Android Community Weekly Wrap-Up for November 30, 2013

This was a holiday week for those in the US market, and as we often see, that meant a sort of slow down for news and other announcements. While the week overall was on the slower side in terms of device and update news, there were a few goodies that popped up this week. Notably, Motorola was once again in the limelight with the earlier than expected US release of the Moto G.

For those who missed it, Motorola surprised everyone back on the 26th when they released the GSM variant of the Moto G. The handset arrived with support for T-Mobile and AT&T and perhaps more important — at the expected price point, which begins at $179 for the 8GB model. The one catch with this early release, the Moto G will arrive with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean as opposed to Android 4.4 Kit Kat. Though, Motorola has already said the Kit Kat update is planned for early 2014.

Aside from smartphones, we also saw Acer put an end to some earlier rumors this week. They announced the C720P Chromebook, which is a touchscreen model. This arrived at $299 and while the internals are not quite the same as what we had seen when Google released the Pixel, this does mean a rather affordable touchscreen Chromebook has come available. Of course, those not interested in the touchscreen aspect can also considering some of the other models in the Acer C720 lineup. There is one for $249 and one for $199.

Looking outside of device release news, there was talk of Android leading the charge into 2014. According to new reports, Android tablets are expected to dominate as we move into the new year. While this next bit isn’t something that all Nexus users should be overly concerned with, there was talk of an SMS flaw that affected Android 4.3 and 4.4.

HTC made some news this week. They unveiled the golden edition of the HTC One and also managed to get Kit Kat rolled out for those sporting a Google Play edition, Developer Edition and Unlocked model. T-Mobile also began updating the Galaxy S 4 to Android 4.3 and AT&T once again began that same update. Verizon added yet another color to the DROID ULTRA and DROID MINI lineups — the new addition is white.

Otherwise, Paranoid Android teased an Immersive Mode, OmniROM went Kit Kat and the folks at Cyanogen suffered a setback when the Cyanogen Installer app was (voluntarily) pulled from the Play Store. Just to clarify though, that Installer remains available from the Cyanogen website with the main difference being you now need to sideload the app.

And lastly, Visa introduced a V.me payment solution, Google Wallet began allowing users to add credit cards by taking a picture of the card and those physical Google Wallet cards began arriving in bulk.