Google officially announced the world's first Android One smartphones yesterday, all made by Indian manufacturers, and each costing less than $110 unlocked: Karbonn Sparkle V, Spice Android One Dream UNO Mi-498, and Micromax Canvas A1. At the same time, Google revealed a full list of hardware partners that will eventually commercialize Android One devices.

Alongside Karbonn, Spice and Micromax, the list includes several better known companies like HTC, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer. Furthermore, we see Alcatel, Panasonic, Intex, Lava, and Xolo completing the list.

Among chipmakers, only Qualcomm and MediaTek are supporting Android One for now but that's more than enough. Qualcomm is the world's largest mobile chipset maker anyway, while MediaTek is huge in Asia.

Source Android.com

Android TV is coming this fall and manufacturers are preparing their upcoming products to conquer people's living rooms. Asus is one of them, and leaked benchmarks of this upcomng device that will be called "Google Nexus Player" shows the company is testing its first Android TV set-top box.

The unannounced set-top box runs Android L and packs a quad-core 1.83GHz Intel x86 CPU and a PowerVR Rogue G6430 GPU complete with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. The system has undergone tests on 23.7" and 31.9" displays, both of 1080p resolution.

While seeing an Intel CPU inside an Android TV set-top box is a bit unexpected, it's certainly cool to see Intel stepping up its game in the Android world. Google says Qualcomm, Nvidia, MediaTek and Marvell chips will also get their primetime in Android TV products.

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Google annouced the Android One program that will replace the Nexus branding line-up in the near future with the latest Android version, good specs in a very low competitive price.

The phone, which features dual SIM slots, is listed at Rs. 6,999 (about $115) and packs in a 5MP camera, 2MP front shooter, an FWVGA (854x480) display at 4.5", 1GB RAM, 4GB storage, and a 1700mAh battery. The device from Micromax, readers may recall, is slated to be a dual-SIM device with a 4.5" display at an even less expensive price of "under $100."

There are just a couple of days left until the official Android One announcement but for now it looks like this is our first peek at Android One hardware. Hit the link below for the full listing.

Notethat the Flipkart listing has been pulled for now. It won't take long until it's back again.

Source (Flipkart)

Meizu announced that it will officially reveal its upcoming device, the Meizu MX4 on September,2nd. so the first couple of weeks of next month are due to be very, very crowded in terms of new device launches.

The MX4 will run Flyme OS 4.0, the latest incarnation of Meizu's interpretation of Android. The phone has been rumored to come in at least two different versions, a 'base model' and a higher-end version.

The latter should sport a 5.4" or 5.5" touchscreen with 2560x1536 resolution, and a 20.7 MP rear camera (supposedly the exact same unit that Sony uses on its Xperia Z2). 3GB of RAM will be in at least one MX4 model, as well as Samsung's octa-core Exynos 5433 SoC. The normal MX4 retail price will be about $400 - €300.

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ALL HAIL THE KING, The latest IDC numbers for smartphone shipments are out, and once again it looks like Android just keeps on moving up. Year over year, Android has gained around 5% in overall market share by number of phones shipped... Android is Now accounts for 84.7% of all smartphone shipments for Q2,2014. Total Android phone shipments for Q2 rose 33.3% year over year, at 191.5 million units.

Meanwhile, Apple's iOS slipped further back while maintaining its second place spot at 11.7% of shipments (down from 13.2% last year), while Microsoft's Windows Phone fell to 2.5% compared to 3.7% a year ago. Windows Phone, somewhat surprisingly, even saw a decline in total units shipped, down to 7.4 million handsets compared to 8.7 million in the same quarter last year. That's definitely not a great sign.

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