Welcome to the latest round of the Android Community Weekly. The last edition ever… in 2012. This was an amazing year for the Android world at large, the Android community, and us here at Android Community. We’ll be bringing plenty of stories wrapping up the year tomorrow, but for now lets rundown everything that happened this holiday weekend in the news.
We want to start by thanking everyone that made this year awesome, and possible. From the manufacturers, the PR companies, the wireless carriers, and of course you — the readers! Then by saying Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year — Ya filthy animal (name the movie). We hope everyone has a wonderful and safe New Years Eve. Now lets talk Android. This week was exciting for many Motorola owners, gamers, and Samsung Galaxy Note users. We’ll start with the OUYA, their developer kit game console shipped this week, and we’re expecting great things from OUYA in 2013.
Motorola and Verizon issued the update to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean for their highly popular original DROID RAZR and RAZR MAXX, which made tons of people happy, and reports surfaced of a RAZR M HD for early next year. That was an awesome budget phone and a 4.5-inch variant would be a hot seller. Speaking of the M, we reviewed the Motorola Electrify M for US Cellular, so check that out by clicking here.
Samsung as usual had a fun week. We’ll try to keep their news to a minimum since it comes in bunches, but we saw some interesting Galaxy S IV stuff — albeit fake. A concept video based off of early design drafts was leaked, and looks rather interesting for the 4.99-inch 1080p quad-core superphone. We can’t wait to see it next year around March or April. Then Samsung confirmed the original Galaxy Note will receive Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and multi-window updates soon.
Speed round. Google Music received music scan and match features, but was cutting out explicit songs and naughty words, and here’s a fix for that. Hyundai wants to replace our car keys with NFC smartphones, and an impressive new 3rd party keyboard called the Kii Keyboard was released — and is rather nice. Last but not least Huawei’s 6.1-inch 1080p Ascend Mate leaked a few times, and we’ll be seeing more of that flagship next week for CES.
Have a Happy New Year!!! Then stay tuned because starting next Sunday CES 2013 will be in full stride with plenty of Android news.
Thanks for a great podcast and website. Happy New Year!
I enjoy your site and read daily, but I must complain since you highlighted again in weekly. Motorola did NOT update Razr and Razr Maxx. It was an error. Motorola confirms this and says release will be in Q1, when pressed, they say “soon”. I spent a lot of phone time chasing this after your post, that a simple “oops” from you could have saved.
I appreciate the reply todd, and sorry to have mislead you. The actual OTA update that went out (and was then pulled) is readily available though. Would you like to flash it manually? Or wait for the update. My article was later updated with the download links. It’s a simple process if you’re stock.