Last year, T-Mobile threw down the gauntlet and announced it would no longer subsidize smartphones and went to a pay-as-you-go format. Since the beginning of the year, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless have also announced changes to their pay-as-you-go strategies. While the Big Two (AT&T and Verizon Wireless) took baby steps towards making pay-as-you-go a viable alternative for their contract customers, this is still a positive development in my opinion. More choices in the no-contract space are a small but important win for consumers and will hopefully lead to more options for customers of all four of the major U.S. carriers.

You may have heard of app developer OneLouder and may be familiar with some of the popular apps it has released, including Tweetcaster, Friendcaster, 1Weather, and Reddit client Baconreader. You might find it troubling, though, that on Monday Sprint announced its buyout of OneLouder's parent company Handmark. If you are indeed concerned about what this means for the future of your favorite apps, Sprint attempted to calm your fears by promising not to discontinue them.

Vic Gondotra, Vice President at Google announced a new layout, along with several other related features to the Google+ platform. Along with the layout change, there were several changes to photos and other services, adding up to "41 new features". Google+ has become much more than a simple social network and matured into a full-fledged social platform, but has it matured for the better?

Yahoo has been making some headlines recently. With its purchase of Tumblr this week, Yahoo stands to start building a social presence to tie into several mature existing platforms from news to stocks. Monday morning, Yahoo announced a long awaited revamp of its Flickr site and version 2.0 for Android updated to match these changes.

If you've been under a rock you may not have noticed the Google Plus update that occurred right around the time of the little party called Google I/O. Like me you may have been fully expecting the Google Plus 4.0 for Android update to come along with it. It took a few extra days for those expectations to be fulfilled, but the new Android app is rolling out right now to Android devices with improvements to photos, location and stream.

Last week was probably the most exciting week of the year so far at RootzNews thanks to Google's annual I/O superconference. The event was a disappointment to those who were expecting announcements of a new Nexus 7, Android 4.3 or a new Q, but for those who were focused on development, it was well worth the wait. Even for Android enthusiasts who aren't developers instant gratification came in the form of a new Hangouts app, a new Play Music app with a subscription service and improvements to Search/Google Now among other updates.

In a previous article we posted a rumor that originated on a Facebook page dedicated to Galaxy Note 2 enthusiasts claiming that the Galaxy S3 and the Note 2 would receive Android 4.2 Jelly Bean by the end of May. Coincidentally (or not), it turns out that a leaked test build of Android 4.2.2-based TouchWiz is available today on Samsung enthusiast site SamMobile.