Telus has the Galaxy Note listed as coming soon on their website. Now Samsung Canada has a information registration page up on their site as well. Whats interesting is Samsung has a scheduled release date of Mid-February on the page. So with it now looking as though us Canadians will be getting access to the Note in less than a month, It does make for an interesting next few weeks.  Pricing is not known and so far only Telus has the Note announced but you can expect Rogers and Bell to carry this device as well.

The Samsung Galaxy Note is an Android 2.3 device with a 4G LTE 1.5GHz Dual core processor,  16GB internal with 1GB RAM, Android device, with a 5.3 inch HD Super Amoled screen, Full Touch as well as precise S pen writing capabilities.

We will be sure to keep everyone updated on the latest Galaxy Note information especially price points. Let us know in the comments if you will be picking up this when it launches sometime in February or what your thoughts are on this device.

Source: Samsung

If you are the type that prefers not to keep your Android phone in a case this may just be for you. Gelaskins is a company that makes custom skins for our portable devices. Gelaskin uses an advanced 3M adhesive that contains patented micro-channels that prevent air bubbles from forming and are easily applied and removed leaving no residue behind even after being left on for an extended amount of time.  Gelaskins prevent against scratches as well as had an anti UV coating. When picking your design you can browse through over one hundred artists designs or upload your own pictures and have it made into your very custom skin. They also email you a matching wallpaper so your Android device design flows front to back.

The best skins on the planet! GelaSkins are removable covers for protecting and customizing your portable devices. They feature stunning, photo-quality graphics ranging from fine art prints to contemporary urban images designed by our growing family of artists from around the globe. Stand out in the crowd with personalized protection from GelaSkins.

Gelaskins also has a free wallpaper app on the Android Market that you can download and spruce up your phone as well.

The Gelaskins wallpaper app offers:

• Search or scroll through hundreds of images
• Select an image
• Customize it to your liking
• Your new wallpaper will appear under Gallery
• Set the image as your wallpaper

you can download the free app here on the Market

Here we go folks, now time for the fun! We have two gift certificates to giveaway from the good folks over at GelaSkins. the certificates have a value of $25 each, which should cover the cost of a custom phone skin and shipping. If you are outside of North America, check with Gelaskin about international shipping rates.  The Gift Certificate online codes can be used to purchase a custom skin to your phone either by one of the hundreds of designs available or your own custom design. head over to gelaskins.com and pick out a design or create your own. then simply leave a comment below and fill out the quick entry form so we can contact the winners. We will randomly select two lucky people to receive the gift codes!

I will add additional bonus entries if you take a screenshot of your design and share it with us on Google+

Happy New Year and Good luck to everyone!

Winners will be announced on Monday January 9th 2012

link to entry form

Samsung is giving the Galaxy Ace model a refresh, the Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus is very similar to the original Ace just millimeters larger  and features a 3.65 inch HVGA display which is slightly larger then the first Galaxy Ace, which was 3.5 inch as well as a 1GHz processor up from the 800 GHz processor. Also improved is the Storage which has jumped to 3GB as well as 512MB of RAM.

The Galaxy Ace Plus will ship with Gingerbread where the Galaxy Ace shipped with Froyo. It is unlikly that the Ace Plus will receive an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich officially, but then again we never really can guesstimate Samsung’s plans.

Being an entry level Android phone it still lacks the front camera so if you love to video chat and partake in Google+ hangouts, this may be a turn off to you; If you are looking for an affordable Android phone that offers the most bang for your buck then maybe the Galaxy Ace Plus is right for you.  

Side By side comparison of the Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus and Galaxy Ace

“The phone has been designed to be simple yet elegant.”

No word on Price or availability as of yet but we will pass along updated information as it comes available.

