Android this week: HTC One X+ leaked; LTE Photon Q coming; Galaxy S III sales humming

Last week it was Android tablets, this week was about Android smartphones. Sprint announced a QWERTY keyboard version of the Photon Q with LTE, while Samsung’s Galaxy S III continues to set sales records. Can the leaked HTC One X+ slow Samsung’s momentum?

Tablets such as the Nexus 7 had the spotlight last week, but this week was more about Android smartphones. At this point, most of the new handsets — with a few exceptions of the lower end models —  are finally launching with Android 4.0, Google’s platform that was announced in October of 2011. The improved platform combined with the latest hardware innovations are continuing to propel Android handset sales forward.

The top seller this year may already be Samsung’s Galaxy S III, which only launched in late May. This week, Samsung announced 10 million sales of its flagship phone and that surely helped the company’s overall handset sales figure. Samsung hit record profits — $4.5 billion — in the second quarter of 2012 and according to IDC estimates, sold 50.2 million handsets during that time period.

Putting those figures in perspective: Samsung’s total mobile phone sales for the quarter were nearly double that of Apple, which announced 26 million handset sales in April, May and June. And 20 percent of Samsung’s phone sales were comprised of the Galaxy S III. Another interesting statistic? Samsung sells 190,000 Galaxy S IIIs per day on average. We know that Google is now activating one million Android devices per day, meaning that the Galaxy S III is a sizeable chunk of those activations.

Of course, there’s room for other smartphones in the market too; this week one new phone was announced, while another was leaked. Sprint announced a 4G LTE update to the original Motorola Photon Q, coming in the near future. At 960 x 540 resolution, the 4.3-inch screen won’t have the most dense pixel count, but nearly all other components are appealing: A 1.5 GHz dual-core processor;, Android 4.0.4; 8 megapixel camera; five-row keyboard; and world phone capabilities with support for CDMA, EVDO, GSM and LTE.

Sprint hasn’t yet announced pricing and availability details, but the phone is real. The same can’t be said of the HTC One X+, which is rumored to be a handset coming to T-Mobile. The carrier opted to pass on the original HTC One X in favor of the smaller One S, which is a solid smartphone. But like all other One devices in the U.S., it doesn’t have the quad-core Tegra 3 processor, which has no integrated LTE support.

According to leaked information found by TMoNews, the HTC Era 42 is a One X with a Tegra 3 processor, possibly clocked at 1.7 GHz. Given that T-Mobile is the last of the big four U.S. carriers to migrate to an LTE network, it makes sense that a Tegra 3 version of the HTC One X could be coming. It would provide HTC a better chance to compete against Samsung’s Galaxy S III juggernaut.

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Samsung Says TouchWiz Update for Galaxy Tab 10.1 is “Coming Soon.” Tells What’s in Store

In order to launch its Galaxy Tab 10.1 with the latest and greatest version of Honeycomb (3.1), Samsung had to delay its planned TouchWiz UI overlay. To some purists, myself included, this was great news, but some people enjoy the benefits manufacturer skins bring. If you happen to be one of the latter as well as the owner of a Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung promises TouchWiz is coming soon and has delivered some details on what to expect with the update.

The update will be downloadable to your device, and if you set up a Samsung account on your tab, you will be notified when the update is available. It is not confirmed, but presumably you will need a Samsung account to get the update, as the Google IO Edition Tabs did when the 3.1 update was available for them. So if you plan on downloading the TouchWiz update, you may as well sign up now.

The update itself brings several new features aside from TouchWiz, including a tablet version of Swype, Samsung’s Hubs, mobile printing, several enterprise features and four preloaded apps. That’s a lot of cool bonuses to lure you into giving TouchWiz a try, and I imagine that’s exactly why Samsung threw them in there. If you are on the edge about whether to give the update a shot, let us break it down for you.

It was back in March that we got our first look at TouchWiz UX (the tablet version). Some of the coolest features include a mini apps tray, which works similarly in concept to the dockbar in ADW launcher, but then launches apps in its own window on top of your current activity, and an enhanced settings pannel and clipboard. This will be the first major UI skin for Honeycomb, so it is a bit hasty to pass judgement on it, by lumping it with phone skins. Samsung seems pretty confident this will be a new wave of UI skin, so we’ll have to wait and see what, if any effects it has on performance and battery life.

To sweeten the deal Samsung will throw you a few free apps, including tablet-optimized Swype, Amazon’s Music Cloud Player and Kindle apps, as well as a mobile printing, app, Zynga’s Words with Friends game, and FindMyMobile, a gps tablet locater/remote wiping app. If that’s still not enough there is always Samsung’s Media, Music, Readers and Social Hubs. Essentially these are media aggregators giving you quick access to your contacts/facebook updates/music/etc. The Media Hub does, however, offer movie and TV rentals, a trend we’re seeing pop up more and more in manufacturer software.

Will all this be worth letting Samsung skin your device? The answer for now, maybe. If you have a Samsung phone with its TouchWiz UI and you love it, chances are pretty high you’ll like this too, if you absolutely hate when someone gets in the way of you and your pure Android, then probably not. If you’re on the fence, I definitely wouldn’t rule it out. Once the update is released you can bet we’ll give it a thorough hands on and let you know how it runs.

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