Ever been told that you should fully discharge your battery to prolong its life? Or that jailbreaking your phone is illegal? Or that you should wait for the newest Intel processor because it’s going to be “so much faster”? These are tech myths we hear all the time, and likely spread to our friends — but most are just a waste of your time (and in some cases, they can actually harm your gadgets). Here are some of the worst offenders.
Samsung’s launching… something at the end of the month. It’s not saying what it’s launching — but the indications are pretty clear that it’s the Galaxy S III.
You would think a necessary component for rooting the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III would be the actual handset. Unless you’re exceptionally pro, in which case you can just do it remotely using a leaked kernel. Before you ask, yes, this exact feat has been accomplished already, so the day you do purchase your shiny new S III, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll be able to root it immediately.
Android in your pocket? OK, you already have that if you have an Android phone, but in terms of flexibility, nothing quite beats an actual PC. So what if you could carry about a small portable computer running Android, just waiting for whatever task you want to throw at it? Enter the AllWinner A10 Android 4.0 mini PC.
You know it as the Samsung Galaxy S III, but Samsung knows it as the GT-i9300. Now the clever team over at Ausdroid has discovered that entering in model codes over at Samsung Australia’s support site returns a range of variants for Vodafone (VAU), Optus (OPS) and Telstra (TEL). If they’re reading the tea leaves right, it looks like a full-on, multi-carrier GSIII assault is planned at the end of this month.
Samsung Galaxy Note fans have spent the last week watching ICS rollout overseas. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for the OS update and Samsung’s new ‘Premium Suite’ of S-pen apps like S Note, Shape Match and Formula Match (see video). I asked Samsung, Telstra, Optus and Vodafone for updates, and here’s what they had to say.
The 4.3-inch PadFone goes one step further than the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note ‘phablet’ by docking into a 10.1-inch station to became an actual slate device. We’ve been tracking its progress for a year now, and with the Computex Asia tech show weeks away, you’ll soon see a lot more of it. New this week: Finally a decent PadFone close-up video (after the jump), and an Australian window: Q3; likely mid-to-late August.
You’ve probably read about Android market fragmentation and wondered just how big a deal it is. This visualisation spells out the problem quite clearly: there are almost 4000 unique Android devices out there running a single app available on Play. That, right there, is fragmentation.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will partner up with multiple Android handset manufactures to produce several Nexus-branded phones each year, rather than releasing just one.
Aussies certainly know a thing or two about patent disputes delaying product launches. It sucks. Now Americans are facing that fate with the HTC One X and Evo 4G LTE (the US-centric successor to the Evo 3D). They’ll be indefinitely delayed at US Customs for investigation of an Apple patent infringement. HTC explains:
