 After a few hiccups with the initial roll-out for Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch owners, Ice Cream Sandwich is ready to go once again for your device on Sprint. According to a report from AndroidCentral, many Epic 4G Touch owners are receiving Android 4.0 for their device today.
We hope that Sprint and Samsung managed to fix the bugs associated with the previous update. As always with a OTA Software Update, it will take a couple of weeks before all devices have the update, so be patient! Here is what you can expect from the Android 4.0 update: the update brings Face Unlock, Android Beam, improved keyboard, and a refreshed Calendar and Gmail app. Via [Android Central]  
As RIM prepares its BlackBerry 10 launch, it plans on streamlining its company and become more efficient in costs and operations. To achieve this goal, RIM is reportedly going to cut another 3,000 jobs by August 13 in order to save costs before the end of Q2. Since BlackBerry 10 is the primary focus of RIM at the moment, employees working on the development team or enterprise sales are safe from the layoffs. However, RIM will be taking a close look at employees in non-enterprise sales, human resources, customer service, and marketing in order to decide who is essential to the operation and who is expendable. It’s always unfortunate to see a tech company forced to let employees go, but hopefully RIM will be able to right the ship and begin hiring in the near future. Via [BerryReview]  
After rebooting the Digg brand and a caffeine-fueled 6-week drive, the team at News.me has launched the new Digg, or Digg v1, today instead of tomorrow, ahead of schedule. The original social news aggregator has been rebuilt from the ground up and is now cleaner and uses images more prominently. They have also re-written the famous Digg algorithm from scratch to now include popularity scoring from Tweets and Facebook shares. Along with flipping the switch to the new version, they’ve also launched a brand new iOS app. As far as upcoming features, this is what they’ve detailed so far: - introduce network-based personalization features (like we do in News.me) to make Digg a more relevant and social experience
- experiment with new commenting features
- continue to iterate Digg for mobile web
- move the website forward with features like the Reading List, different views into the top stories on Digg, and more data to help users better understand why a particular story is trending
- launch an API so that members of the development community can build all the products that we haven't even thought of yet
Expect Digg to change and evolve as the weeks go on, but the real question is: Will Digg see the same popularity (as well as traffic and page views) as it did in its $300 million valuation days? Let us know what you’re predictions are in the comments. Via [Digg Blog]  
Care for another personal assistant app on your iPhone? Don’t worry, it’s not a Siri clone, although it has similarities with Apple’s personal assistant app. This new app is called Saga and it was just released for the iPhone. According to the developer, Saga is an intelligent companion designed to help your get the most out life. As such, the app keep tabs of where you’ve gone, how you got there, who you were with and of course what you did there. Best part of it all – it does not require you to check-in. Additionally, the app can also tell you a little bit about what the future has in store for you. It does this by an algorithm that figures out things that you like doing and comes up with personalized suggestions that you might want to do right at this moment or in the coming days. Other things that the app can do, include; - Automatically record where you’ve gone and how you got there — all without you having to check-in.
- Learn more about your daily routine, commuting patterns, and personal habits.
- Find out what’s nearby — and when there’s something going on that you should pay attention to.
- Get great personalized recommendations, based on what’s hot — and what you’re normally down for.
- Discover more about the world around you, including the top places, events, and activities in your area.
- Keep track of how you’ve spent your time with insightful infographics and interesting factoids.
- Measure the quality of your week with Saga’s Experience Points (XP). Saga awards XP for each awesome thing you do, whether you’re out having an exciting night out on the town or spending a lazy weekend at home.
- Share your discoveries with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare.
