6 percent of its stable and T-Mobile blessed only 12.5 percent of its phones with the new digs. AT&T bashers should take note, as Ma Bell didn’t update a single one of its nine Android phones during the June-December 2010 time period. Yeah, ouch. Over on the handset side, we’ve got HTC gifting half of its devices with Froyo, while Motorola comes in second with 15.4 percent and Samsung third with 11.1 percent. No matter how you slice it, it’s a depressing study to look at, and it probably makes your decision to skip over a Nexus One seem all the more idiotic in retrospect. But hey, at least there’s the Nexus S to console you… if you’re willing to sign up with T-Mob, that is.

Study: Verizon Wireless and HTC most eager to provide Android 2.2 updates originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Got a hankering for some NVIDIA 3D Vision in a new laptop PC? Dell’s making it happen with some component upgrades on its high-end Alienware M17x and XPS 17 laptops. It seems Round Rock came across a few shipments of a 17-inch, 1080p panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, perfect for interfacing with NVIDIA’s shutter glasses, and is including it (along with a new NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M for the XPS 17) as premium options. They’ll also both sport Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors. Dell’s press release doesn’t specify if a set of 3D glasses will come with the new laptops, nor how much the upgrade will cost, but a 3D-capable M17x will start at $1,499 starting January 10th, and a stereoscopic XPS 17 will run $1,449 on February 1st. You do the math.

Updated: We got to check out the XPS 17 3D after the presser. Those looking for 3D in the XPS chassis won’t be dissapointed — Alice in Wonderland looked pretty great in three dee. We also got to check out the M17x — hands-on with that one here.

Continue reading Dell refreshes Alienware M17x, Dell XPS 17 with 120Hz 3D HD screens, Sandy Bridge CPUs

Dell refreshes Alienware M17x, Dell XPS 17 with 120Hz 3D HD screens, Sandy Bridge CPUs originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The farce that has been Sony Ericsson’s bungled, delayed, and deservedly maligned Android upgrade story for the Xperia X10 family is coming to a fittingly silly end. Questioned by Android Community on the possibility of a Froyo (Android 2.2) upgrade for its initial set of Android handsets, the SE team has just come out and admitted that there’ll be no future OS upgrades, at least in terms of Android iterations. The X10, X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro are not being abandoned, not at all, but the only software enhancements you can look forward to will come directly from Sony Ericsson. The company hardly sees that as a bad thing, however, judging by a recent tweet announcing its belief that an SE-customized Eclair tastes better than Google’s untouched Froyo. We’d protest, but what’s the use?

Sony Ericsson: no OS updates for Xperia X10 beyond Android 2.1, it’s better than 2.2 anyway originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Word on the street from Microsoft savant Paul Thurrott is that Windows Phone 7’s first update might go gold as early as this week — in time for Ballmer’s CES keynote, in fact, which means he might give it a mention and / or spend a few minutes showing it off. It’s said to be codenamed “NoDo,” short for “No Donuts” — a pretty obscure (and odd) reference to the fact that Redmond doesn’t want to release incremental, minor updates like Google did with Android 1.6 Donut. We’re not sure why they’d bother taking a swipe at an Android build that happened… oh, four versions ago, but Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Anyhow, it’ll apparently add copy / paste, CDMA location support (which might be the only thing holding up Verizon and Sprint from launching at this point), support for additional Qualcomm chipsets, and miscellaneous bug fixes.

Moving on, Thurrott says that the rumored Mango update isn’t the next update after NoDo, but it’s real — and it’s big. It’ll add Internet Explorer 9 with HTML 5 and Silverlight support, but notably, its code line is being referred to internally as the “entertainment branch,” so there might be some other magic in store. Current version numbers for Mango are in the 7.2 range, but builds are in the 7500 range, suggesting Windows Phone 7.5 branding is a possibility. An exciting 2011 for Microsoft on the mobile side? Looks like.

Update: Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel has chimed in on Twitter in direct response to Thurrott:

“BTW, a guy failed to bring donuts to a meeting after loosing [sic] a bet. The ‘nodo’ codename had nothing to do with Android.”

Makes a heck of a lot more sense — and it confirms the accuracy of the codename. Thanks, CrookedC!

Windows Phone 7 ‘NoDo’ update hitting phones in early February, ‘Mango’ coming later with IE9? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t know what it fixes yet, but we’ve gotten some tips — and we’re now seeing it on xda-developers — that Nexus S handsets in the field are getting blessed with their first software update, build GRH78 (up from GRH55) with an official version of 2.3.1. Not everyone has it yet (we don’t on ours), so as usual, this would seem to be getting sent out on a rolling basis. Hang tight, owners!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Update: The full text of the update is “This system update from Google contains important bug fixes plus the latest version of Maps.” It’s 1.9MB — so yeah, don’t expect much!

Update 2: By the way, it appears that the “checkin” trick is actually working to force this update (it usually doesn’t). Just dial *#*#checkin#*#* from the dialer and you should get the update notification. Have fun!

Nexus S gets its first update over the air originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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