HTC confirms phones with Android 4.0

HTC, known for its series of Android devices lately, has now come up with surprising its Android phone users. The manufacturer has announced the first wave of devices that will taste the new Android version 4.0 – Ice Cream Sandwich.

The phones that are expected to get the new update are : HTC Vivid, HTC Sensation, HTCSensation XL, HTC Sensation XE, HTC Rezound, HTC Evo 3D, HTC EVO Design 4G and HTC Amaze 4G.

While the all new HTC Vivid that made its debut yesterday is upgradable to Ice Cream Sandwich, the other phones mentioned will get the upgrade in early 2012. This is what HTC has to say:

We can confirm the brand new HTC Vivid, on sale beginning today, is upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich. In addition, Ice Cream Sandwich is coming in early 2012 to a variety of devices including the HTC Sensation, HTC Sensation XL and HTC Sensation XE, as well as the HTC Rezound, HTC EVO 3D, HTC EVO Design 4G and HTC Amaze 4G through close integration with our carrier partners. We’re continuing to assess our product portfolio, so stay tuned for more updates on device upgrades, timing and other details about HTC and Ice Cream Sandwich.

HTC made this note on their FB page. It’s time that Samsung and other manufacturers kick-start with their phone upgrades.

HTC Run on Verizon’s Speedy 4G LTE Network

HTC rolled out the HTC Rezound smartphone for the Verizon 4G LTE network on Thursday, and besides packing some seriously impressive specs, it doesn’t look too bad, either. Let’s take a look.

Running the Android Gingerbread operating system, otherwise known as version 2.3, it’s packing a 1.5GHz dual-core processor with a gigabyte of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. All that’s displayed on a 4.3 inch 720p display, and the good news is HTC has beefed up its battery to handle all that screen real estate.

Just look at it with that snazzy slim body, all-black with swank-looking red trim that makes it appear to be a Droid Incredible from a distance. By the way, if you were waiting around for an HTC Vigor, this is it, renamed to Rezound, presumably to make it seem even more vigorous.

That red trim is part of its Beats audio affiliation, first introduced on the HTC Sensation smartphone in Europe in September. That’ll include upgraded earbuds and a special electronic profile that’s supposed to rock your world as soon as you plug in those special earphones (pictured in our gallery below). I’ve tried Beats headphones and laptops, and their enhanced audio quality makes us take notice when we see that Beats logo on anything else. We’ll believe it enhances the sound on a smartphone, though, when we hear it with our own ears.

Nothing new: its 8-megapixel camera assisted by a dual LED flash and an F/2 .2 lens, and that’s accompanied by a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for conferencing. And by the way, it’s too bad we won’t see the brand-newIce Cream Sandwich (version 4.0) of Android loaded on board at first, but the company says it’s ready for such things and will see that operating system pushed into it early next year.

Will this smart-looking handset be a rezounding success? The HTC Rezound will enter a crowded market on Nov. 14, available at Verizon Wireless and Best Buy for $299 with a 2-year contract. Take a look at the pics of this new phone in the gallery below, and you’ll notice that it’s not exactly the slimmest phone in the world, but perhaps you need a little more heft to pack in all that serious hardware.

Major security hole claimed in some HTC Android smartphones

Summary: Security researchers claim they’ve found an insecure logging program in some HTC Android phones that easily enables crackers to get full access to all your personal data.

What is it with companies wanting to know your every move anymore? Facebook’s has been tracking you on Websites with Facebook Like buttons; Amazon, with its forthcoming Silk Web browser, will literally track your every move on the Web, and now HTC, in some of its Android smartphones, has planted a logging program that records everything you do with your phone. That’s bad enough, but according to Android Police researchers, that snooping program has a giant security hole that will let crackers easy grab the information that it has been gathering.

According to the researchers, Trevor Eckhart, Artem Russakovskii, and Justin Case, in recent updates to some of its devices, HTC introduces a suite of logging tools that collected both system and personal information. That’s invasive. What’s even more annoying is that they also discovered HTC had added “an app called androidvncserver.apk to their Android OS installations”. That’s a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) remote access server. With it, HTC, in theory, could remotely control your phone.

But, wait, there’s more! The real problem is that they’ve found that “any app on affected devices that requests a single android.permission.INTERNET (which is normal for any app that connects to the web or shows ads) can get its hands on” this data.

What’s in there? They’ve found that, among other information, the logging program gathers:

• List of user accounts, including email addresses and sync status for each last known network and GPS locations and a limited previous history of locations
• Phone numbers from the phone log
• SMS data, including phone numbers and encoded text
• System logs (both kernel/dmesg and app/logcat), which includes everything your running apps do and is likely to include email addresses, phone numbers, and other private info.

To get access to all this data, all a cracker need do is to get you to download any program that connects to the Web with android.permission.INTERNET–which is pretty much all Android programs–with instructions to download the HTC data-logger’s file on your phone’s activity. With just that, in less than a minute, a malware program could forward all your phone’s information to a snooper. They will then know who you are, where you’re at and where you’ve been, who you’ve been calling and texting and on and on.

That’s all there is to it. HTC did the hard work of gathering all your information. All a cracker has to do it is to harvest the results. There’ no need for a password cracker or any other fanciness to use this security hole. It would take an experienced Android programmer less time to write the code to exploit this problem than it did for me to write this Reader Digest’s description of the problem.

