October is looking like a very hot month for Google and its Nexus devices. The company is rumored to unveil Android 4.2 – which is believed to be just an incremental Jelly Bean update rather than a full blown Key Lime Pie upgrade – that will be found aboard a variety of new Nexus devices.
Earlier today we learned that not all the Android 4.2 details presented in various rumors are real, but that doesn’t mean that Android 4.2 does not exist. In fact, we showed you yesterday that Android 4.2 has appeared in various server logs and now we’re able to confirm such data. We have thoroughly checked our own server logs and Google Analytics data and found several traces of devices running Android 4.2 and checking out Android Authority during tests.
The Google Analytics screenshot below shows us that Android 4.2 was being tested as early as mid-August, with a spike easily spotted in early October when we reported on the findings of Android and Me, which were proven fake. We registered 48 hits from Android 4.2 devices during that timeframe, with 90% of them being new visits. Probably Googlers were interested in finding out whether Android 4.2 details have been actually leaked or whether it was all just baseless speculation. And what better device to check out that story than the one you’re testing Android 4.2 on?
But we dug deeper to see what actual devices were used to browse through our pages, and whether they were similar to the earlier findings of Android Police that we have shared with you yesterday. Below you’ll find a list of devices that were registered in our logs as running Android 4.2 – and be prepared for a few surprises!
We expected the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus, currently Google flagship devices, to show up in such logs, and they did, running various Android 4.2 builds. In fact, in what follows, we're only going to list once each of these devices running a different Android 4.2 ROM, although in our server logs they showed up more than once.
What we were interested in finding out was whether any of these newly spotted Android 4.2 devices supposedly made by Motorola were going to be found in our logs. These are the Occam, believed to be a smartphone of the RAZR family, quite possibly a RAZR Nexus, and the Manta, which is said to be a tablet, also rumored to be a Nexus device.
And we did spot the Occam and the Manta in our logs:
Much to our surprise, we spotted two other devices running Android 4.2, neither of them being a Nexus handset, and neither showing a codename like the Occam and the Manta do. These are the Sony Ericsson LT18i also known as the Sony Xperia Arc S and the Samsung GT-S5360, also known as the Galaxy Y:
Is Google testing Android 4.2 on various other devices just to see how the new software runs on older handsets? Are these tests part of the Nexus program expansion? Or are OEMs already testing Android 4.2 on a variety of devices – we would assume that OEMs would have earlier access to the Android 4.2 PDK, just as Google promised back at this year's Google I/O event.
Both the Xperia Arc S and the Galaxy Y were released in the second half of 2011, and while the former runs Ice Cream Sandwich and could be upgradeable to Jelly Bean in the future, the latter is officially on Gingerbread.
So why are we seeing them running Android 4.2 in our server logs? And since we’re asking questions, what is that Android 4.2.4 software that’s spotted running on the GT-S5360?
In our logs it's the Xperia Arc S that showed up the most. In fact it was more frequent than the Nexus 7 or the Galaxy Nexus. Does this mean that Sony and Google are working closely on a future Xperia Nexus, a device that was rumored more than once in the recent months?
Of all the devices mentioned so far, the most interesting are the unreleased Occam and Manta, which seem to be Motorola-made devices that will run Android 4.2 out of the box. That could mean we’re looking at Motorola’s first Nexus devices, a smartphone and a tablet. Then there’s also the possibility that the Occam is one of the newly launched RAZR models that was simply updated to Android 4.2 for testing purposes, while the Manta is indeed a new tablet.
PhoneArena reports that both devices have been spotted in AnTuTu Benchmark results.
The Occam registered a score of 9817 and the tests revealed it’s sporting a CPU clocked at 1512MHz. In order to achieve that score, the device should either sport a quad-core processor although it's also possible that the Occam packs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 CPU that would be performing even better running Android 4.2 instead of older Android versions.
The Manta scored a result of 8077 with AnTuTu, registering a CPU clocked at 1.7GHz. According to the screenshot above, the Manta runs a Jelly Bean version dubbed as JellyBeanM, which seems to indicate we’re looking at a Motorola device.
It's really too early for conclusions as we're still missing lots of pieces of this Android 4.2 / Nexus puzzle. Not to mention that user agent profiles can be faked. However, the evidence seems to suggest, yet again, that Google is testing Android 4.2 on a variety of devices, including its own Nexus-branded smartphones and tablets, existing Android devices from other OEMs but also devices that were not unveiled yet (at least the Manta).
We’ll keep looking for more Android 4.2-related information for you while we wait for Google and any of the companies mentioned above to officially launch new products. Or leak them in advanced.
In case you want to share more details about Android 4.2 or the devices that will run the software out-of-the-box, we definitely appreciate your tips.
by Chris Smith, 1 day ago
A new report says that Verizon may release in the future a Motorola handset similar to the XT1058 (rumored AT&T XFON), suggesting that a CDMA Google X Phone may be launched alongside a GSM version…
