It’s not often that a carrier and manufacturer team up to beat an estimated launch date, so color us stoked to see Verizon start to push the official Froyo update for LG’s Ally starting this week — a little earlier than the February guidance they’d given before. Of course, the phone had originally been promised an eventual update way back in August of last year… so yeah, we’ve got to credit Ally owners for their patience on this one. Looks like there are some updates to LG’s custom apps and widgets, too, along with bug fixes (instant data reconnection after long calls, for instance), so we’d say this is a build you’re going to want to grab as soon as you can.
It’s been a long, tough, road, but customers of Sony Ericsson’s beleaguered X10 have some reason to celebrate this week as the Japanese version offered on NTT DoCoMo becomes the first to get an official multitouch software upgrade. Mind you, it’s not a full, perfect multitouch implementation: pinch-to-zoom is actually the only gesture supported, which means rotation (in Maps, for example) won’t work, and it’s also not guaranteed to work in all multitouch-capable third-party apps. Furthermore, Sony Ericsson isn’t yet talking about when the update will be available for other markets — and considering the phased Android 2.1 rollout, some markets could be in for a bit of a wait.
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.
Happy Thursday, Verizon customers! No better way to celebrate the beginning of the second half of the work week than with a couple firmware updates, we always say — and Big Red’s playing the part with new builds for the Fascinate and Droid Pro. The Fascinate update doesn’t seem to be Froyo as far as we can tell — disappointing, we know — but it’s still got a long list of improvements covering everything from Bluetooth and GPS to updated third-party apps in ROM. On the Droid Pro side, this seems to mirror the Droid 2 Global update that went out not long ago, promising improved voice quality and better global roaming performance. So go on, get your upgrade on — and let us know how it went.
Good news for budding rock stars — T-Mobile’s other myTouch 3G device, the Fender Edition and myTouch 3G with the 3.5mm jack, are apparently slated to get their Android 2.2 update today. New features include a fully integrated Exchange client with calendar support, GAL (Global Address List) search, remote wipe, and enhanced security. Another tweak being offered is the contact Faves Gallery, a diddy which lets you browse your top 20 contacts to see all your texts, calls, emails and the like, and Gmail app enhancements including inline image viewing and colored labels. The original myTouch 3G was serviced way back in October of last year, so we’d wager that there are a pretty good collection of folks who’ll benefit from this. So with that, we’ll leave you all to the refreshing you invariably started by the time you hit the first few words in this post. Good luck — and let us know how you make out, won’t you?
As has been discussed before, Windows Phone 7 is set to release a major update later this year, but it appears that the boys in Redmond may finally be ready to send out an OS refresh that will substantially improve the existing WP7 user experience. First and foremost, copy and paste is included, which given how long we’ve been waiting for that functionality, would be more than enough to appease the majority. The update, however, also promises significantly lower load times for third-party apps due to improvements made in memory management. We don’t have details on the specific tweaks made, but generally, the changes allot more memory for pre-loading applications to hasten things significantly. Who knows when users will receive the upgrade, but here’s hoping it’s sooner rather than later. Peep the video after the break to see just how much faster you’ll get to start honing your Fruit Ninja skills when the mood strikes.
There are no surer signs of the apocalyptic onset of middle age than a preoccupation with puzzle-solving and an unhealthy interest in adverts and barcodes. And those just happen to be the three new features Google has added to version 1.3 of its Goggles software. The visual search application for Android is now intelligent enough to decipher tricky Sudoku puzzles (and thereby suck all the fun out of them), while its algorithms have also been tweaked to make barcode scanning “almost” instant. Popular printed ads will be recognized as well, taking you to a Google search on the relevant topic. US newspapers and magazines from August 2010 are being supported for now, but we can’t imagine the rest of the world should have to wait too long for this added convenience. Video of the new Goggles’ Sudoku skills after the break.
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?
It’s no secret that Microsoft is anxious to get copy / paste functionality rolled out to Windows Phone 7 users on the double. In his CES keynote last night, Steve Ballmer himself said that it’d be coming soon — but a little hint on Microsoft’s site indicates that it might be coming as soon as this month: the URL Microsoft is using for the update’s details page includes “january-update.aspx” in it, which we’d say is pretty telling. Of course, launch dates inevitably slip, and perennial Microsoft guru Paul Thurrott thinks it’s tracking for early February before it’ll actually reach users’ devices… so we wouldn’t go canceling vacations you’ve got scheduled this month just so you can be around to score the update as soon as it’s available.
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!
