Samsung is apparently working on customizing Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for use on Samsung phones. The folks at SamMobile have obtained a leaked ROM for the Samsung Galaxy S II which includes a custom version of Android 4.0.1 with Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface.

The app launcher and home screen look virtually identical to the ones for Samsung’s devices that run Android 2.3. In other words, Samsung threw out some of the hard work that Google did to make sure that Android 4.0 played well with screens of all sizes.

The good news is that Samsung continues to use a custom notification tray which offers quick access to brightness, WiFi, and other settings. Many of the new features in Ice Cream Sandwich are also present including a redesigned Settings menu, a better way to view recently used apps, and a Face unlock security option that lets you unlock your phone by looking at the camera.

While this is the first time we’ve seen Android 4.0 with a customized user interface, it probably won’t be the last. HTC, Motorola, and other device makers have long put their own polish (some people have another word for it) on Google’s mobile operating system.

You can download the leaked ROM for the Galaxy S II from SamMobile, but it’s still an early build with a number of bugs, so proceed with caution.
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Samsung may be one of the biggest names in the Android phone business, but Samsung also offers a handful of phones using its own Bada OS. The Samsung Wave line of devices look a lot like modern touchscreen smartphones and offer pretty good hardware. But there aren’t as many apps available for Bada as Android, so one way to get a little more out of a Samsung Wave phone is to replace the operating system.

And that’s exactly what a team of developers at xda-developers is doing. They’ve started to port Android to work on Bada devices.

The software is still a work in progress. Phone calls and 3G don’t work right now, sensors aren’t supported, and phones shut down if they’re idle for too long. But so far WiFi, audio, video, and the Android Market do work, as well as some 3D games and app launchers.

In other words, it’s probably too early to replace Bada OS with Android if you actually want to use your phone as a phone… but if you’ve got a spare Bada device lying around and you want to get a taste of Android, you can already get started.

via xda-developers

Google and Samsung are holding an event in Hong Kong on October 19th to introduce the next major update to the Android operating system, as well as at least one of the first phones that will run it. Since Hong Kong is all the way on the other side of the world, the event will actually take place at 10:00 at night on October 18th if you’re on the east coast of the US.

The two companies had originally scheduled a kick-off event for for this week. But the launch event for  Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and a new Samsung Nexus smartphone was pushed back.

In the meantime, as if the invitation didn’t already provide enough evidence that Ice Cream Sandwich will be available soon, Google has added a new desert-themed statue to its lawn.

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Samsung and Google had palnned an event for October 11th where the companies were widely expected to unveil a new Google Nexus phone, which would be the first phone designed to run Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich. The updated operating system is the first version of Android designed to be equally at home on pocketable smartphones and larger tablets.

Over the last few months we’ve seen a number of leaks, first showing what Ice Cream Sandwich looks like, and more recently showing what the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Nexus will look like.

But today the company’s announced that they’re postponing the launch event until a later date.

The good news is we already have a good idea of what the phone will look like, thanks to a leaked video posted at gadget.ro. The post also shows some specifications,w hich are hard to verify at this point. The phone will reportedly have a 4.65 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel Super AMOLE Ddisplay, a 1.2 GHz TI OMAP 4460 dual core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage.

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HP is killing off its webOS hardware division, which means pretty soon there will be no more HP TouchPad, Pre or Veer devices. But the company still has high hopes fro the webOS software. HP may still install webOS on future PCs, printers, and other devices, and the company has been seeking a partner willing to license webOS for their own phones or tablets.

Clearly that partner isn’t going to be Motorola. That company has been building Google Android-only devices for a few years and recently Google announced plans to acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion.

Nokia, meanwhile, has struck a deal with Microsoft that will bring Windows Phone 7 to future Nokia smartphones.

Among the big phone players that leaves HTC and Samsung… but now it looks like we can probably scratch Samsung off the list as well. There’s been a rumor floating around that Samsung could flat out buy the webOS operating system from HP, but speaking at the IFA trade show in Berlin, Samsung CEO Choi Gee Sung poured cold water on that idea.

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Samsung has unveiled its answer to BlackBerry Messenger, iMessage, and pretty much every other messaging service for mobile devices. It’s called ChatON, and the app will be available soon for Samsung phones running Bada OS or Android, as well as for devices running iOS, or BlackBerry OS.

In fact, ChatON won’t even require a smartphone, a simpler version will also be available for feature phones. There will also be a web app that you can use to send and receive messages from a PC.

ChatON lets users engage in text-based chats as well as group chats with larger groups of contacts. Users can share pictures or movies with contacts, as well as location information. There’s also support for non-real-time communication: you can leave comments on a friend’s profile or leave comments on pictures or videos shared in a chat room.

Another neat feature is something Samsung calls Interaction Rank. You can see stats showing who you talk to the most.

Steve Kondik goes by the name of Cyanogen online, and the CyanogenMod software he helps develop is one of the most popular versions of Google Android for people that want to hack their phones and make them a little more powerful.

CyanogenMod usually offers the latest versions of Android, root access, and a number of additional tweaks and features that give users more control over their phones than they would have if they stuck with the software developed by Google, HTC, Samsung, or other device makers.

Now it turns out that the driving force behind CyanogenMod is also going to be one of the people working on software for Samsung — one of the biggest Android phone makers. Kondik recently took a job as a software engineer at Samsung.

Kondik says he’ll continue to stay involved in the CyanogenMod project, and the news doesn’t mean that Samsung will be releasing a phone with CM7 anytime soon. But if Kondik and his independent developer colleagues have been able to make as much progress as they have while working on their own, just imagine what he can do while working at a major handset manufacturer.

Samsung has unveiled a new version of its TouchWiz user interface for Android. TouchWiz 4 is designed specifically for Android tablets running Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb, making it the first custom user interface set to run on top of Google’s new tablet operating system.The first tablets to use the new TouchWiz software will be the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1 inch tablets which are due out this summer.

The software won’t actually be available when the tablets launch, but will come as a future upgrade.

TouchWiz offers a few key features including Live Panels which display constantly updated information on your home screen from various apps. The panels actually remind me a lot of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 home screen interface.

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