Android Atlas

Zact touts lower phone bills

Why shell out extra bucks each month for a cellular service you don't benefit from? That's the question wireless newcomer Zact poses to customers. In a fresh twist on the MVNO model, today the company unveiled a radical way for people to buy and customize their phone plans on the fly.

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What Google I/O should bring for Android hardware lovers

Google's hotly anticipated annual developer conference will kick off in just a couple days in San Francisco. And conference-goers and Android fans are excited about the possibility of new products the company may announce and/or give away.

But Android fans may be a bit disappointed if their expectation is brand new hardware. While the 2012 Google I/O conference saw the introduction of the new $199 Nexus 7 seven-inch tablet and the Nexus Q streaming media hub, the 2013 conference is likely to feature no brand new Android hardware. Instead, it's likely that Google will refresh some … Read more

Facebook Home finally hits 1M download mark

A month after its release, Facebook Home has reached 1 million downloads, according to download numbers at Google Play.

It hit the milestone just days after Facebook's director of mobile engineering told reporters that Home had been downloaded "just about" 1 million times. The app's page was updated Sunday morning to indicate that its download numbers now fall in the 1 million to 5 million range.

While the social network's software suite for Android achieved its first 500,000 downloads in its first 10 days out in the wild, Facebook Home took twice as long … Read more

Manage to-dos with these four Android apps

For a long time, Astrid was considered a go-to task management app for Android users. But with its recent acquisition by Yahoo and the news that it will soon be going away, fans of the app will soon be looking for alternatives. With that in mind, I've put together a list of four of my favorite to-do managers for Android. In some ways they may even outdo the popular Astrid, but feel free to tell us in the comments how you think they stack up.

Wunderlist (free) The beauty of Wunderlist lies in its simplicity. It easily syncs across … Read more

Get Automatic Lifelogging with Saga for Android

Meet Saga, the "Automatic Lifelogging" app. This is the app you've never known you needed. Remember what you were doing last Thursday? Saga remembers. OK, I guess that sounds a bit creepy. But really, here's what the app does...

Instead of forcing you to write a journal each day to talk about everything you did, in perhaps an overlong narrative, Saga keeps everything in a neat list for you. Checked in at the grocery store on Foursquare last Monday? Saga recorded it. Tweeted about an upcoming movie you want to see? Yep, Saga got that, too. … Read more

Top 5: Reasons not to buy the Galaxy S4

If you're an Android fan with a short temper, please turn back now. Watching this video will just send you into hysterics.

Part of my job here at CNET is to play the devil's advocate, and sometimes that requires me to talk trash about products you love. This time around, I'm going to take a poke at a phone that we love as much as you do, the Samsung Galaxy S4.

You'd be hard pressed to find a smartphone on our site that comes more highly recommend than the S4, but that doesn't mean that … Read more

New Google Nexus phone to replace de-stocked Nexus 4?

The Android faithful are getting giddy over what Google goodies could be revealed at next week's Google I/O developers' conference, and the de-shelving of the Nexus 4 at retailers has some wondering if a new pure Android phone is about to replace it.

Two U.K. retailers, Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U, have discontinued sales of the Nexus 4 this week, and the number of U.S. retailers still offering the phone online also seems to be shrinking. Check Google's official retail locator for the latest pure Google phone and the only outlets that pop up in most places (I checked New York, San Francisco, and Denver) are all T-Mobile stores.

Yet, when I checked Best Buy's Web site and clicked on the only Nexus 4 on offer (the T-Mobile version), I got a mysterious "Page Not Found" error. It certainly appears someone thinks the Nexus 4 has run its course and is looking to make room for something new.… Read more

Android dominated smart devices in Q1, says Canalys

Android dominated the global smart mobile device market in the first quarter, according to a new report from Canalys.

That market -- which combines smartphones, tablets, and notebooks -- hit 308.7 million units in the first quarter, representing year-on-year growth of 37.4 percent, according to Canalys, which released the report on Thursday.

By operating system market share, Android was on top with 59.5 percent of all smart mobile devices shipped. Apple was second with a 19.3 percent share, while had Microsoft had an 18.1 percent share.

Global tablet shipments grew 106.1 percent year-on-year to … Read more

As Android disrupts, tablets beat cheap PCs: Nvidia

Nvidia is banking on new computing devices to replace "cheap" PCs and Android to drive that disruption, according to comments from the chipmaker's chief executive on Thursday.

"A great tablet is clearly better than a cheap PC," said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the company's fiscal first quarter conference call.

"New computing devices are becoming increasingly like your personal computer, [so] performance matters and this is where we can add a lot of value....disrupting the entry-level PC," he said.

Nvidia sees Android as the agent of disruption. "Android is really … Read more