Galaxy S II Skyrocket tasty ICS treat unwrapped early

The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD debuted on AT&T early this year, and at the time it was rocking Android 2.3 as the operating system. Samsung has been slowly updating many of its smartphones to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The Skyrocket is one of the devices getting the update along with the regular S II and several other smartphones that already have it.


I’m sure there are more than a few users of the Skyrocket that worried they may not get ICS, but those fears are unwarranted. The official ICS built for the Skyrocket has been around apparently since March 14, even though it hasn’t officially launched yet. If you are tried waiting for the official launch, apparently RootzWiki has landed an early version of the official update.
You can head over the website and get the full leaked update along with installation instructions and links to download mirrors. It won’t work with versions of the Skyrocket operating on the T-Mobile or Rogers networks. The update does add the whole shebang the AT&T version, including NFC and Google Wallet.

Samsung doing... something... at Phones4U in London on March 30

Everyone start the rumor mill rolling. The photograph seen here was snapped by a reader over at ​Eurodroid, and shows the current window dressing at Phones4U, on Oxford Street in London. It appears that something Samsung related will coming to them on March 30. That'll be this coming Friday, then.

The first thing to note is that this is the flagship Phones4U store. The same store that had an initial exclusivity to sell the Galaxy Nexus at launch (at an extortionate £100 mark-up over the RRP, we might add). Being a store as well, it's pretty unlikely (though not impossible) that they're advertising some kind of launch event. It's more likely that they're preparing to sell a new Samsung device. There's also a good chance that it's something we've already seen, and that this is just a marketing exercise on the part of both companies. 

At this point, we know that a whole lot of you would hope and pray that we're going to see the Galaxy S III. But we aren't. Really. Let's not forget that this is a phone store in London. Samsung's last major London event was at the slightly more impressive Battersea Power Station, where the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Nexus were both on show. Taking all this into account, we're going to take a punt on this and say that it's likely to be something mid or low range. 

In an effort to stifle the speculation, we reached out to Phones4U to see if they could shed any light on what's going on. The official comment, is that at this time there is no official comment, but that we should watch this space. We only have to wait 5 days, and then we'll know. We'll contain our excitement for the moment -- chances are it's probably just the Galaxy Beam, or one of Samsung's many other mid-range devices.

Galaxy Nexus owner says Microsoft cheating him out of a Windows Phone 'Smoked' win

We've always watched Microsoft's "Smoked by Windows Phone" competition with a bit of amusement. On one hand, Microsoft hit a stroke of marketing genius here. (And lord knows it's had enough experiences in the opposite direction.) Put a Windows Phone up against anything else to see which can perform a specific task more quickly, and film it for posterity.

We've used Windows Phone. It absolutely can do some specific tasks pretty darn quickly -- often enough more quickly than other phones, and catching folks getting "Smoked" is YouTube gold. But it's also always been a bit of a techie carnival sideshow, albeit a popular one, as we saw for ourselves at Mobile World Congress. (No, I didn't actually get smoked, because I didn't belly up to that midway game.)

That brings us to today's tale. Skatter Tech's Sahas Katta writes that his Galaxy Nexus, armed with a couple weather widgets on the home screen, indeed was able to beat Windows Phone at its own game -- "bring up the weather of two different cities," Katta says. He had an ace in the hole: An option mod that bypasses the Ice Cream Sandwich lock screen and goes straight to the home screen when he presses the power button. The Windows Phone competition didn't have that, and finished "a split second later."

So Katta and his Galaxy Nexus won, right? Nope. the Santa Clara (Calif.) Microsoft store decided, after some gnashing of teeth, followed by some quick thinking, that it had to be to cities in different states. Oh. Good bye $1,000 custom laptop, hello "Smoked" pic of shame.

We're willing to bet Microsoft makes good here after this PR gaffe, and that some store employees might have seen better days. And let's hope Microsoft does it on camera, and posts it alongside its other "Smoked" videos

Ice Cream Sandwich for the AT&T Galaxy S II Skyrocket leaks out

If you're hanging onto a Galaxy S II Skyrocket and wishing it had some Ice Cream Sandwich love on it, you're in luck. A new leak has now appeared and is available for download for those of you out there who are willing to give it a shot. The build date for this one is listed as March 14th, 2012 with the build.pro file confirming some form of officialness to it:

ro.build.description=SGH-I727-user 4.0.3 IML74K 107 release-keys
ro.build.fingerprint=samsung/SGH-I727/SGH-I727:4.0.3/IML74K/107:user/release-keys
ro.build.characteristics=default

Update: False alarm for the T-Mobile SGSII (T989). Look for a working method in short order, but for now fall back.
The potential for things to go wrong is there, so keep that in mind. For the moment, Windows users only can make use of the file but hopefully that'll be sorted for Mac and Linux folks soon. Hit the source link for the download.