White HTC Sensation and Android 4.0 incoming.
HTC looks as though it's shaping up to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, the Dutch branch of the company has annoucned, via its Facebook page, that a white version of the Sensation will be available on the 1st of March, because there is a lot of love for white phones at the moment.
The second announcement is that an OTA update for the original Sensation (read: black) will be 'coming soon'. So will the Sensation be the first phone to get a bump to Android 4.0 outside of the Nexus family? If the videos floating about on the internet are to be believed the answer is yes and the update will look decidedly like the current version of Sense that runs on top of Gingerbread, but we'll have to wait and see what HTC can conjure up.
Google to launch 'Bouncer' to protect the Android Market.
Yes we've all heard the scare stories about how malware will infect our Android phones and tablets and secretly deceive us as a legitimate app and then laugh at us as it sends secret text messages to premium rate numbers in our sleep. But, hopefully, all of that is about to change because Google will be implementing 'Bouncer' which will scan apps for malware as they're submitted to the Market to hopefully try to prevent the majority of harmful apps reaching the Market in the first place. As an extra measure all apps will be run on Google's cloud-based servers to check for any dodgy behaviour too. So in theory this is a good plan and will hopefully keep the people who refuse to read permissions safe from harm.
PSN down..... again.
PS3 owners, it's down again, sorry you're going to have to give up another 6 hours of COD gameplay because Sony will be taking the PSN down for some more maintainance. But, if you log into online gaming before the start of the maintainance you can keep gaming all through the night tonight. But, on the plus side you're not paying a yearly subscription so what can you expect really? Yes, I have an Xbox so I do always feel a smidgen of satisfaction when I hear this terrible news, but it's only banter....
Android fragmentation?
Google's latest Android stats are in and they're not looking too good for the amount of devices that are 'up to date'. Only 1% of devices are running Android 4.0, which is hugely disappointing 2 whole months after the latest OS launched. But, Google has no urgency to force other companies to update because this is fragmentation according to Google. On the plus side most devices are now running 2.3 Gingerbread which is a solid OS in it's own right.
Apple overtakes LG as 3rd biggest mobile phone vender.
The table above doesn't really need much explaining. The bad news is really for LG; they have suffered a huge marketshare loss and have been well and truly trumped by the astonishing growth of Apple with the huge success of their iPhone 4S. The surprise for me personally was that ZTE are only 0.6million devices behind LG in terms of shipments given how huge a company LG is.
You may also notice there's no HTC, which is mainly because they focus almost exclusively on Samrtphones and therefore aren't in the top 5 unit movers because they aren't selling any featurephones.
