android lost

Here's a bit of good news to soak in over the weekend. After the unveiling of the Xiaomi Phone 2 (aka Mi2) in front of some 3,000 people yesterday, a reliable source informed us that the Chinese startup is already looking to bring its highly affordable phones to Europe next year. Alas, we couldn't get a more specific time frame, but assuming Xiaomi wants to deliver its first quad core device to the Europeans as well, it'd likely be within the first half of next year, well before the next August 16th announcement (the company's managed to stick to the same date so far).

Of course, it all depends on whether Xiaomi can scale its business model for the unknown territories, and it'll certainly need some solid partners to do so -- much like its collaboration with local retail channels China Unicom, China Telecom and Vancl. Luckily, the MIUI developer will be doing a warm up first in Taiwan. As reported by Business Next last month, chairman Lei Jun made a high profile visit to several Taiwanese carriers in the hopes of breaking into their market by the end of this year. If successful, Lei should be able to meet his ambitious sales target of 6 million Xiaomi Phones accumulated -- still some way away from the 3.52 million units sold so far. Judging by the madness at the event this week (see gallery below), it should be no problem.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/17/xiaomi-phones-may-enter-europe-next-year-because-china-aint-bi/

One of last year’s best handsets, the Samsung Galaxy S II will be getting the much anticipated Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update in a month or two. Any Galaxy S II that has been manufactured in April 2012 or later comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box.

According to SamMobile, the firmware being tested by Samsung is working fine and the company will release the public KIES release version. Provided no further problems are caused by the update, the Galaxy S II will get the update to Android 4.1.1 in September or October.

For those interested in purchasing the Galaxy S II, here is a quick look at its highlighted features:

• 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus Gorilla Glass display sporting a 480 x 800 pixel resolution with 16 million colours
• Dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with a MAli-400MP GPU
• 4G (HSPA+ 21MBPs), EDGE/GPRS, Wi-Fi with DLNA compliance(AllShare), Wi-Fi hotspot support, Wi-Fi Direct
• GPS with a-GPS
• Bluetooth 3.0+HS, USB 2.0 with MHL for media out and USB-on-the-go
• 8MP AF camera with LED flash supporting 1080p video capture @30fps
• 16GB and 32GB capacities with 32Gb microSD card support
• NFC support
• DivX, XviD video codec support with 1080p video playback support

Earlier this month, we had reported that the Jelly Bean firmware for the Samsung Galaxy S III had also passed testing successfully. Samsung is waiting for Google’s approval to officially roll the update out. The situation seems to be similar to that of the Galaxy Note. Although testing for the firmware on the Note has been successful, there is still no word from Samsung about the Jelly Bean update.

Along with the S II, this would make Samsung the company with the highest number of phones that are receiving updates to Jelly Bean.

Later this year, Samsung has plans of introducing a 64GB variety of the Galaxy S III handset. In its statement, Samsung added, “The 64GB model of the Galaxy S III will be available during the second half of this year. The market availability and timing may vary and will be determined at the time of release."

The global sales of the Galaxy S III have hit the 10 million mark, as per a statement by Shin Jong-kyun, President of Telecoms and IT, Samsung. The news comes merely a couple of months after the official launch of  the highly anticipated smartphone. Successor to the company's popular Galaxy S II smartphone, the S III was expected to hit the 10 million mark in July, according to a report published in late June.