How would you change Motorola’s Xoom 2?

Posted on 16/04/2012 by Daniel Cooper

Motorola's Xoom 2 is, undeniably a strong tablet. It was able to beat a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a Transformer Prime in some of our performance tests, battery life is around nine hours and it's nearly running a pure version of Honeycomb. We're a big fan of that display, but less so its unnatural attraction to fingerprints. As we sit anxiously waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich to make its belated way onto the slate, we want to know: what do you think works, what did Motorola scrimp on and what would you change to make it a better device?

How would you change Motorola's Xoom 2? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Apr 2012 01:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How would you change ASUS’ Transformer Prime?

Posted on 09/04/2012 by Daniel Cooper

"All hail the new king," was how we capped off our review of the Transformer Prime, which simply blew us away. Gaming performance was astonishing and it only improved when Ice Cream Sandwich appeared in the middle of this year's CES. In fact, the only issues we could find involved a less-than-ideal speaker placement, slightly flat color reproduction and the fact that the keyboard dock and battery is an additional $150. The company's even getting around fixing the GPS issue with the soon-to-be-released dongle attachment. But then we wanna hear your opinions about how this thing behaves in the real world: what are your feelings using this thing on a daily basis? Can you use it instead of a laptop or Ultrabook? What do you love, what do you hate and, if Asus' was watching, how would you change it?

How would you change ASUS' Transformer Prime? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Apr 2012 22:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gmail app update brings ICS experience to Honeycomb tablets, performance tweaks elsewhere

Posted on 04/04/2012 by Darren Murph

Fiddling with updates this evening? If so, you may notice your Gmail app begging for a refresh, as Google has revised its famed email program to bring the Ice Cream Sandwich experience to Android 3.2 (Honeycomb) users. Specifically, it'll allow you to swipe to move between newer and older conversations, tap to access Recent labels, set custom notifications for individual labels and sync the last 30 days of messages so you can read and search messages faster both online and offline. As for Android 2.2 and 2.3 users, they'll see a new labels API for third-party app developers as well as nondescript "performance improvements." If you needed any help, the download link is waiting there in the source.

Gmail app update brings ICS experience to Honeycomb tablets, performance tweaks elsewhere originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ICS reaches 2.9 percent of active Android devices, 63.7 percent still on Gingerbread

Posted on 03/04/2012 by Richard Lawler

As we check back in on Android's Platform Versions dashboard for the first time since January, we can finally see notable growth in the percentage of devices running some flavor of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, up for 0.6 percent then to 2.9 percent. That's likely fueled by the release of updates for the Samsung Galaxy S II and HTC Sensation family of devices, and is a sharp uptick from last month when it registered on 1.6 percent. Gingerbread (2.3) still reigns supreme, running 63.7 percent of the Android hardware that accessed the Play market in the last two weeks, but its growth seems to finally be slowing. Last year at this time that position was filled by Android 2.2, with 2.3 on just one percent of the hardware and Android 3.0 barely registering at all, a point which highlights the long cycle of upgrades. Call it fragmentation or flexibility, app developers can use these stats to plan their releases going forward, although it may be a little while still before the majority of the crowd can access any Ice Cream Sandwich-specific features.

ICS reaches 2.9 percent of active Android devices, 63.7 percent still on Gingerbread originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PSA: TurboTax on Android is free through Sunday if you start your taxes before then

Posted on 30/03/2012 by Dana Wollman

If you've ever filed your taxes on an iPad, you know Intuit's TurboTax app is free to download, but that you'll have to pay up once you're ready to submit those returns. But, in an effort to promote its newish apps for Android tablets and the Kindle Fire, the company's giving the entire number-crunching cow away for free -- at least through this weekend. Just download between tomorrow (Friday) and Sunday and make sure you start your taxes before Monday (it's okay if you finish them later). To be clear, this includes both federal and state-level taxes, which you'd normally pay for separately for $29.99 and up. Another quid pro quo: this won't work on handsets, even though the Kindle runs a customized version of Android 2.3. If you own a tablet it should run smoothly on Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich, though. In any case, to those of you who've been putting off your taxes, happy downloading, procrastinators.

Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.

PSA: TurboTax on Android is free through Sunday if you start your taxes before then originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.