Samsung’s Galaxy S II lineup is getting Ice Cream Sandwich in early 2012

In just a few weeks, Samsung will start shipping Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich over the air to Galaxy device owners.

 

“We know you have been waiting, and we’re thrilled today to announce that we’ll start serving Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II in the first quarter of 2012,” wrote a Samsung representative on the company’s mobile division Facebook page.

 

The rollout will start with the company’s Galaxy S II, its latest high-powered smartphone, and the Galaxy Note, a stylus-enabled gadget that’s either a huge phone or a wee tablet — the jury’s still out.

 

Samsung also was the chosen manufacturer for the Android 4.0 lead device, the Galaxy Nexus. For that launch, Samsung got early access to Ice Cream Sandwich and a distinct time-to-market advantage.

 

Other Ice Cream Sandwich-upgradeable devices are set to include Samsgung’s Galaxy S II LTE, the Galaxy R (another Android smartphone), and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, 839, 7.7 and 7.0 Plus tablets.

 

With the upgrade, these tablets will be some of the first to run Ice Cream Sandwich; other models boasting the slick new OS have so far been sold out or available for preorder only.

 

Ice Cream Sandwich’s new features include a one-size-really-does-fit-all approach that makes the OS suitable for phones, tablets, TVs — just about any connected device, according to Google. Previously, Google had offered separate forks of the OS for different devices — the 2.X line was intended for smartphones, while the 3.X line (a.k.a. Honeycomb) was meant for tablets.

 

And in addition to all that delicious behind-the-scenes harmony, the OS brings consumers a flashy new interface with new colors, large images, and even a homebrewed typeface, the elegant humanist sans, Roboto.

 

Samsung is racing Sony to the finish line where Ice Cream Sandwich is concerned. The latter company announced last month it was bringing Ice Cream Sandwich to the entire Xperia line.

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Nuance to acquire rival Vlingo to build a better Siri

Voice technology firm Nuance has agreed to buy its top rival Vlingo for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced this morning.

 

Nuance has been providing voice technology for years but has recently been getting a lot of attention for powering Siri, the well-advertised voice assistant on the iPhone 4S. Vlingo has been Nuance’s heated rival in the tech space, and interestingly enough, Nuance had sued Vlingo in court for patent infringement, while Vlingo bought its own set of patents to counter-sue Nuance and stop it in its tracks.

 

But the two are putting aside the lawsuits with the acquisition. Now they can work together to boost the power and innovation of natural voice technology. Most likely, they’ll do what they can to improve the highly-popular Siri and similar voice apps across mobile platforms.

 

“Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications and services,” said Mike Thompson, Senior VP of Nuance Mobile, in a statement. “By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand.”

 

Nuance appears to be on an acquisition streak in hopes of neutralizing the competition. Before Vlingo, Nuance agreed to acquire texting technology company Swype for a reported $102.5 million back in October. Nuance’s T9 predictive text software is a direct competitor to Swype’s technology, which lets people quickly draw from point to point on touch-screen keyboards.

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Google sees 700K+ Android activations daily

According to Google’s Android chief, Andy Rubin, you’re one of a growing mob of people tuning in and turning on to the open-source mobile operating system.

 

“There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day,” Rubin stated late last night on his Google+ page.

 

This statistic has more than doubled since last year, when Rubin tweeted that 300,000 new devices were being activated daily.

 

And during the company’s July 2011 earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page noted that the company had reached the 550,000 activations per day milestone. Around that time, Rubin stated Android’s rate of growth was growing by 4.4 percent every single week.

 

All these activation stats add up to some serious domination. Earlier this month, we reported that Android devices accounted for half the total mobile market for smartphones in the United States. Apple came in a distant second at 27 percent.

 

Also (and this likely has an impact on both the OS’s growth and total market share), Android overtook iPhone as the most desired mobile platform earlier this year. According to numbers from Nielsen from January 2011 to March 2011, more than one third of consumers indicate Android as their preferred operating system. That number had leapt up from around one quarter just a few months before.

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Windows Phone is still in trouble

Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform now has more than 50,000 apps available — a significant milestone, but one that still puts it far behind Apple’s 500,000 iOS apps and Google’s more than 380,000 Android apps.

At least things seem to be picking up for the platform on the app front. It took Microsoft over a year to reach 40,000 apps on Windows Phone, but only 40 days to add another 10,000, reports All About Windows Phone. But apps alone won’t sell consumers on Windows Phone, especially during its do-or-die year of 2012.

So what’s keeping the platform, which is reportedly still seeing slow sales, from finding the success of the iPhone or Android? As former Windows Phone general manager Charlie Kindel sees it, the real problem with Windows Phone doesn’t stem from hardware or software (which he deems “superior” to the competition), but instead is due to Microsoft’s inability to play nice with carriers.

The company has imposed strict hardware restrictions on hardware partners, which has led to only a few devices being developed, and it has removed carriers entirely from the Windows Phone update process. Those two elements have led to carriers preferring to push Android and iOS devices, instead of Windows Phone.

“Carriers own the marketing money and spend billions a year,” Kindel wrote in a blog post yesterday. “The money is provided by the other sides of the market: OS providers & device manufactures, but the carriers get to spend it; they are the aggregation point where the money actually gets spent. The carriers choose what devices get featured on those TV ads.  They also choose what devices to train their RSP (retail sales professionals) to push.”

While I don’t deny that carrier marketing efforts have influenced Windows Phone sales, the situation seems much more complicated. First of all, Microsoft was way too late to the game, launching Windows Phone at the end of 2010, while the iPhone and Android hit the market in 2007 and 2008 respectively. MG Siegler argues that particular point nicely.

Kindel also fails to mention the explosive failure of Microsoft’s Kin phones earlier last year, which surely turned off many consumers to any future Microsoft mobile platform. I also think consumers are more savvy than the marketing sponges Kindel takes them for. He assumes people will buy what carriers tell them to, when in reality having a product that is clearly superior to the competition (which Windows Phone certainly isn’t) is more important.

You can say that Windows Phone is superior as much as you like, but so far Microsoft has failed to prove that to consumers.

One of the big reasons Microsoft has failed to make much of a splash with the platform is that it’s going after the same market as the iPhone and Android, when it should be focusing more on users who haven’t yet considered smartphones. I previously argued that Nokia’s Lumia 800 is an incredibly important device for Microsoft, but in many ways its cheaper sibling, the Lumia 710, is just as significant.

The Lumia 710 opens the door to a wider market of users who don’t want to spend over $100 on a new phone (T-Mobile will offer it in the US for just $50 with contract). And its inexpensive hardware also makes it more suitable to the prepaid market, a quickly growing segment in which Microsoft desperately needs to find a foothold.

Microsoft’s partnership with Nokia also makes it well positioned to expand Windows Phone into international markets as well — though those will admittedly be less lucrative than dominating the U.S., Europe and Asia.

 

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