If you find yourself with nothing better to do this weekend, then you might have a bit of fun playing around with Samsung’s soon-to-be-released S Voice application on your rooted Android 4.0 smartphone. The APK has now made its way into the wild, and we couldn’t help but take it for a spin on our Nexus S. First off, while we can’t vouch for the security of the file, we can confirm that it’s indeed functional. Secondly, while some of the S Voice features work just fine — such as search or contact queries — other requests such as navigation repeatedly caused the app to crash. In other words, if you’re expecting this app to behave as it should on the Galaxy S III, you might be in for a disappointment. If you’re merely looking to poke around with the S Voice functionality, however, the download seems quite worthwhile. At this point, we’re most curious to know whether non-Samsung owners have similar luck.

SOURCE via xda-developers

The final significant roadblock to Google’s buyout of Motorola has been cleared, as Chinese regulators have just given their rubber stamp. Their approval follows a few months after the simultaneous American and European clearances, and virtually all that’s left now is to formally close the deal and start integrating the two mobile giants.

It might still come too late for the combined entity to present a united front at Google I/O, but at least they won’t have any awkward glances at each other across the room. We’re just trying to decide on whether or not Googorola is the best pet name for the loving, $12.5 billion-dollar Android union.

Google has told the AP that the deal will likely wrap up early next week, so Motorola should be part of the family well in advance of Google I/O. Also, Google has to keep Android freely usable by anyone for at least five years, although no one was expecting that to change anytime soon.

SOURCE via Wall Street Journal

Despite Motorola’s Android 4.0 rollout schedule, not every one of the manufacturer’s devices are ready for dessert — some, the outfit says, will be put on a diet. “Obviously we want the new release to improve our devices,” the company said in a recent blog post, “If we determine that can’t be done, well, then we’re not able to upgrade that particular device.” Handsets that are bogged down by Ice Cream Sandwich simply won’t get an update. Even so, Motorola affirms that it’s working closely with Google to keep its hardware up to date.

SOURCE via Motorola

Americans and Brits might chuckle at their respective understandings of words like chips, pants and biscuits — a search engine, however, can’t be quite so discerning. As it turns out, Google actually thinks it can, and has been working on its Knowledge Graph project to prove it. Beginning today, English searches from Google.com might start seeing a new box appearing alongside. If there is more than one potential meaning to your search term, Google will ask you to specify (trousers, not underwear, for example). Likewise, when it’s more confident it knows what you mean, you’ll get a summary box instead. (A celebrities place of birth, favorite cheese etc..)

Google’s Shashidhar Thakur, tech lead for search, told us “We think of this as our pragmatic approach to semantic search.” And by pragmatic, he means that for the last two years, Google has been working to map the “Universe of things,” not just webpages. Over 500 million things, in fact, creating a total of 3.5 billion attributes and connections so far. The hope is, that as this technology evolves, you’ll be able to ask more complex questions, like “Which US airports have a Cinnabon stall.” Or, you know, other such deep and meaningful queries.

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As you may have heard, Samsung is launching their brand new flagship Galaxy S III sometime soon. Anyone who has been doubting the success of the handset from when it was unveiled at the Unpacked event nearly a month ago should get ready to eat their words. An unnamed Samsung official has put the pre-order numbers to around 9 million units worldwide. This figure includes phones sold by more than 290 carriers in 145 countries. The Galaxy S III will follow suit with its predecessor in having many localized variations whose specs have been leaked on the net already. The SGS3 is said to have a May 29th launch in Europe and a June release in North America.

SOURCE via The Verge

Let’s face it: right now, the head nods and other rudimentary controls of Google’s Project Glass are mostly useful for looking good, sharing photos and not much else. A US patent application submitted last September and just now published, however, raises the possibility of more sophisticated control coming from your hands. A ring, a bracelet or a even a fake fingernail with an infrared-reflective layer would serve as a gesture control marker for a receiver on heads-up display glasses. Having this extra control would give the glasses-mounted computing room to grow by learning gestures, and it could even depend on multiple ornaments for more sophisticated commands — at least, if you don’t mind looking like a very nerdy Liberace. We can imagine the headaches a hand-based method might cause for very enthusiastic talkers, among other possible hiccups, so don’t be surprised if Project Glass goes without any kind of ring input. That said, we suspect that Sauron would approve.

SOURCE via USPTO

Love them or hate them, those ubiquitous Android skins aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Now the latest one to make an entrance to the overlay game is LG’s UI 3.0, which the Korean outfits says will make the overall experience of its handsets easier, speedier and “more convenient.” The new UI brings features such as a novel drag anywhere-style lock screen, an Icon Customizer for setting your own photos as icons / shortcuts, a revamped Pattern Lock that lets you preset apps for quicker launch and a Voice Shutter trait for taking snaps via voice commands — à la Sammy S Voice. UI 3.0 is set to make its debut next week with the launch of LG’s Optimus LTE II in Korea, while the Optimus 4X HD will also come sporting the fresh skin once it launches in June.

SOURCE via LG

By any means, this is certainly far from being one of the biggest changes Gmail’s ever seen — still, it’s one that’s likely to make a few tasks a wee bit easier for you. Inside the recent tweaks, Google added a new quick access trait that makes contact details — such as phone numbers — show up automatically in search results within your cherished G inbox. Additionally, the Android-maker has improved the Google+ integration (again), now allowing folks to narrow down conversations from specific Circles in the search box. Google says the changes will be rolling out over the course of the day, but in the meantime, you could always check out what exactly happens behind Gmail’s closed doors.

SOURCE via Gmail

It was only last week that we learned of the varied battery life of ASUS’ phone that would be a tablet that would be a laptop. Now, a further trickle of its performance might has passed our way, giving us insight into the real-world chops of its dual-core S4 processor and companion Adreno 225 GPU. The tests, carried out by the fine folks over at Netbooknews, highlight the device’s strengths across a swath of the usual benchmarks, putting it just below AT&T’s One X variant in Quadrant with a score of 5,057 and Sunspider at 1,917ms. The company’s hybrid did, however, manage to eke out a victory against its similarly CPU-equipped smartphone rival in Vellamo, as well as NenaMark 1 and 2, coming in at 2,554 and 60.4fps / 60.5fps, respectively.

SOURCE via NetbookNews

While pre-release benchmarks have a very hit or miss record for clues as to what future devices will bring, they almost always raise eyebrows. Nowhere is that more true than in a round of NenaMark2 testing uncovered this weekend: a previously unknown Samsung SCH-i535 for Verizon has tipped up sporting a 1.5GHz, dual-core Snapdragon S4 instead of one of Samsung’s own chips, like the Exynos 4 Quad. Given that the SCH-i515 is the model badge for Verizon’s Galaxy Nexus, it’s not a great leap in logic to speculate that this is a custom version of the Galaxy S III. It’s entirely possible that something else might fit the bill, but knowing that Samsung has used Snapdragons itself to include 4G before and that HTC just recently switched up the One X with an S4 to give it LTE on North American networks, we may be looking at the compromise Samsung needs to make to get its 4.8-inch gigantophone on Big Red.

SOURCE via Nena.se