With iPhone 5 on the horizon, Google needs to do something to catch/keep our interest in Android and in the highly competitive marker of smartphones aside from new devices the best way to shake things up is a new OS!!! Google is trying just this with Ice Cream Sandwich!

I just made the leap from Froyo to Gingerbread on my phone (haven’t even used Honeycomb yet) and here we are looking at a new OS rumored to come out as soon as early October to compete with the highly anticipated iPhone 5.

According to this article some of the new features/improvements of ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) are USB host support and the highly anticipated music and movie rentals. Google is rolling out their movie rental service to devices soon and it will consist of movie rentals starting at $1.99 per rental. You have 30 days to view the movie from download date and 24 hours to complete it after you start to view the movie (more information found here). The music service will be like a cloud server to download your music collection to for use on your phone.

More information will be sure to come out as we get closer to release date, but with a lot of big phones closing in on their 2 year anniversary (upgrade time) and the projected release of new devices soon, I anticipate quite the buzz for a while!!

How about you guys? What do you think the chances are of Google holding it’s own against the new version of the heavy-hitting iPhone? What features would you like to see in ICS, or what features do you think it will need to compete with iPhone 5?

Sources: Phonearena   BGR   Talkandroid

Looking at the screenshot to the right, it appears that those who are rocking the Hero or Moment on Sprint will be receiving an official update to Android 2.1 sometime in early May. Features that Android 2.1 includes are Live Wallpapers, interactive backgrounds that change based on user input (a video of which can be found here), 5 home screens instead of the 3 found in Android 2.0, an updated App Launcher, a 3D photo gallery, and voice recognition for all textual input fields. An exciting May it will be then!

Source- Phandroid via Engadget

Sorry if you did not get the wedding invitation (neither did we), but say hello to the marriage of Android to the x86 instruction set architecture, which is the prevalent standard on desktop and laptop computing. Playing matchmaker is Intel, who has been non-existent in the mobile phone market since 2006, when they sold their ARM-based XScale chip division to chipmaker Marvell Technology Group.

The x86-based chipset that Intel is using is called Moorestown, which is related to Intel’s Atom mobile computing processor used in netbooks. Moorestown will compete against ARM-based chipsets, including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, Nvidia’s Tegra, and OMAP by Texas Instruments. Will Intel be able to stake a claim in a market dominated by ARM processors? It is interesting to note that Intel is in a position of underdog, as it will be fighting for small stake in the smartphone market while it dominates the desktop/laptop market.

For more information on this chipset, please check this document (PDF) by Intel that provides a more in-depth look at the technology behind Moorestown. For a recap on the the processors that Intel must compete against, I point you to this article.

Source- Pocketnow

Image from mightygadget.co.uk