Displaying items by tag: Jelly Bean

Google's latest operating system for mobile devices, Android Jelly Bean, has finally surpassed Gingerbread and has become the most common version of Android. According to data published by Google, Jelly Bean now holds approximately 37.9% of the share among all Android versions, while the share of Gingerbread is 34.1%.

The number of devices that run Android version 4.x rose once again, but maybe not so explosive as compared to 16.5% increase last month. The figure of 25% of the device running on Android 4.x Jelly Bean and such a large jump in the month was not due to the fact that a few hundred thousand or even million users bought new smartphones.

Like it was not enough that they pretty much ruined the basic version of Android with their apps and add-ons like Walkman, now Sony has announced that some of their Xperia devices won’t even get a Jelly Bean upgrade. This will certainly be more than disappointing for their usersand they can’t do anything but hope that things will change later in 2013. However, until early 2013 no changes will be made. Some of the devices will not be getting the update at all.

Even though the international (Austria, Spain, France and Romania) Galaxy S3 owners already have gotten the update for their device to latest Android software, US owners will have to wait a bit more. According to Samsung, the update will be rolled out in the coming months, but they didnt want to give specific dates. For more information customers will have to wait for the announcements from their carriers. The main problem with new Android versions is that companies like Samsung prefer to add something unique like their TouchWiz, so it takes longer to get the latest updates for this custom operating systems.

It looks like Google is finally stepping up to the plate when it comes to security in their Android Smartphone OS. For a number of years now opponents of Google’s desert themed mobile OS have complained Android does not have sufficient security. This makes it an unsuitable operating system. The fact that a large portion of these complaints come from the competition (Apple and Microsoft) meant that they were ignored by the large majority of people. It is also noteworthy that the openness of Android has allowed for mobile phone makers to highly individualize their Android offerings instead of relying on the stock version. Consumers have eaten this up and now you can see people defending their favorite version (HTC’s Sense UI over Samsung etc.) It is a great feature to the OS and one that has helped in in the market.

There has been a lot of talk about how Google is not making any money on the Nexus 7 and in truth they are probably not making much on hardware sales. This is not an uncommon trend to get products to the market at a cost that puts them in the consumers hands only to follow up with services that do generate income (in fact that is the business model of the cloud). The question is; if there is no margin for Google how much is there for Asus and why would they want to make these without making money per unit.

So Microsoft is on a push to get out as much information as they can about Windows 8. This new operating system represents a massive change for Microsoft and not just in the way the new OS will function, but also in the manner they are interacting with the public. This is evident in almost everything they are doing, from the building Windows 8 Blog to the public statements, demos and interviews that are happening frequently.