Samsungs Galaxy Nexus holds the title of first released phone to run Googles Ice Cream Sandwich variant of Android and as a big Android fan it didnt take long for me to come to love the Galaxy Nexus with its superb feature set and state of the art operating system

There are blogs everywhere telling you all about it so theres little point in stating the obvious, instead lets get personal, or personalized !!

Android has always been the OS of choice if personalized home screens and creative looks is your bag and when a friend asked my the Galaxy Nexus seemed to be ‘empty’ and have limited apps from new i had a realization – i replied to my friend that the Galaxy Nexus was more like buying a new PC or Netbook than buying a phone, it comes with the basic feature set and an un-populated desktop just as a new pc would. Then you get personal.

Widgets is a big one for Android and the old favorites show up time and time again, but the level to which you can mix it up now is incredible – okay so you have but 5 homescreens from stock but install ADW-EX launcher and ‘BANG’ your now running NINE homescreens and the 5 from stock, the posibilities are endless.

The once fairly un inspiring desktop of the sandard ICS launcher is transformed, and with a decent live wallpaer thrown in for good measure the whole thing looks amazing, the wallpaper i used here is Symphony-of-colors you can change the Colour scheme to match any theme you like and its very simple which makes it look slick and minimal.

You might have noticed the stock launcher on my Galaxy Nexus is a little different to standard, 5 vertical rows and extra buttons, my Nexus is currently running a Modoco rom with extra features including alterations to the stock launcher, you can find the rom Here…..

As you can see it also supports rotation unlike the standard launcher ICS comes equipped with out the box- all lots of good reasons to root your Galaxy Nexus and flash a custom rom.. although i have to tell you its your phone to take that risk withobviously  ( disclaimer due to litigation finding its way in to all parts of life nowerdays )

All in all im very happy with my Galaxy Nexus, its fast, light, thin, awesome, and the screen is just incredible and needs to be seen for real to understand how good it really is.  You already know the Tech specs numbers and most likely the good and bad points raised by everyone since its launch so all that remains it to drop another nice photo here and sign off so i can spend some time enjoying the device myself

Its not a long post about ICS  ( android version 4 – ice cream sandwich ) neither am i going to blurb on about the superb specs of the latest ‘Nexus’ labelled device to come to market from  the Google camp. I just want to voice my thoughts on the desirability of this thing.. or NOT !

Okay so looking at the picture above it is quite nice but lets face it this needs to be world class and it has some tough competition in the hardware design stakes. My main thoughts upon handling the Samsung Galaxy Nexus are first ‘its shaped like a soap dish’ a bit curved and also a little bit off centre!  and second ‘crappy back panel’ …whats with that back panel, its made from terrible cheap textured plastic just as the feature phones of 10 years ago were !

There you go look, from the shot above you could be forgiven for thinking this was a $99 or £99 shanzai special from ebay ! …  Now obviously i know im getting lots of you shouting at me right now about how wrong i am and how great the new Nexus is but hey – its just the opinion i find myself with after holding it for an hour and having a play !!

I may not have many people who agree but i would have been much happier to have gone shopping today and come home with a phone looking something like the HTC Sensation XL but running ICS google pure edition..  you could throw in a pair of decent ear buds too if you like but its not a deal breaker ..

I do wonder if im just getting old and loosing all sense of good taste, may be you can tell me by taking a look at my idea of a great looking design for a new android phone, the 2 pictures bellow are my idea of super cool perfection – okay the screen size is out but you get the idea..

I should probably say at this point that despite my lack of enthusiasm toward the new Galaxy Nexus i am still a huge Android fan, i just wasnt expecting to go shopping for a phone today and find all sorts of more likeable hardware – HTC Titan HTC Sensation XL – and even a Nokia ( lumia ) had me me feeling more like parting with half a grand of pocket money…  i came home without a phone in the end.  Next time may be

I gotta tell you i love my motorola XOOM. Its just a great device, loads of ram loads of storage an overclocked processor running dual 1500mhz cores, custom built version of Honeycomb, hell it even has a barometer!

So why on earth have i gone and taken it apart and attacked the casework with 240 grit abrasive paper ?

Its not a good look is it ? .. well just go along with it for now and take the back of your Xoom by removing the 2 Torx screws on the bottom edge and slide the cover down, it will snag half way requiring you to use a very slim screwdriver down the back of each edge to release it,

There you go its wide open so you can see the lovely internal build structure now, so take a deep breath and start sanding away that silver paint the cover is layered with, start with a medium grit like 240 then go for 400 leading on to 600 – 800 – 1000 -final abrasive wet and dry 2000..

