Samsung Epic 4G Touch receives Ice Cream Sandwich

Users of the Samsung Galaxy S II for Sprint, also known as the Samsung Epic 4G Touch, are reporting that they are receiving an update to Android ICS.
There have been reports of the IMM761.FF18 build being pushed to users for a few days now, and it seems there are enough people getting it to make the whole thing seem like a legit carrier-wide update.

If you own a Epic 4G Touch and haven't received an update notification yet, check for updates from your phones' settings menu.
The ICS build should improve performance and stability, as well as add improved multitasking features. Remember to turn on your WiFi connection for any OTA updates.

RIM unveils the 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook, to hit Canada first

A new BlackBerry PlayBook has become official with some upgraded specs in tow.
Design-wise, RIM's slate looks the same and is running on the same Playbook OS as usual. It does, however, add LTE connectivity, a new dual-core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz (previously 1GHz). The first country to get the 4G PlayBook will be Canada through Bell, Rogers and TELUS on August 9.

After Canada additional variants of the updated PlayBook will hit US, Europe, South Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
The LTE-enabled BlackBerry Playbook will only be available in a 32GB variety. Despite the specs bump, we really don't get why RIM is still fixated on continuing with the Playbook fiasco.

The App for the Blog gonna arrive to playstore in a week!

Nexus Q: It’s a sphere!

It's great to be able to take your entertainment with you wherever you go, but sometimes you want to ditch the headphones and enjoy music with friends and family. So we’re introducing Nexus Q, which combines the power of Android and Google Play to easily stream music and video in your home—all controlled by an Android phone or tablet. Designed and engineered by Google, Nexus Q is a small sphere that plugs into the best speakers and TV in your house. It’s the first-ever social streaming device—like a cloud-connected jukebox where everyone brings their own music to the party. Available first in the U.S., you can preorder Nexus Q today from Google Play for $299, and it will ship mid-July.

If you own one of the 400 million Android devices out there, you already know that it’s much more than simply a phone or tablet. It’s your connection to the best of Google—all of your stuff and entertainment, everywhere you go. Now you have a new version of Android, more entertainment and a growing portfolio of Nexus devices to choose from—all available in Google Play. The playground is open.

Apple’s iPad dominates tablet market with record-breaking quarter, according to IDC

While Android was the undisputed ruler in the smartphone world, it’s a different story when it comes to tablets – Apple’s iPad had a record quarter and accounted for 68.2% of tablet shipments during Q2 of this year.

For comparison, the biggest maker of Android tablets is Samsung and their share is just 9.6%.
Going back to Apple for a moment, they beat their record Q4 2011 quarter despite shipments in mature markets losing some of their momentum, according to IDC. The other markets picked up the slack.
Samsung’s shipments grew by 117.6% and solidified its second place, even though they’ve got a long, long way to go before catching up with Apple. Amazon and their single Kindle Fire tablet are doing pretty good for themselves too, snatching a 5% share of the market – this is especially impressive because the Kindle Fire was only introduced in Q4 of last year.

Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide Media Tablet Shipments, Second Quarter 2012

Vendor	2Q12 Shipments	Market Share	2Q11 Shipments	Market Share	2Q12/2Q11 Growth
1. Apple	17,042	68.2%	9,248	61.5%	84.3%
2. Samsung	2,391	9.6%	1,099	7.3%	117.6%
3. Amazon.com	1,252	5.0%	0	NA	NA
4. ASUS	855	3.4%	397	2.6%	115.5%
5. Acer	385	1.5%	629	4.2%	-38.7%
Others	3,067	12.3%	3,668	24.4%	-16.4%
All Vendors	24,994	100%	15,042	100%	66.2%

ASUS more than doubled their shipments and even though they’re in fourth place with a 3.4% market share, they can expect better results in the third quarter as IDC’s numbers don’t reflect sales of the Google Nexus 7 tablet made by ASUS.
Acer completes the Top 5 tablet maker list – they used to be ahead of ASUS, but have dropped by almost 40% year on year, and will probably join that dreaded Others group unless they do something drastic in the coming year.
The tablet market as a whole saw healthy growth – about 25 million tablets were shipped worldwide in Q2 this year, up 66.2% year on year and 33.6% quarter on quarter.

Android gets its own official blog, read all about the OS straight from the Android team

So far, the Google Mobile blog has been the major source of info on Android, coming from the source. The blog, however, covers a lot of other Google mobile services (like Google’s mobile sites and apps for other mobile OSes), so when the Mountain View team received an overwhelming amount of requests for an Android-only blog, they delivered.