Interested? You can give the app a shot now by downloading it from the App Store. Via [iOS App Store] and [Scobleizer]  
NYC Subway riders now have another reason to use Google Maps — the addition of service alert data. Though, before you get super excited, this does come with a few catches and limitations. Just to begin with, this feature is currently available for those using Google Maps on an Android device or on the web by way of the maps.google.com website. Sorry, iOS users are out of luck at the moment. The other catch, these alerts will only be able to show scheduled cancellations, which means those last minute issues can (and likely will) still pop up. Anyway, while we have been focusing on what is bad and/or missing, lets shift back to the good as this will likely stop more than a few from making their plans only to find out a change will be needed. The bottom line here, use the web or an Android device to get your subway route and you will be able to easily shift around any scheduled delays on your route. And assuming there is a scheduled delay on the route you plan to take, you will be presented with alternate routes or be able to adjust your departure time. Finally, while Google has done this for those in NYC, they have stated that they are regularly adding new cities and features globally which means there is still hope to see similar alerts in your location. Via [Google Lat Long Blog]  
Microsoft today is opening the doors of its new webmail portal to interested users who may want to get a taste of the new Microsoft email service. According Microsoft, Outlook.com is a huge step that they are taking to introduce a new webmail service that responds to the signs of the times. By that it means that Outlook.com as a personal email service will have new features including the ability to detect emails that are newsletters and seggregates them from the rest of incoming emails in the inbox – giving you a cleaner and fresher email inbox. The service also allows you to immediately stop from receiving newsletter-type emails by way of a single click as well as delete all previously sent messages from a given send in one sweep. Another nice feature of Outlook.com is that you can sync it up with your social networking accounts including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, three of the most popular social networking sites that most of us regularly monitor and maintain. With the integration to this services, Outlook.com updates your contact information whenever any of your friends or contacts update their profiles in those service. Additionally, Outlook.com also filters emails from your social networking services and files them into their own specific folder. Hence, preventing them from cluttering your Outlook.com inbox. And since this is after all another Microsoft product, Outlook.com also gives you access to various Microsoft tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even Skydrive. You can use these tools inside your Outlook.com inbox. So far, Outlook.com seems to be a promising new webmail service from Microsoft. It’s not probably going to make you abandon Gmail or Yahoo! Mail at once as your webmail of choice but who knows in time, if Microsoft continues to enhance the service, you just might bid your current webmail service goodbye. Via [Outlook Blog]  
It is looking like Verizon Wireless will be shutting down the Alltel data network beginning in the early part of next year. The details are coming by way of letters that are reportedly making their way into Alltel customers hands. According to the details provided in the letter, Verizon is retiring the Alltel data network and the end will officially come in April 2013. More specifically, the letter states that; “To allow us to operate more efficiently and provide your company with the best service possible, we will be retiring the Alltel data network and moving to one network for all data users as early as January 2013. A recent review of your account shows that your company is using Alltel device(s) that are running on the Alltel data network. Once the Alltel network is retired, your can still use your Alltel basic phone(s) for making calls and text messaging, but any data features like Internet, apps, multimedia/picture messaging, email and ringback tones will no longer work.”
Simply put, if you are still using an Alltel device for data purposes, it may be time to at least begin to think about moving to a Verizon capable device. Of course, we suspect that some will push things as long as they can and that being the case, enjoy your (approx) 6 months before you have to get a new phone. Via [Droid-Life]  
We have seen the FreedomPop 4G sleeve case for the iPhone 4 and 4S, and well, it looks like the FreedomSleeve has since come available for the iPod touch. Well, a bit more specifically, for pre-order. The case is dubbed the Freedom Sleeve for iPod touch and it is priced at $99. The folks at FreedomPop are touting this as allowing the user to turn their iPod into an iPhone with 4G anywhere. Of course, what this really means is you will have direct access to connectivity on iPod touch so you can do things such as stream music and download apps. In addition, the Freedom Sleeve acts as a mobile hotspot for up to 8 additional devices. Those who make the purchase will get 500MB of “guaranteed” free mobile broadband per month and have the option to buy additional data for $10 per GB. Plus, you can get additional MB’s for referring friends. Otherwise, the Freedom Sleeve for iPod touch comes without any contract or long-term commitment. Finally, those interested will likely want to know that FreedomPop is an MVNO of Sprint which means this will work only as well as Sprint service works. Via [FreedomPop] 
 
Coming after some recent hints from LG, the folks have MobileSyrup are suggesting that the Optimus 4X smartphone will be available in Canada sometime this fall. As for the hints that came direct from LG, they had stated that more powerful smartphones were coming to North America in the second half of the year. This later bit is coming by way of a tipster and has yet to be confirmed. Of course, the timeline seems logical and believable enough. The details that the tipster provided included an image of the handset showing the LG Optimus 4X in white and mentioned the possibility or a release with Telus, Rogers and/or Bell. Simply put, LG is expected to launch the Optimus 4X in Canada sometime around the end of September with a variety of carriers. And on that note, we will remain on the lookout for an official announcement — either from LG or direct from a carrier. Finally, just to offer a recap on the specs so you have some idea of what you may be waiting for — the LG Optimus 4X will arrive with Android 4.0 ICS, the Optimus 3.0 UI, a 4.7inch (1280 x 720) True HD-IPS display, quad-core 1.5GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, 2150 mAh battery, 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with 1080p HD video capture and NFC. Via [MobileSyrup]  
Tweet Lanes has gotten another beta update. This brings Tweet Lanes to version 0.5.7. This update has been described as a Project Butter release which is designed to make the app run a lot smoother. Tweet Lanes was already pretty smooth to begin with, but it’s noticeably zippier now. The improved navigation speed comes at a cost. The image loading speed had to be decreased in order to make the app faster. Developer Chris Lacy is currently working on a way to make Tweet Lanes faster without sacrificing image loading. This update also brings improved tablet support. By default, Tweet Lanes is not as wide as it was before. The purpose of this is to reduce the distance your eyes have to travel when reading tweets. You can disable this look in the settings menu if you like. This update is not available in Google Play yet. If you want to test it out, you can download it directly from the link below. Via [Twitter]  | |
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