Ahh now look at that! a brushed alluminium look rear panel for your Xoom, but it looks more or less the same as when it was painted yes?..   okay time to go for it with a metal polishing kit, its like using a cloth on the end of a drill with a bar of soap !!

Fire up the cordless drill, attack a buffing wheel, spin off some of that soap and start attacking the Xoom back cover with it, then do it all over again with the fine grade soap! – No im not kidding thats what your supposed to do with this stuff honest..

Now do you get why i went to town on the back of my XOOM, it kinda looks awesome dont you think, a really nice mirror finish does the Xoom justice and makes it look even more attractive and highly tech desirable, it will now need almost daily buffing and a weekly polish with some decent metal polish.

 So there you have it, if you fancy having a go and need a little advice im available for questions  http://twitter.com/#!/terminal7

…and another picture of the finished product i think….

So there you have it, the mirror finish xoom, highly polished and so much better looking than the factory finished silver paint job. My next project will be to do the same to my ipad2 , a mirror finish ipad 2 sounds quite nice to me.  Have fun

Do you know what a ‘TWERP’ is ? well a twerp is most often used a disparagement and is somewhat similar to ‘Apeth’ or ‘Benny’ ! okay i may have lost some of you there . Moving on TWRP pronounced ‘Twerp’ ( of course ) is the latest in a fairly long line of recovery managers for Android, it looks a bit different to what you may be used to though …

You see how its all big block buttons? well thats the idea – after all touch screen phones or tablets need buttons you can fit your fingers on to dont they, seems logical- must have seemed logical to the developers of ‘TWRP’ or Team Win’s Recovery Project..  ahh thats what it stands for.

Okay history lesson now, back in the old days around 2008 the G1 came out and people wanted to flash roms, the stock recovery manager in android wasnt much use so the comunity took it upon themselves to make a replacement, many replacements emerged one most noted variant was JF (jesus freake) Recovery, you couldnt miss it with its somewhat trippy appearance.

This kind of recovery was to be the key component in flashing roms and backups and restores and partitioning SD cards, just brilliant..

After the JF recovery came the Amon-RA* recoveries for many devices, Haykuro** claims to have given Amon-RA all the skills to acomplish this task though but never the less the Amon RA recovery series are legendary in android circles.

**Haykuro on twitter    *Amon_ra on twitter

As time passed other talented developers came up with more well featured versions of the Android recovery and none offered as much as the Clockwork Mod recovery with its integration to the working Android OS via Rom Manager, this meant you could now perform the many tasks available directly from an app within the OS, great!

Clockwork-Mod Recovery developed by KOUSH ..

Back to todays instalment of recovery managment and heres a little video featuring Twerp, the full story can be found over at the slightly popular engadget!

Xoom was the name of the very first GED ( google experience device ) tablet and so far as we know Motorola who are now owned by Google will continue the Xoom name when the MK2 is released, not too much is known as fact but as you can see the Xoom2 is a definite reality – only the specs and details are sketchy ..

The image above was the first hint at the new MK2 Xoom being a more vertical experience than the previous offering, this Verizon add is very much showing the first prototype idea and i doubt the unit even has a real screen !

Moving on and over the last few days a few more images have popped up on the net showing what looks like 2 different tablets, one may be a 7 inch or may be 8 or 9 !!  the other is looking like a full size 10 inch unit, no point in guessing though im sure the specs will soon become fact, give it a month or so..

So say hello to a new Xoom the Xoom2 ! notice how the shape reflects a kind of theme for Motorola at the moment, in all honesty i reckon the shape is just a good try to stop Apple going nuts and trying to ban the new Xoom from being sold because it has similarities to the iPad, ridiculous isnt it..

Nice looking bolt on back panel.. Xoooommm….

HTC’s first tablet device the Flyer wasnt a huge success, now there are a few reasons for this, most reasons are  arguable ie- everyone wants an iPad and may be its too small at just 7 inches of glass, but one reason i think we all agree on was the use of a Gingerbread ROM. Why put a phone rom on a tablet when the Tablet rom is available ?

Well it looks like HTC have at last started to develop a suitable rom for the Flyer based on the Honeycomb Android source, and trhat should make for a better device experience all together. Above you can see HTC have added Sense UI but its clearly a Honeycomb build as you can see by the signature Honeycomb notification area at the bottom.

The image below however gives me something to complain about, HTC have chosen to mess up the overall theme of Honeycomb and opt for their own lighter colors on the menus – just like Samsung did on the Galaxy Tab MK1 and that looked dreadful too untill you flashed a custom rom with stock android looks!!

