With the hustle and bustle of CES over the last week, we’ve been pretty out of the loop regarding mainstream tech news. And wouldn’t you know it, something pretty big was revealed — Samsung and Intel are reportedly combining Bada and Tizen. The former is Samsung’s in-house pet project while the latter is Intel’s (which also contains some core pieces of MeeGo). More importantly, a new API and SDK will eventually make its way into...

CES blasted into full swing today as the convention opened to the masses. We started our day at the Samsung booth with a nice tour and some hands on time with a couple of the new devices Samsung has on the market. The main reason I wanted to walk through the sea of people at the Samsung booth (read: city) was for the Note. Samsung crushes the smartphone competition with a gorgeous 5.3″ HD Super AMOLED that will please the tablet and smartphone users alike. My first...

Oh Samsung. Why must you tease us so? First they lead on Galaxy S users saying there would be an Android 4.0 ICS update for their devices only to backtrack a few days later. Then, after much public outcry, you suggest a “Value Pack” update to bring many of Android 4.0′s best features to the aging line of devices only to deny that too. And now, you push out a new Value Pack ROM for the Galaxy i9000. What a cluster. The Value Pack in question is Android...

Apple launched an all out assault on the traditional SMS market controlled by carriers with iOS 5. Instead of an app that users had to seek out in some app store, every iDevice that comes with or can be upgraded to iOS 5 is capable of harnessing the data based world of iMessage. Today, Samsung took that same battle straight to Apple’s home turf with their own data based, cross-platform messaging app, ChatON. While ChatON itself has already been on the Android and...

Anyone with an iDevice with iOS 5 should be fully aware of iMessage, a service extending SMS by sending messages to other iDevices via the internet, instead of through your carrier. Although other similar services and apps exist, both on other devices (like BBM) and across devices (like WhatsApp), it’s a little unusual to see a direct competitor like Samsung take on iMessage with its own service, ChatOn. ChatOn has been released on the Android Marketplace but is soon...