General News

Shortly after the release of the Transformer Prime, ASUS said in a statement that they would be releasing an unlock tool for the device's bootloader. They've made good on that promise today, and the unlock tool is now available!

NVIDIA has used "The way it's meant to be played" for their marketing tagline for several years. With their recent introduction of the Icera modem family and the popularity of their Tegra series of SoC solutions, their motto could shift to "The way it's meant to be called." The Icera platform currently consists of three different modem variants and will be debuting on ZTE's Mimosa X, giving that phone the distinction of being the first phone available powered completely by NVIDIA.

Panasonic is pretty much a household name when it comes to electronics, but we don't really tend to think of them when it comes to mobile phones. Well it seems that might change since they're supposed to announce a few new devices at MWC. While details are slightly scarce at the moment, we can definitely tell you everything we know. And probably some things we don't.

Android and Linux is really a marriage that should have come about a long time ago. Android runs a Linux kernel, so the transition between the two should be pretty seamless. And now it is. No more will you need virtual machines or dual-boot systems. Canonical is introducing a parallel system that allows Android for mobile, and Ubuntu for the desktop, all in one device. With some extras.

Fujitsu has been serving the Asian phone sector for several years and developed a foothold in that market in both Android and Windows Phone sales. Reports are now surfacing that Fujitsu will announce its intentions to bring its line of mobile phones to Europe at the Mobile World Congress and potentially begin sales in the North American market in late 2012 or 2013. With HTC, Samsung, and Motorola already fiercely battling for the spot for several years, will Fujitsu be able to penetrate an already crowded market?

Now that Ice Cream Sandwich has seen a few months of use, we're starting to see manufacturers releasing their own customized takes on Google's latest edition of the Android operating system. The latest list up is up from Motorola and it's not exactly an exhaustive roster. If your Android-powered Motorola device has at least 1GB of RAM, you're good to go.

Ever since it was Open Sourced earlier in the month, we’ve been hearing a lot about Cornerstone from Onskreen. Cornerstone allows multiple applications to run onscreen at the same time in different “frames.” Now it seems that there are plans (albeit loosely based ones) to build Cornerstone into CyanogenMod 9. Since this announcement, however, a Google engineer has come forward with some compelling reasons as to why this level of modification might be a very bad idea.

MediaTek announced today a new Android platform designed to address the emerging low-cost smartphone market. Designated the MT6575, this platform combines a single-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, a graphics processor, and GSM/HSPA radios into a System-on-Chip package. This setup can also handle dual hot-swappable SIM cards and a variety of screen and camera resolutions. Will this be the chipset we see in developing markets and MVNOs over the next few years?