The HTC smartphone models that appear to be vulnerable are the EVO 3D, EVO 4G, Thunderbolt,and possibly HTC’s Sensation phone line. After finding the vulnerability, the trio claim that Eckhart contacted HTC on September 24th and HTC didn’t respond to them. So, after receiving no real response for five business days, they’ve decided to release news of the vulnerability to force HTC to fix the problem. HTC has yet to respond to these claims.

In the meantime, you should not install any remotely questionable new applications to your HTC smartphone. If you’re comfortable getting down and dirty with your phone’s firmware you may also want to consider dumping your phone’s default HTC Android distro and replacing it with an Android Open Source Project (AOSP) firmware such as CyanogenMod.

HTC partners with Dropbox: all future Sense 3.5 handsets bundled with 5GB of free cloud storage

 

HTC seems to have inked a deal with Dropbox, which would allow the company to offer 3GB of additional cloud storage for its Android handsets. Dropbox is already offering a free 2GB entry pass to its service, which brings the total to 5GB, according to Pocket-lint. The first phone to benefit from the offer will be the newly announced female-centric HTC Rhyme. Now, we haven't seen this officially confirmed so we'd still take it with a slight pinch of salt, but it definitely looks credible given that it reportedly comes from an HTC employee.

In the future, all Sense 3.5 devices will get the bonus as an extension of the deal, which puts HTC almost on par with Apple’s iCloud (5GB of free storage) and Microsoft’s SkyDrive (25GB of free storage) service. And then, there’s always Google’s suite of free cloud storage options including Picasa for images and Google Docs for documents.

When asked whether the same offer would apply for Windows Phone handsets HTC was hesitant as the platform already has the SkyDrive cloud storage. The Taiwanese phone maker hasn’t commented on whether older HTC handsets will qualify for the 3GB Dropbox bonus.

HTC Sensation XE now official

The first ever Beats Audio powered smartphone, from HTC.

HTC has launched a new version of its flagship Sensation smartphone. The new HTC Sensation XE is the refreshed version of the older Sensation but has the same form factor and design.
Sensation XE is the first smartphone to benefit from the HTC and Beats Audio partnership. Besides, Sensation XE gets a minor cosmetic upgrade as well in the form of Beats inspired red accents all around the phone.
HTC Sensation XE features a faster 1.5 GHz dual core processor promising faster performance and better battery utilisation. As compared to its four month old sibling, the Sensation XE gets a bigger battery as well to keep the juice flowing longer.
Sensation XE is the first handset to offer Beats Audio, a combination of software and hardware that allows you to hear music in the best possible way. It also comes with an exclusive Beats in-ear headset which allows the handset to automatically switch the bespoke Beats by Dr. Dre sound profile, delivering audio tracks tuned specifically for the headphones.
The in-ear headphones also feature a remote control, allowing you to pause, play or skip through tracks and answer/end calls while the phone is in your pocket.
"Audio is a crucial part of any consumer's mobile experience and we are continually pushing the audio boundaries to encompass not only improved voice but music, movies and games," said Jason Mackenzie, president of global sales and marketing, HTC. "The HTC Sensation XE offers a truly incredible experience that demonstrates our commitment to place consumers at the centre of their mobile worlds."
The Beats Audio tuning for Sensation XE allows the device to deliver superior audio quality not only while playing music but while using other applications and even while gaming.
Sensation XE will also ship with a high capacity micro SD memory card (8 GB/16 GB depending on the location) and will be available in the Indian market by the end of September or early October. Final price and date of launch is yet to be confirmed by HTC India and we will keep you updated with the details as and when they arrive.

HTC Jetstream Review

AT&T has just officially announced new tablet named HTC Jetstream and also known as HTC Puccini. It will be the first 4G LTE and HSPA+ tablet available in market. It will hopefully available in market on 1st week of September 2011 and it will be the first tablet available in United States. Tablet is the first runs with.
Android 3.1 Honeycomb onboard
1.5GHz dual-core processor CPU.
Full Specifications and Features of Unlocked HTC Jetstream are mentioned below :
Display : It comes with 10.10 inches touch display with the resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels. It also has Accelerometer, Light sensor and Multi-touch function.

Camea : Tablet comes with two camera 8 Mega pixel camera with LED flash on the rear side and 1.3 Mega pixel camera front side just near speaker for doing video calling.
Sounds : It has MP4 and MP4 player which is capable to play songs and videos. It also has YouTube player to play videos on web. Tablet is also inbuilt with Loudspeaker and 3.5mm headphone connector Jack.
Connectivity : It is equipped with many connectivity options such as Bluetooth, 3G, GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, GPS with maps etc.
Social Apps : It is fully equipped plenty of social networking applications such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google Search, Gmail, Gtalk, Picasa, YouTube etc.
Memory : HTC Jetstream 4G tablet accepts up to 32GB microSD memory card to store huge storage of data like songs, videos, images, movies and other data.
Battery : It comes with 7300 MAH standard battery which can give huge battery backup.
Unlocked HTC Jetstream is also bundled with various type of features to use like HTML web browser, Document viewer, Games, Photocall, Email, SMS etc.
The cost of Unlocked HTC Jetstream will be aprox $699 and data plans will be charged by cellular company separately. We are not sure about exact price because the price changes continuously in every point of time.