Some details about Ice Cream Sandwich have leaked that show the new Android operating system, when announced by Google [GOOG] this week, will have built-in photo editing capabilities.

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Although Apple [AAPL] didn’t impress some people with the launch of the iPhone 4S (a lot were expecting a different design and a new name of the iPhone 5), it seems that this hasn’t caused problems for sales in any noticeable way as the company has now announced that 4 million units were sold within the first weekend of launch.

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Samsung has done well with the Galaxy S smartphone range. When the Samsung Galaxy S first launched it was one of the best smartphones on the market. It was powerful, had a great screen and was a great leap forwards for Android devices. The Galaxy S II has also done well for the company.

Samsung has announced today that the Galaxy S range of smartphones have seen 30 million sales since the original launch. This number represents both the Galaxy S and Galaxy S II sales.

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Google [GOOG] has released an update for Google Translate that allows Android smartphone users to communicate with people in 14 different languages. The new update works using speech-to-speech in conversation mode where you can select your language and then specify the language of another person. You can then speak and Google translates your text. You can then hit a button and have the other person speak in their language and it then converts it back in to your language so you can think of a reply to speak back.

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One of the big let downs of the iPhone 4S launch was that for those of you out of the US, Siri has even more limited capabilities. In our Siri Review we noted that Apple [AAPL] had pulled out support for maps, directions and business searches. Although we have been told it’s coming, we hadn’t been told if that would be weeks or months. It turns out that it’s still several months away:

Maps and local search support will be available in additional countries in 2012.

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Google [GOOG] has officially announced that there are now 190 million Android smartphones. This number also accounts for $2.25bn in extra ad revenue for Google.

Back in July Google also made an announcement but that time there were 130 million devices active which means there’s been 60 million more added since then.

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A lot of iPhone 4 users want to get Siri but unfortunately Apple [AAPL] has decided against offering it and has instead made it iPhone 4S only. We don’t know the reason for this as it could be related to the iPhone 4 not quite having enough power or that it’s some other hardware tweak that we don’t know about. It could also be a sales thing so that the 4S has another slight edge against the older versions.

Anyway, a developer has managed to port the Siri interface on to the iPhone 4. The downside is that it doesn’t quite work yet as the interface isn’t talking with the Apple servers yet. Siri requires a connection to the servers at Apple so that your voice records can be stored and used to improve the service. It appears that Apple isn’t authenticating the use of Siri on the iPhone 4 and hence, not allowing it to function fully.

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We’ve been busy testing Siri for the iPhone 4S today to see if it works as advertised and also look at how it can be improved. What we wont touch on in this review is iOS 5 or the hardware in general. We’ll get on to those in the next few days after having more time testing the device and OS. On to the review…

Siri is a personal assistant for the iPhone 4S that goes beyond responding to simple commands. Siri understands context and allows you to speak in natural language to ask your phone to do things such as read my text message, remind me to do this, email this person, check the weather amongst several other things. When first getting the iPhone 4S you need to enable Siri and preferably allow it to use your current location as this comes in handy with some of the options you can set. On the settings screen there are just a handful of options which allow you to select who you are, which country you are from (currently 5 options available) and if you want Siri to activate when holding the phone to your ear. When these are set, you’re ready to go.

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With the launch of iOS 5 there’s a bunch of features that are being discovered as more users update their iPhones. One of those is the new camera functionality. We already know of the double tap on the lock screen to get to launch the camera. We also know that the up volume button can also act as the shutter button. What we learn today is that the headphone volume control can also be used as a shutter button.

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We already heard rumblings of the iPhone 4S having just 512MB of RAM and this has now been confirmed by both iFixit who took the iPhone 4S apart yesterday and by Anandtech who did some research on the part numbers found on the chips found inside.

The possible reasons for Apple choosing to use a lower amount of RAM are likely to do with power consumption. The more RAM the more cells that need updating.

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Microsoft has announced that it will be launching Windows Phone 7.5 Mango in India. The first device that will launch in India is the HTC Radar. The launch date is expected to be as early as next week. Other devices will follow in the coming months which includes the Samsung Onmia W as well as the Acer Allegro.

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iFixit now has an iPhone 4S and has begun taking it apart to check and confirm exactly what is inside of it. We’ve seen various official pictures from Apple that show the A5 processor and battery but other than that we don’t know the exact chips which should reveal a few more details about the inner workings of the device.

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