At Long Last, The Nexus S 4G Finally Gets Its Ice Cream Sandwich Update

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Hey all you Sprint customers, you haven’t been forgotten after all! Sprint has just revealed that the device’s Ice Cream Sandwich has finally gone live, which is great news if you’re looking to squeeze some more life out of your aging Nexus S 4G before you move into something a bit more modern.

Sprint has said the update will be pushed to all devices over the coming weeks, but if you’re impatient — which I can’t blame you for — you should be able to jumpstart the process by going into the device’s settings and checking for the update.

I don’t want to beleaguer the point, but it’s worth mentioning again that Sprint customers have really gotten the short end of the stick when it came to Ice Cream Sandwich. Back when the first round of Nexus S updates were pushed out, GSM Nexus S were good to go (for a little while, anyway) but owners of the CDMA/WiMax variant have been left out in the cold ever since. But hey, if it makes you feel better, the Nexus S 4G is receiving the 4.0.4 build of Ice Cream Sandwich (IMM76D to be more specific) — not even Verizon Galaxy Nexus owners have managed to officially taste that yet.

You know, not that we’re bitter or anything.

Considering that some GSM Galaxy Nexuses are dealing with some wireless connectivity issues after upgrading to 4.0.4, I’m really hoping Google spent the last 111 days making sure this release is as clean as possible.

The Meh-Too Crowd

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It’s been a while since I came to Google’s defense but I think it’s time to talk about what an absolute downer it is to dig through a lot of tech commentary these days. The most recent example came after the launch of Google’s Glass project, a HUD for future travelers that will let us connect to our world in a fairly non-obtrusive way. Arguably, the product is pretty pie-in-the-sky, but all things being equal, the potential device, even if it includes a small subset of the features we saw in the video, is pretty cool.

Instead of oohing and guffawing and going back to, you know, living his life, Old Man Gruber took some time out to dump three links to examples of the potential problems Glass faces. He noted, quite rightly, that only the worst companies created flashy videos of non-existent tech.

But this is Google. They have a lot of money. Even if they create a HUD display that doesn’t suck and that can connect to your Android phone, they could have something relatively cool on the market. I’m not saying they’ll sell a million (they probably will) and I’m not saying they’ll make a product as cool as it appears in the video (they probably won’t) but can’t the geek in us be happy that they’re actually trying? We’ve been promised this for years, and suddenly it’s here.

I usually grunt along with Gruber and MG and the rest of the Meh-Too crowd when it comes to the hot-button fanboy issues. Android vs. iPhone? I’ll snort in derision with the best of them. Windows 8 being the next big thing? I’ll shrug my shoulders alongside the greats. But for the love of Pete, we’re in technology. We love technology. That we would wish Google to fail in this next generation of interface and user experience is akin to hoping Jeremy Lin loses a leg to gangrene because we don’t like the Knicks. It’s mean.

Here’s Gruber (and trust me, I think Gruber is one of the best talkers on tech out there so I don’t even want to call him out on this but I feel I must, at least for my own sanity):

Google’s transition into the new Microsoft is now complete: fancy-pants sci-fi concept video to promote stunningly awkward augmented reality glasses.

Sure it’s fancy-pants and it’s sci-fi and it’s a concept – but it’s a concept that can easily move from drawing board to street. There are already plenty of HUD glasses – none of them are any good – and there are already plenty of concepts for interacting with the world a la Glass that look far more sci-fi than anything in Google’s video. Google’s concept is actually fairly staid, the company is pretty solid and it can usually push its brainstorms to market – witness Google TV and Android. Say what you want about the aforementioned products. If Google can do one thing consistently, it’s ship.

If Microsoft brought this video out and said Windows 8 would have a special Windows Vision mode, I’d be less inclined to believe that it would ship. Microsoft is no good at getting hardware out the door. Software, sure. But they don’t have a good track record when it comes to changing what chips we buy. Google, on the other hand, can probably pull it off.

So what’s with accusing them of pre-crime? Let them try. See it fail or see it change the mobile landscape or see it become a useful and interesting new branch of UX. In any case, admit that it’s pretty cool.

What did Kurt Vonnegut say? “At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

We can disagree over politics, we can disagree over corporate directions, and we can disagree over platforms. But you can’t disagree that sometimes it’s just about wonder, whimsy, and the future we’re bequeathing to ourselves and our babies.

Google Launches Android App To Improve Its Indoor Location Accuracy

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Google Maps, Bing Maps and a number of startups have been offering indoor maps for large venues like airports, malls and stadiums for quite a while. The problem with indoor mapping, though, is that it’s pretty hard for these companies to actually tell you exactly where you are on these maps. GPS obviously doesn’t work well in these spaces and WiFi and cell tower triangulation just isn’t very accurate. Now, however, Google has come up with a plan to improve indoor location accuracy for venues in Google Maps: venue owners who have uploaded their floor plans to Google’s mapping service can now use a new Android app to provides Google with feedback about how accurate its predictions are for their locations. All they need is an Android device (including tablets) that runs Android 2.3 or up.

Once installed, the app will tell its users where to go in the venue and while they walk, the app collects data about nearby WiFi hotspots, as well as data from local cell towers. Once it has collected and analyzed this data, Google can more reliably tell its users where they are inside the building. One specific feature that this process should improve is Google’s ability to tell you which floor you are on.

It’s a shame that Google is limiting this app to users who have uploaded their own floor plans. It would have been nice to see a fully crowdsourced version of this app that would allow anybody to help out with this project. Throw in a few gamification elements or other rewards (chances are you are in a commercial venue already, after all) and Google would have an army of volunteers in no time.

Attention Melbourne: You May Now Begin Hunting For Virtual Eggs

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With all the talk about the potential of Google Glass, I thought it might be nice to drop back in on the current state of Augmented Reality — the kind where you still use a smartphone to view markers or images.

In the spirit of Google’s “20-percent time”, Melbourne Australia based mobile app development company jTribe developed an Augmented Reality Easter egg hunt for their fair city this Easter.

The company took one day a week (for the last 10 weeks or so) to work on their own project which launches today.

The app, which is called EggRaider, has a radar-style viewer to show the general direction of virtual eggs the company has attached to landmarks all around Melbourne. Once you get close to an egg, you switch to Augmented Reality view (by tapping the camera button in the app) to see the egg and collect it. “Race against friends and family to collect the most” says jTribe.

*Note that the virtual eggs are only available at Melbourne, Australia landmarks. There is a demo view though, so you can get the idea of how it works if you are so inclined.

This is not the first AR Scavenger hunt. REI has done one. Clutter magazine another.

What I like most about this concept though is that the company just did it on their own…no waiting around to sell to a client…just a rapid prototype that they brought to fruition and submitted for the sake of coolness, learning and potential as a product.

In terms of future use, this kind of scavenger hunt does have marketing potential for brands, especially within the teen and tween segments. These younger customers are collectors and would probably flock to games and campaigns built around technology like this.

The app is available at iTunes.