This Hour in Nexus S & Gingerbread: EVO ROM Appears, Arabic Support is Finally In, Video Chat Icons Uncovered, No LED, + More
Another morning, another wave of Nexus S – and by natural extension – Android 2.3 Gingerbread news has swept us off our feet. To start, those of you on the EVO 4G who are comfortable with flashing ROMs on a daily basis might be intrigued to know that there’s a 2.3 ROM based on the SDK image out at XDA. I’ll refrain from endorsing this in any way considering you guys will hold us accountable if anything goes wrong, but this link should get you started if you’re feeling adventurous. As always, you take full responsibility of your own device whenever you proceed to do something like this, and you’re responsible for your own research. Our friends at Brief Mobile tell us the ROM isn’t nearly stable enough to be a daily driver, but it’s good to see the community taking initiative!
It seems we don’t go a week without some of our Arabic-speaking readers asking if Android will ever get support for their language. Fortunately, a big priority of Google’s for this update seems to have been localization as they’ve doubled the list of languages (26 to 57) and that includes Arabic (Egypt and Israel). We’re not entirely sure what other languages are new (I don’t check these things as often as I should), but if your language wasn’t supported before, take a look at this list to see if it is now. Unfortunately, you’ll have to have a Gingerbread phone before you can get excited for this.
As we expected, the Nexus S does not have an LED notification light. We weren’t surprised considering none of their Galaxy S phones save for the Epic 4G on Sprint had one. It really is a shame, but what can you do? Not sure why Samsung suddenly thinks the world doesn’t want a notification light, but many will strongly disagree with such a notion. Looks like NoLED is still going to be one of the first applications you Samsung fans will want to download if you can’t go without external visual notifications.
Folks snooping around the SDK have uncovered some treats. One comes in the form of a painting of an innocent-looking Android robot standing in a sea of undead skeleton zombie dudes being led by the scariest gingerbread man I’ve ever seen. If you want to find it for yourself, navigate to platforms/android-9/data/res/drawable-nodpi/platlogo.jpg in your Gingerbread SDK installation.
Last but not least, somewhere in that same resources folder exists the Google Talk icons that note whether or not your friends are video-enabled. This may not mean much, but we’ve heard before that video chat and calling support would be on its way via GTalk once either Gingerbread or Honeycomb hits. For now, we’re just chalking it up to Google wanting to throw them in for good measure, but any respectable engineer knows that it’s frowned upon to include resources – of any kind – that they have no intention to use. Take it for what you will, for now.
OK, I lied. We’ll make the one exception for the awesome “resource” above. But perhaps they’re using it to include as a wallpaper? I’m sure as hell going to be using it as one.
[Update]: We forgot to mention that Google’s giving away a Nexus S per their official @GoogleNexus account on Twitter. Follow them right now and keep an eye out for a series of puzzles at 9am Pacific (that’s 12pm Eastern) for the details.