Samsung Galaxy S II now shipping with Android 4.0 ICS

If you intend to buy a Galaxy S II, there is some good news for you. It seems Samsung is shipping all new Galaxy S II units with pre-installed Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

We've only received confirmation from the Indian market, but we guess other areas are getting the same treatment.

The ICS update for the Galaxy S II has been around for a while but lots of people will appreciate the fact that Samsung spared them the effort of upgrading.

If you insist on getting an ICS-bundled Galaxy S II, look out for units imported in April 2012 or later. In case you get an older device after all, don’t worry – the update is delivered OTA, so you'll only need aWi-Fi network to apply it. 

Xperia S Android 4.0 update arriving by late May

Everyone and their grandmother by now has lamented the lack of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on the Xperia S. Why would Sony want to launch a flagship phone in 2012 without the latest version of Android is beyond us. They promised an update in future but never gave any concrete dates. However, it seems that you won't have to wait too long now to get the update.

While there is still no official confirmation, one of the members of Sony support staff commented on their forum that the official Android 4.0 update for the Xperia S will start rolling out by late May/early June. As usual, he mentions that not all phones will get it simultaneously but that's the general time period by which you can expect to get an update for your Xperia S.

Meizu plans ICS update for MX and M9 this June, slaps it with a Flyme OS skin

Back in November, Meizu's CEO Jack Wong casually mentioned an update to Ice Cream Sandwich would be making its way to MX and M9 handsets, he just didn't specify when exactly. Well, that all important tidbit's been cleared up today with official news pegging a software upgrade to Android 4.0 for sometime this June. Owners of either device won't necessarily be getting a pure injection of Google's latest dessert when that OTA hits, but rather a skinned version known as Flyme OS 1.0 that purportedly brings with it a host of improvements. Among that list of supposed refinements are a more logical interface, ability to backup and sync data, in addition to cloud storage. So when summer finally rolls around and the rest of the Googlefied smartphone universe is still kicking it with Gingerbread, feel free to sit back and gloat. Official presser in all its hyperbolic wonder after the break.

HTC One X gets teardown, battery unsurprisingly dominates

While some might deem the One X's combination of svelte unibody profile, quad-core power and 720p display to be downright witchcraft, we knew differently. Fortunately, there's now scientific proof to back us up, courtesy of PCOnline, which has performed a delicate autopsy on the Chinese variant of HTC's new flagship. To explore that polycarbonate shell, a narrow plastic tool to is eased in behind the screen and around the face of the device, with the majority of the phone's tightly packed innards -- including the Tegra 3 processor -- attached to the display half. Some contacts, however, were left on the inside of the unibody, including the NFC chip. Most of the quad-core thinking parts were clustered around the 8-megapixel sensor, while the battery dominated the center of HTC's big hitter. Anyone who gets their kicks from the gentle undoing of all that engineering hard work can watch it unravel in grisly detail at the source below.

Huawei 2011 financials: 20 million smartphones sold yet profit down 53 percent

Huawei's annual earnings report is out and it's a mixed bag, since while turnover increased by 11.7 percent to 203.9 RMB ($32.3 billion), profits plummeted 53 percent to 11.6 billion RMB ($1.8 billion). Revenue from overseas sales (138.4 billion RMB) equated for over half the company's total income and it boasted of having sold 150 million consumer devices, including 20 million smartphones in the year. The company didn't provide reasons for the drop in profit, emphasizing that it's increased R&D spending by 34.2 percent to 23.7 billion RMB ($3.75 billion) and that in any event, it's got around $30 billion of assets that can shoulder the brunt of a bad year.
However, the company may not see a rosy 2012 either, after both America and Australia refused to give the company big infrastructure deals (Huawei's bread and butter) thanks to allegedly close relationships between the company and the Chinese government. It seems to be following a similar trajectory to rival ZTE, which also felt margins squeeze as it entered the global retail space and felt the heat when its political dealings were thrown in the spotlight.

Paul Thurrott confirms no Windows Phone 8 for any current handsets

There have been conflicting rumors recently over whether or not current Windows Phone handsets would be getting the update to Windows Phone 8 when it hits later this year, but Paul Thurrott wants to set the record straight once an for all. A few days ago, the question was brought up whether or not current handsets will get the upgrade to Windows Phone 8, but we seemingly had confirmation that it could when yesterday it came out that the software was being tested on Nokia Lumia 610 and 800 handsets. Unfortunately, Paul Thurrott does not have good news for anyone with a current handset, not even the new flagship Nokia Lumia 900.

Paul Thurrott wants to set the record straight, and do it convincingly:

No. It won’t happen. Not for the Lumia 900, and not for any other existing phone. It won’t happen partially, through an update that will deliver just some features, and it won’t happen for those who wish to pay for such an update. It simply isn’t happening.

You can't get any more clear than that. Thurrott forced a contact with Microsoft to reveal this info and has three reasons why it won't be happening. First, the economics aren't worth it. The current Windows Phone ecosystem is pretty small, and will probably have fewer than 20 million handsets sold by the time Windows Phone 8 is planned to launch. The small size of the ecosystem compared with the cost of building Windows Phone 8 to support those handsets apparently isn't worthwhile for Microsoft.

Second, Microsoft wants to push forward the platform. Windows Phone 7 was still based on the Windows CE kernel, but Windows Phone 8 will be running the Windows 8 kernel. Microsoft wants to have this platform span from smartphones to tablets and tie-in to desktops, so the hardware needs to be more powerful than before. Microsoft has kept a very tight ecosystem with Windows Phone 7, but now it needs to push into multi-core CPUs and HD resolution displays. Optimizing that hardware is the priority, not making the system scale to old hardware.

Lastly, Thurott claims that carriers simply would "never, ever, ever, ever deliver this update to users." Thurrott doesn't really explain this claim, just saying that he knows for a fact that it will never happen.

Of course, Thurrott has been known to be wrong in the past, but he also does have some very solid contacts with Microsoft, so it's hard to say whether this is all true or not. It does make sense, and we've seen similar things happen with both iOS and Android, where older hardware had to be left behind in order to push forward the platform. We'll just have to wait and see if it's true.

Nokia Lumia smartphones doing poorly in Europe, admit carriers

The Nokia Lumia 900 for AT&T has been selling like hot cakes despite store employees not putting much effort in promoting the smartphone. However, even though the company's flagship has taken off, Nokia has not been doing that well as of late, and its overall unit sales are pretty disappointing, as it was revealed last week.

In fact, European wireless carriers that have been offering the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 since Q4 of 2011 are quite underwhelmed. "No one comes into the store and asks for a Windows phone," said an executive who works for one of them during an interview with Reuters. "Nokia have given themselves a double challenge: to restore their credibility in terms of making hardware smartphones and succeed with the Microsoft Windows operating system, which lags in the market," the executive added. Lack of innovation and insufficient marketing efforts are among the prime reasons as to why the Lumia lineup has been doing poorly in Europe, according to representatives for the said carriers. The battery glitches that the Lumia 800 was plagued by made it even harder to convince customers that Nokia's smartphones were worth picking.

At the same time, Apple's iPhone 4S and Android smartphones made by Samsung are dominating the European smartphone market. If Lumia smartphones are to grab a bigger piece of the pie, European carriers will have to increase subsidies so that customers can have a bigger incentive to buy one. Increasing the marketing budget with a little help from Microsoft could be of help as well, although it is no guarantee that doing so would turn the Lumia brand into a market success.