Carriers, how they do love to rip you off. From excessive charges for calls, texts and picture messages to charges that are even more scary such as international calling. They are fighting a losing war in today’s battle in light of emails and voip services. It is almost as if they have not figured out how to adapt. Which I think is even more true for users in the States where they get charged to receive a text message. Those of us who are not willing to stand for such charges find ways around.

Thankfully there are some companies out there that feel the same as us. Once such company is Viber. They allow you to make calls, send texts and picture messages all for free. That is right – FREE. And now their latest update brings with it Jellybean support.

As long as you have an active data connection, either 3G or wifi. And the best bit there are no ads. That is right, they do not even spam you with stupid ads for whatever crap that you do not want.

So what are the good and bad points of Viber.

The Good:

• It’s free
• No ads
• Group messaging support
• Simple and clean UI
• As well as Android 2.0-4.1.1 support they also have apps for any friends that may have an iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Phone

The Bad:

• The colour of the UI, you might hate it as it does not follow the Google guidelines
• No way to change ringtone or notification tone at the moment.
• No way to backup previous sent and received messages if you re-install on a different device

Are the bad points bad? Yes. Will they affect most people. Not really. As Android users we are used to being able to change ringtones and notification tones at will so it is frustrating not to be able to do so. Viber have said they are hoping to bring this feature in a future update. As for backing up older messages, unless you flash roms on a regular basis this will not be a problem for the average user. Most people will install it once and keep it running.

Overall I think this is a great app. I use it everyday to send texts or make calls to the States or other places. I love it so much I have been keeping my One X on an ICS rom just so I could carry on using it. Now with tonights update to include Jellybean support I can finally move across to Jellybean.

So, what are you waiting for? Hit up the download link below install. If you will excuse me I have a JB rom to flash.

Viber Play Store Link

You cannot have too much of a good thing. And right now that good thing is Jelly Bean.

The Jelly Bean Candy Co have unleashed their very own Jelly Bean Live Wallpaper to fill that gap in your life if you are missing it.

I have to say it does look really good and much better than the pictures lead you to believe. And lots of options to play about with

Features:
> Tap the screen to drop more jelly beans into your jar
> Touch and hold a jelly bean, then drag, spin or flick it
> Shake the phone or tilt it upside down to clear
> Invent your own games, like “Jelly Belly Volleybean” – don’t let the bean hit the bottom!
> Choose your favorite flavors to display, like Buttered Popcorn or Very Cherry
> Change the level of gravity to affect the drop/tilt/flick features
> Choose a background for the best look on your phone

Hit up the Play Store to download and enjoy the Jelly Bean goodness

Play Store Link

(via Randy Kelly)

While HTC are still trying to figure out bringing Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) to devices users now have the option of trying out Jelly Bean.

A Xda user going by the name of randomblame has released it to the masses. While still in early stages, and still very much a beta, the list of working things is very impressive for a rom that is only 4 days old.

What works, what does not?

broken:
camera
working:
Mic
accelerometer
audio
bluetooth
wifi
egl
the interface
buttons
lights – switch from auto brightness
gps
gsm
lots more

quirks:
auto brightness causes the button backlight to be disabled always
button backlight is disabled after going to sleep change brightness again to bring it back
camera mostly set up but we really need the ics blobs (anytime you’re ready htc)
backlight sometimes remains on when you lock the device – with a black screen just lit.

I should add that there still is a bit of trouble with dropping signal for some users. This is still an early build of CM10, no doubt in the coming days and weeks much will be improved on

And thanks to another Xda member Simonekl there is also a video for you to enjoy

Hit up the thread on Xda if are still rocking the Desire HD/Inspire 4G

Link

Thanks to  tHoMaS-1 for letting us use these pictures.

I’m not sure how legal these Emulators are or if it’s wise to download and install any .zip you find around the internet but interesting video all the same. Originally shared from Clove Technology

Android Open Kang Project have released some information on moving to 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Here’s the official statement..

 After a great deal of conversation within the team, I’ve decided to make a formal announcement regarding the future of AOKP.

To start, I’m officially announcing the retirement of the following devices as supported:
HTC Incredible (inc)
HTC Desire (bravo)
HTC Evo 4G (supersonic)
Amazon Kindle Fire (otter)
These devices have a number of problems for our team; first and foremost the fact none of us own any of them.  Beyond that, they’re falling behind in terms of hardware, and maintaining them blindly defeats us before we begin in our goal to create stable releases.  I’ve come to the conclusion that by supporting these devices we’ve overextended ourselves, and the team is in agreement.  Long story short; we can’t release a Milestone build and call it ‘stable’ with these devices in our farm.  The code for these devices will still be in our repos, so anybody who wants to compile them can do so if they wish… they just won’t be receiving “official” builds any longer.  We’re all very sorry about this, but we feel it is necessary for the health of the ROM (and the team making it!).

Now that the bad news is out of the way…

Milestone 6 is coming! We are shooting for a release sometime this weekend. No promises! We’ve been working for the past few weeks to squash as many bugs as we can.  This will be our final ICS release.

After Milestone 6, the team take a short break in preparation  for Jelly Bean. We’ll be taking a different approach to JB; starting fresh. With a clean start, we’ll be able to set things up properly from the get-go.  We’re a much more experienced unit now,  and we believe merging all of the JB changes is just asking for trouble.

When I started AOKP back in November, I really hadn’t intended on releasing it to more than Nexus devices. AOKP has grown bigger than anyone has expected, most of all me.  It quite literally blew up in my face.  Right now, according to http://stats.aokp.co, there are almost 50,000 devices running AOKP and almost 120,000 devices using some kind of AOKP code-base (aka a KANG). Bear in mind this stats system was implemented only starting with build 39. This is absolutely insane to me!

In closing, Team Kang is just a small group, and AOKP was started for fun.  We aim to keep it fun.  Putting together a feature-rich and buttery-smooth ROM with unrivalled stability is fun both because of our love of doing it and getting to share it with all of you.  Thanks for understanding the things we need to do to keep it that way.

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