Source: Samsung

They will be showing their new Android powered Intel chipped devices at CES and it is sure to be a doozy. Many of you might have looked at the image and thought, “Great it looks like an iPhone.” Although that maybe true, a great number of Android devices look similar too. It is kinda hard not to when we all want shiny and rectangular. Intel isn’t in the market to make phones or tablets though. They are in the processor depart. What we are all looking forward to seeing is how Intel will be using Android on their chips.

“You’ll see a number of Intel customers using the guts of this phone to go into the market in the first half of next year,” CEO Paul Otellini said at a Credit Suisse investor conference last month. “And we’ll have more announcements of that at CES.”

It is all about the inner works of the device, not the device its self. The Medfield-based reference smartphone you are looking at is apparently right up there with all our other high-end devices. Boasting Blue-ray quality video and shoot burst photos at 15 frames per second. The device is sadly running Android 2.3 but there is also a tablet that will be shown off running ICS. On the internal side they are saying the Atom processor is promising better battery life than the ‘Top Three” currently available. They neglected to mention who they compared it with though.

They still have some work to do in the 3G/4G department though. They still haven’t been integrated into the Medfield design as of yet. They are getting into the game a little late though. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung and Texas Instruments are 4 names that you already know and know well. Intel plans to do some major pushing in the next year or two to hopefully get themselves into the market.

Intel makes a good product but I am concerned that they might be getting into the game a little late. If they can manage to give us a fast chip, with much improved battery life though, it could get interesting. They will be shipping their hard work out for manufacturers to get to work with in the first quarter of 2012

Source - Electronista & AllThingsD

This is somewhat of a surprising move by Sony Ericsson, today they have released the alpha build of Ice Cream Sandwich for their Xperia line of Android phones. Sony Ericsson states that they have done so to show their support to the developer community and of course hoping to get valued feedback.  The Xperia Arc S, Neo V, and Ray Alpha Android 4.0 builds are available to download. There are only a very limited number of features currently working with these builds, and as a word of caution, these Roms are for development and Demo purposes and are not suitable for daily use. One feature not currently working is the basic ability to make a phone call.

To show our continuous support to the open developer community, and get your valuable feedback, we are today making an alpha ROM of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.1) for Xperia™ arc S, Xperia™ neo V and Xperia™ ray available for download. This is something we have not done before, and we are obviously very excited about it.

This ROM is strictly targeting advanced developers, and it will not work for ordinary everyday usage, as it only has a limited set of features working (you can for example not make any phone calls).

 

The extent of the limited functionality for this ICS ROM pretty much guarantees only Developers will have a use for it.

Features not working:

• Gapps (Gmail, Google Maps, etc.).
• Modem is turned off and SIM card will therefore not be recognised
• Bluetooth
• Wi-Fi
• ANT+
• FM-radio

Features included:

• New “Roboto” font.
• New “Holo” theme is supported (you are able to test apps written to make use of the Holo theme).
• Music player control from lock screen.
• Updated UI in the Settings menu.
• Updated UI in the web browser.
• Updated UI and interaction with the new messaging action bar.
• Updated UI for improved multitasking.
• Swipe to dismiss notifications, tasks and browser tabs in the Notification menu.

Well it isn’t Ice Cream Sandwich for all but at least it may give Xperia owners something to cheer about knowing developers are getting the support of Sony Ericsson. If you are curious and want to check out the ICS ROM you can head over to the SE developers world website for additional information, warnings and of course the download links.

Source: Sony Ericsson Developers World

T-Mobile and Nokia held an event here in New York City tonight “announcing” the Nokia Lumia 710, a $49 Windows Phone 7.5 device.  Due to launch on January 11, 2012 (the second day of CES 2012).

This is phone comes with a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm processor, 512 MB RAM, and 8 GB of internal storage, a 3.7″ touchscreen with “Nokia ClearBlack (a special coating that aids visibility in high lighting levels) .  The Lumia 710 fits solidly in the mid-range tier of smartphones, aimed squarely at those users who have not yet taken the plunge into the smartphone arena.  On numerous occasions throughout the evening it was mentioned that the United States still has more feature phone users than smartphone users.  Apparently there are 150 million users who have not yet joined us, the smartphone users.