The Official Android blog will be the go-to place to learn what’s new with the Google mobile operating system. A major Google Wallet announcement is the first piece of news to be broken by the blog.
By the way, even though the Official Android blog launched just yesterday, it has plenty of content already – the Google team has aggregated various Android-related posts from all the other Google blogs and put them in one place.
Here’s the blog, Android users will probably want to bookmark it for future reference.

Windows 8 goes gold, now released to manufacturing

It seems Microsoft is right on track with its Windows plan – the new OS has been released to manufacturing as it’s been scheduled.

 Microsoft’s OEM partners now have the final release of Windows 8 and they can start embedding it into their new devices.
The developers will be able to download the RTM version on August 15, while a day later it will become available to the TechNet subscribers, Microsoft Partner Network members and IT Windows 8 testing organizations.
August 20 is the day Microsoft Action Pack Providers will get access too, while on September 1 all Volume License customers without Software Assurance will be able to buy Windows 8.
The general availability of Windows 8 will come on October 26, while starting today “any qualifying business in a supported market can now submit a Metro style app for Windows 8”.

Dropbox admits leak of account emails, no passwords have been stolen

After investigating complaints from its users getting crazy amounts of spam, Dropbox has announced that emails and passwords stolen from third-party websites have been used to hack into existing Dropbox accounts.

One of the breachеd accounts is a Dropbox employee’s and it happened to contain some project files with a number of Dropbox client email addresses. Hence the spam spree.
To fight back, Dropbox will be introducing new security measures to protect its users from such attacks. Here are the future features the company plans to implement:

• Two-factor authentication – a way to optionally require two proofs of identity (such as your password and a temporary code sent to your phone) when signing in. (Coming in a few weeks)
• New automated mechanisms to help identify suspicious activity. We’ll continue to add more of these over time.
• A new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.
• In some cases, we may require you to change your password. (For example, if it’s commonly used or hasn’t been changed in a long time)

Don’t worry, passwords haven’t leaked out, but it’s a good idea to change your Dropbox password just in case.

Analysts have crunched the numbers and revealed the state of the mobile world in Q2 of 2012. Canalys released a report that mostly talks about China - and with good reason too, as the country broke the record for smartphone shipments for a second quarter in a row.
On the world stage, Android is increasing its lead against the competition - it powered 68.1% of the 158.3 million smartphones shipped globally in Q2. It's interesting to point out that the smartphone shipments in Q2 of last year were almost exactly the same as the number of Android phones shipped this year.
Shipments of Apple smartphones increased 28% year on year, but market share fell by 2.5 percentage points. BlackBerry OS was a distant third with 5.4% of the market, while Symbian and Windows Phone had 4.1% and 3.2%, respectively. Bada isn't that far behind WP with 2.1%.

 Samsung maintained their position as the top smartphone vendor by shipping 31% of all smartphones. The company is largely responsible for Android's growth - they accounted for 45 million of the 107.8 million total droids shipped.

Apple and Nokia were second and third respectively, while HTC snatched the fourth spot from RIM. Huawei and ZTE are seeing phenomenal growth in China, but couldn’t make it into the top 5 worldwide.
Speaking of China, 27% of smartphones were shipped in China - compared to just 16% in the US. A lot of that came from local makers - ZTE, Lenovo and Huawei - placed second, third and fourth, respectively. Together, they accounted for about a third of the all shipments in China, but Samsung managed to hold onto their top spot by shipping 17% of the smartphones there.
Meanwhile, Apple slipped into fifth place in China, even though their shipments went up 102% year on year. Nokia's shipments in China tumbled down by 47% and Motorola aren't doing too hot either. HTC's shipments went up by 389% year on year, but they still totaled just 1.8 million - just a fraction of the 25.6 million shipments by the aforementioned Chinese makers.
Android is the OS of choice in China, with a dominant 81% share of the market. For more, check out the report from Canalys in the source link below.

Samsung starts 64GB NAND memory mass production for mobiles

The more internal memory mobile devices have, the better. But speed is just as important as capacity and Samsung are betting on both with its latest NAND memory chips.

 Currently entering in mass production, the new high-speed embedded memory (eMMC) flash chips will be offered in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB varieties. They'll be manufactured under the eMMC Pro Class 1500 specification, which boasts some... well, ballistic speeds.
Those flash chips are rated for speeds of 140MB/s read transfer and 50MB/s write transfer, which has never been achieved before. They are result of an engineering mix of a 64-gigabit NAND with a toggle DDR2.0 interface, all built using the 20nm manufacturing process. These chips are also the first of their kind to support the JEDEC e-MMC v4.5 specification.
Naturally, it'll be put into future premium smartphones and tablets. If we had to guess, we'd say the company's Galaxy Note 2 may be the first device to rock the new storage chip, but only time will tell.