So its kinda like HTC dont want to fully embrace the beauty of Android Honeycomb ! Not a good choice i think and not a choice that will sell more devices, may be Sense UI could still work on this tablet but as for the non genuine theme i have to say im not a fan at all .

HTC Flyer, well on its way to getting a much needed software upgrade.

Did you jump for joy the day the HTC HD2 came out? i know i did, it was the first of many big screen phones with big tech specs to match, at the time you were mostly faced with 3,7 inch screens on high end devices so something with 4.3 inches of glass was a new form factor all together and one that has made a big impact on the smartphone industry.

This coming season all the big names are offering new devices with screens almost the size of tablets and all running Android or Windows of course – no doubt the next build of Android known to us all as Ice Cream Sandwich will take advantage of the big screen real estate and push the smartphone form on to another level making us want to buy one and thus making more money from an already captivated buying audience.

SAMSUNG offer us the Nexus Prime with a 4.5 inch samoled screen and also the Droid Prime too with much the same dimensions, the Galaxy 2s with its 4.3 inch glass and most outstanding of all the Galaxy Note with a humongous 5.3 inch display which is right on the border between phone and tablet device.

HTC the brand that invented big display phones back at the turn of the century with such devices as the Wallaby are continuing the trend this coming season with the Holiday 4.5 incher, the Vigor and Ruby with HD2 like size attributes ie, 4.3 inch, and the Titan with a 4.7 inch display to show off the new Mango release of Windows Phone 7.

One more contender offering something big this year is MOTOROLA who have come up with the Bionic and the DroidHD these two come to us with a 4,3 inch and a 4,5 inch display respectively – im almost scared to admit this but im looking forward to seeing these in the flesh more than the other manufacturers offerings, not because im not impressed with Sammy or HTC but more that im so impressed with how the Xoom is built that i want to see how the big Ms phones are looking nowerdays.

So thats about the size of it ! BIG Displays are in – and im happy because i use a Galaxy Tab 7 as my main device so for me a large glass plate in the pocket is no bad thing ! Cant wait to see this lot in the shops soon

The only negative point i can find to add to this is that the HD2 has been relesed and re released in so many forms now that almost every HTC seems to look like a HD2, not that this stops me from wanting every device they invent but i do wonder when something completely new will emerge that doesnt make me think ‘HD2 – EVO – DesireHD – EVO3d – HD7 – etc etc etc… ‘

$100 tablet from HP !  It sounds off the planet i know and to be honest it is, HP have gone completely mad and killed off WebOS the operating system they acquired last year when they spent billions on the trouble struck company PALM. Not only does this mean no more phones under the ‘Pre’ banner but it also means the lovely HP Touchpad tablet is now discontinued and since they only sold a few thousand of the quarter million units manufactured its time for HP to go nuts and sell them off for less than $100…

Best Buy US above show the Touchpad 16 gig model as out of stock for online purchase but apparently you can go to your local store and buy one per customer at this once in a lifetime price.

The HP Touchpad may not have been a success at a price equal to that of the iPad but at this price its become an overnight hit with every tech head on the planet scrambling to get one and this does make me wonder why they didnt just sell them off for about $200 each as im pretty sure the same mad rush would have followed – not that im complaining, i want a slice of this silly price pad too !

As i said i would like to buy my $100 HP too but you see in the UK my local stores dont seem to have been told the news by HP and as such are still pushing out the Touchpad at £350 for the 16 gig version ( $580 ) and to be honest im not about to spend six times more than the US does for the very same device.

So Best buy UK not quite the same bargain seller as Best Buy in the US ! – Looking a bit deeper into this you can imagine some of the Android tablet manufacturers are a little bit upset by this price hacking – after all if your average guy walks into a shop looking to buy a media tablet and he has no special affiliation to Android or Apple or HP  its likely he might think the HP Tablet is just the thing and he would be totally correct for thinking that since its well built and does all the stuff most tablet users want.  It wouldnt surprise me at all if Apple had purchased HP just to do this and play a little war game with android !

So whats up at HP ?  well whatever is going on they have certainly gone off the rails, in other news there is talk that they are to stop building PCs too very soon, that must be a direct hit from Apples success with the Mac and the shifting focus of domestic users on to devices like smartfones and tablets. So the mighty HP are no longer mighty at all and the descision to kill off WebOS leaves me thinking they have no idea at all what they are doing – i mean yeah sure kill of one product like this but only for the right reason, like re-releasing a budget version without touchstone technology and lacking the DRE speakers, yep the world does want a WebOS tablet and they want it to be much cheaper than the iPAD so come on HP you did it with Netbooks so why not do the same with Tablets ?