Nokia and T-Mobile are hoping to interest these users with an attractive price and more than adequate specifications.  While not necessarily for the “hardcore” crowd, the Nokia Lumia 710 could work very well for a fresh smartphone user as well as anybody who uses the Xbox 360, seeing as the recent update to the “Metro style” user interface will make a WP 7.5 device instantly recognizable.

We realize that we are an Android site but we were invited to this event – so we took them up on their invite. We ate their food, drank their alcohol, and played the abundance of games.  Don’t judge us – we’re what you call professionals.

Hardware:

- Unlocked bootloader!
- Android 2.3.5 pre-loaded (MIUI ROM)
- 4inch screen at 480 x 854 res
- Dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S3 (MSM8260)
- 4GB ROM
- 1GB RAM
- Up to 32GB Micro-SD card support
- 8MP Rear Camera
- Noise-cancelling microphone
- 1930mA battery!
- GPS (U.S. GPS and Russian GLONASS;)
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity
- 266MHz Adreno220 GPU
- 125 * 63 * 11.9 (mm)
- GSM 850/900/1800/1900
- WCDMA 850/1900/2100

Other specs:

- x3 Capacitive touch buttons (Menu, Desktop, Back key)
- Side USB (micro) port
- Volume button (side)
- Powerbutton (side)
- MI-Button (Customisable button for application of your choice)
- 149g weight

Accessories:

- Interchangable back covers in variety of different colours. (currently 7 with more to follow)
- Other “MI” Accessories to be launched such as phone stand.

Source: Engadget, miuiandroid

Krylon360 over at RootzWiki.com found the Official Gingerbread build for the Samsung Galaxy S 4G by T-Mobile. The past few weeks, we have been seeing a few leaks for the device, but nothing that has come over Samsung Kies Mini.

Here is what Krylon360 has to say about it.

“I bring to you, The Official GB Leak for the Galaxy S 4G. I took this from the Samsung Servers, and had Chainfire decrypt it.
I say this is official due to the fact that there are a few users on XDA who started to receive it over Kies Mini, but then it was taken down, just as fast as it went up.

This is not a deodex’d or rooted version.
Whitehawkx is currently deodexing it, and drhonk is working the kernel for root/cwm flavoring.”

We are anxious to see what devs do with this build.
Since both Krylon360 and drhonk released ClockWorkMod for the Galaxy S 4G, Development has really picked up, and both Krylon360 and drhonk are focused on bringing CM7 to the device.

You will need ODIN to flash.

Instuctions:
Unzip
Rename the .tar.md5 to just .tar
Boot your phone to Download Mode
Load the .tar into the PDA Slot and flash.

Galaxy S 4G GB Leak

Sources: drhonk, RootzWiki

So far Rooting has been unsuccessful, however, there are devs working on it. One good thing that has come from all of this, is that the GPS Drivers have been ported over to the Vibrant by developer @romanbb, which allows GPS to work on the Gingerbread Ports that have shown up for that device.

Head on over to XDA to read up on the rooting discussion, and you can grab the leak from here

Sources: XDA, SamFirmware

Well this is just a tid bit of good news for all those HTC Sense users out there. HTC has been looking at how to bring it’s latest Sense 3.0 UI to some of its older and still very capable devices. According to this little note posted through facebook:

“There are aspects of the latest HTC Sense that won’t work on some of our previous devices. We are working to incorporate other aspects that will”

That means that such devices as the EVO 4G and Desire HD, might just get an update with some new Sense in it at some point. It all makes a lot of “sense” really. We have seen some ROM’s come from the xda-developers lately that are running very stable and fast using elements of the new Sense 3.0. Even on the MyTouch 4G, as our boss Simon showed us not long ago.

No matter which way you look at it, if they manage to get some UI elements implemented into some of their previous device it will be good news for everyone.

Source: XDA