Ice Cream Sandwich

Samsung, AT&T, I'm sorry. I smashed the Samsung Rugby Smart. It's busted, broken and unusable. In my defense, I was told I could drive over the rugged smartphone with a car and it'd come out OK. To test out the car-versus-Rugby Smart selling point, I enlisted Times auto critic David Undercoffler to drive over the durable handset with the nicest car we could find -- a Bentley Continental GT convertible. The Bentley came out fine, but the Rugby Smart is trashed. It won't even turn on. And the screen is shattered.

HTC Corp. on Wednesday offered a few more details about which of its phones will receive an update to the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, expanding the list to 16  from  12 . HTC said in February that its Sensation line of smartphones would move to Ice Cream Sandwich in March, but things are still a bit vague now, with the company saying in a statement that "as for timing, we're in the early stages of rolling out Android...

Roboto, the custom-designed font Google introduced in the Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, is now available for free download for developers, designers and font geeks. Google has released Roboto in 16 different typeface variations (bold, italic, condensed and differing weights) and with an Action Bar Icon Pack of user interface icons found throughout Ice Cream Sandwich, such as a search glass, pencil, phone, trash can and others. "You may use the materials in this file without restriction to develop your apps and to use in your apps," Google said in a note included with the download, bringing to mind the question of whether we'll see a developer use Roboto in an iOS app at some point.

Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich and next -- Jelly Bean? According to a report, Benson Lin, an Asus executive overseeing mobile device, has let it slip that the next version of Google's Android operating system will be called Android Jelly Bean. "Asus is very close to Google, so once they have Android 5.0 I think there will be a high possibility that we will be the first wave to offer the Jelly Bean update," Lin told the website TechRadar in a Friday report.

Acer's Liquid Glow smartphone, announced Friday, is bringing Google's Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and a bit of an odd name to market this summer. The Liquid Glow smartphone will be detailed at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, next week, but for now, Acer says that the new handset will bring a "balance between style, performance and affordability -- ideal for today's fun-seeking, social-networking youth. " With a pitch like that, it's likely that the Liquid Glow will be a lower-cost, entry-level handset.

First it was dual-core processors. Then it was big screens. Next up in Android smartphone trends: the quad-core CPU. And getting things kicked off is the LG Optimus 4X HD. Sadly, what has yet to become a trend in Android smartphones is running the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. But the Optimus 4X HD, thankfully, will ship running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest and greatest version of the OS, LG said in a Korean statement . Powering the Optimus 4X HD will be a 1.5-gigahertz Nvidia Tegra quad-core processor, along with 1 gigabyte of RAM. The new Tegra chip also includes one "low-power drive 'companion core' " that will be used when the phone doesn't need four cores to power operations, a move that should save battery life.

We can now add Motorola to the growing list of Android gadget-makers that will be waiting until the second half of the year to update the majority of its devices to Ice Cream Sandwich. On Wednesday, Motorola announced its road map for upgrades to Android Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of the Google-built operating system, and everything that will get an upgrade will have to wait until the third quarter of the year except for the Motorola Xoom tablet and the non-U.S. versions of the Razr smartphone.

Samsung surprisingly announced a new 7-inch tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2 , on Monday, that will be the company's first to run on Google's new Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. But, while the device is new in name, the hardware specs aren't much of a leap forward, but rather a variation of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus with less powerful hardware. The Galaxy Tab 2 is powered by a 1-gigahertz processor and packs a 4,000  mAh (milliampere-hour) battery.  The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus runs on a 1.2-gigahertz processor and a 4,100 mAh battery.

Good news for owners of HTC's Sensation line of smartphones -- you'll be getting an upgrade to Google's Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system in March. Everybody else with an HTC phone, disappointingly, you'll have to wait until later this year to get in on the latest Android sweetness. Bummer. The announcement, which HTC made on its Facebook page on Thursday, is a delay of the time frame the Taiwanese smartphone and tablet maker set for its Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades back in November , when it said all the updates would take place in "early 2012.

Two of  Google's  most successful products, Android and Chrome, have come together. On Tuesday, Google released a Chrome Web browser app for its Android Ice Cream Sandwich mobile operating system. The new Chrome app serves as an alternative to Android's Web browser named, uninspiringly, Browser, and brings to phones and tablets many features from the desktop version of Chrome. As users can do in the Android Browser app, Chrome users can use the "omnibox," where a website's URL appears as a Google search box too. Chrome offers tabbed browsing as well, and a private "Incognito" mode is built-in for when a user may want to surf the Web without leaving a trail behind.