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Phone Week: Samsung phones unveiled, but ICS scarce
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After ringing in the new year with a whole host of phone news, we find ourselves only a week later with a tonne more of the stuff to impart. Once again, we’ve cleverly squeezed all the latest rumours and announcements into one easily digestible video, so feel free to gulp it down in one gluttonous go.
Samsung has announced, to our dismay, that a tooth-tingling Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade will not be available for every model in its Galaxy fleet. Unlucky owners of the Galaxy Ace and the Galaxy S will have to make do with trusty old Android 2.3 Gingerbread instead.
Those who are craving a chillier sugar rush shouldn’t be too alarmed, however, for while Samsung taketh away with one hand,
so it giveth with the other. Two new versions of the flagship ICS phone, the Galaxy
Nexus, have been announced for the UK — a white 16GB model and a 32GB version of the
traditional black model, both of which will be available soon.
Two brand-new phones have also been announced by the Korean company: the Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus and Samsung Galaxy M Style. The former will be a more powerful version of the previous Ace, and the latter, a budget Android phone sporting a super AMOLED screen. Neither model will come packing ICS though, and it’s been confirmed that the M Style won’t be making an appearance in Blighty at all. Oh Samsung — you build us up, only to knock us right back down.
Meanwhile, HTC is soon to launch a quad-core phone, which the company is hoping will restore it to its former glory after it experienced a 25 per cent fall in profits in Q4 of 2011. Poor old BlackBerry, once the darling of the smart phone world, is also suffering after a rather miserable year. This week it emerged that it could be all change at the top, with the board considering jettisoning its two chairmen in favour of a new independent director.
A report into Internet usage on phones and tablets has revealed that owners of Apple devices are far more likely to hit the web on their gizmos than owners of Android, Nokia or BlackBerry devices. Smart phones and tablets running Apple’s iOS software performed 52.1 per cent of all mobile browsing last year.
Clearly not wanting to drop the ball, LG and Motorola have quietly got in on the new-year-new-phones precedent set by Samsung, with the former launching the Optimus 2, and the latter showing off the MotoLuxe and the Defy Mini. We expect more phones to be unveiled later this week at CES, the international technology show in Las Vegas. Keep your eyes peeled for the Nokia Lumia 900 and hopefully some new Sony blowers too.
Do you feel let down by the lack of ICS updates for Samsung phones? Which rumoured or newly released phones have particularly tickled your interest? Let us know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.