Clicking the link on HPs UK site takes you to a ‘not found item’ web page, may be this could be a sign that the UK will soon also be able to buy the touchpad at a much reduced price. For now if your like me you will be scrolling thru pages of Ebay sellers looking for a Us seller who wants to cash in on the deal, if someone in the US buys a $100 touchpad and sells it for $200 on Ebay the buyer in UK still gets a cracking deal and everyones happy .. sound like a plan ?

You may know of Googles latest purchase, just a small buyout of a little startup, yeah right- MOTOROLA (mobility) have been purchased by the internet add and search giant for what must be about the same money as Murdoch bid to buy B-SKY-B ! so how much exactly is that ? ehhr about 10 billion or over ! its good to be bloody loaded you know!

Screams of joy as we sit back and imagine great new devices running Android built by the now Google branded Motorola team…… STOP ! … Thats not why Google set out to buy the mobile and comms devision of Motorola – its all about the patents they now own, all 24,000 of them!

So is this buy worth the cash Google spent ? well to be honest i dont think Google had much choice since they totally lucked out in the past due to the lack of patents they owned and since patent wars have become the new business battle field in recent times its absolutely required for Google to posses a catalogue of such intellectual rights  to fight their corner, or side , or half, or however many bits they now own of their industry!

Motorola have not done too well in recent years, they are not the same company as they were back in their glory days, between 2007 – 2009 they lost about 4.5 billion and by this year they had split the company in two to create Motorola Solutions ( the best bit of the company that began in 1928 ) and the other half Motorola Mobility, ( the bit that made the razor and the xoom! ) Google aquired the Mobility bit !!

So back to these pesky patents, we all know how it works, Apple draw a kiddy like picture of a phone with a human hand a jet pack and a parachute and claim they invented the mobile phone emergency survival kit!  then once the technology becomes available to build such a device they tax the hell out of anyone who tries something remotely similar, lets say a mobile phone with a built in hand dryer ! yep thats the world we now live in!

Google face many legal battles with Android just because of its ridiculous growth and other big corps like Apple cant just sit back and watch Google trash their patch – other battles come from Oracle who claim Android owes licence revenue due to implementation of Java code, lets see how that one pans out next year.

In other similar battles Apple (again) are attempting to sue Samsung because they claim the new Galaxy Tab looks like the iPad, in the picture below you could say it does untill you realise that picture has been photoshop edited by apple to look just like the iPad, thats dirty !

Now isnt that amazing? they look the same size!  in reality the Galkaxy tab is both longer and much narrower than Apples iPad – it has to be by design due to the fact it has a completely different aspect ratio, and for Apples benefit here ill explain Aspect Ratio – its the relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimension of an object if an object is of a different aspect ratio it has to be different in length and width!

Also theres the lovely way in which apple have shown the galaxy tab with its app draw open, the app drawer  is just a folder full of apps and does not reflect the true appearance of the tablet, unlike Apple who only have enough imagination to put shortcuts to apps on their desktop the galaxy tab has an array of widgets and this maked it look nothing like the ipad.. look..

It looks like the patent wars are just a fact of life now so we must all just sit back and watch the money we spend on our gadgets being wasted as companies attack each other with their cash, not good to know your money is being spent on this is it? – One last point, do you ever see Samsung trying to sue Sony because they have just released a 42 inch 16:9 screened TV? No because that would be ridiculous ..

Motorola’s Xoom may not be the first device you pick up when you want to make a quick phone call or send a text message to your loved ones , or haters if thats more your bag ! It can be done – Xoomers everywhere can patch the Android Honeycomb operating system so its able to perform phone functions just as any Android phone would.

The image above may not instantly look too familiar but it is the phone app your average Nexus phone would be using to make a phone call, thats not all you need though, first your Xoom must be rooted and as such im going to assume you allready know that bit or you would most likely not be reading this anyway !! So whats the other bit you need then ?..

The magic ingredient is the ‘Framework-res.APK’ or at least a somewhat modified version of the framework-res for your specific Xoom, take a look at this XDA post http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1015857 for the low down on all the specs and all the instructions to achieve your TEN inch phone !. Please read carefully as there are many different versions of the Xoom and all the different regional variants need a different Framework-Res.apk .

You can see the contacts app above and you might notice it looks a bit messed up once this hack is in full swing, thats because your now looking at the contacts from the phone apps point of view – the original contacts app is still available simply by using the good old Google Search widget just like all Androids.

As for texting you can download Handcent-SMS or use a copy of the MMS-apk found in most Android roms of the Nexus generation, either work very well indeed, you will now also have that lovely CRT animation that flashes off when you power down the Xoom screen, just like the nexus-s  nice side effect !