Jumping head first into the hybrid tablet trend Chuwi have launched a 12 inch 2 in 1 tablet. The Windows 10 tablet comes with 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage and the same 2160*1440 display as the surface 3. The price is currently $269.99 but if you want the keyboard half of this device you’ll have to pay an extra $55.
The Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are now shipping to T-Mobile customers, and XDA/Android Podcast Member altimax98 was lucky enough to receive his first thing in the morning.
Since then he’s been playing with it and digging deep into the user interface, trying to find as many neat little features as possible. So far, his experience has been satisfactory, but you’ll be able to hear his full hands-on in tomorrow’s episode of the XDA/Android Podcast. Until then, here is a neat gallery showcasing what the new TouchWiz looks like, with and without Material Themes.
As you can see, this isn’t very different from what we saw in the Marshmallow builds for the Note5 and S6/Edge/+, so those that have received the update aren’t missing out on much. Nevertheless, TouchWiz keeps changing here and there and it’s certainly very different than what we saw just two generations ago.
What do you think of the new TouchWiz look? How do you think Samsung’s skin has improved over time?
There’s going to be a big update hitting the Android version of Waze soon. We aren’t told when this update will start to roll out, but a new video shows off the changes that will be coming. The update will bring a fresh user interface, you’ll have quick access to your destinations, a quick way to send someone your ETA and more.
Continuing with the Be Together, Not the Same campaign, Android’s latest ad features Rock, Paper and Scissors becoming best friends. I don’t want to spoil too much, but I have to tip my hat to whoever is coming up with these ideas and the latest one is another home run in my opinion.
For those who have been waiting, the HTC Vive is currently available for pre-order directly from HTC’s website (and on Steam too). To pre-order, simply head over to their website and plop down $800 (plus shipping) to reserve your unit. This purchase comes with a pair of wireless lightboxes, a pair of wireless controllers, along with three games: Tilt Brush by Google, Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption.
Android has matured by leaps and bounds as a mobile platform, winning the hearts of consumers worldwide and quickly establishing its dominance in the sphere, while simultaneously spreading to other ones.
While Andy Rubin’s brainchild does offer a host of options and variety that its competitors lack, the winning feature of Android is undoubtedly its customization options and the sandbox-like ecosystem which allows it to happen
HTC Themes is the Taiwanese manufacturer’s take on bringing a curated collection of themes, icon packs and wallpapers to Sense users, and has become quite popular in that clique. Recently, a Google+ user reported seeing a number of icon packs and themes on the store were originally works of the acclaimed Tha PHLASH. PHLASH handled it professionally, reaching out to HTC via multiple channels, but much to the woe of him and the community, the Themes store staff failed to respond. In the time since then, HTC has been tagged, emailed, mentioned and tweeted at in a widespread attempt to justify the wrong done, but to no avail.
Creative Design
Creative design, which consists largely of subcategories like graphic design, icon design, wallpaper design, et al, is the hub of piracy, theft and plagiarism in the design ecosystem, given the ease with which the act can be carried out. From masking and clipping with batch processing to color changes and blatant duplicates from showcase sites, the creative design sector has seen its fair share of scandals. The Android theming community on Google+ and Reddit is a tight-knit group, and on more than one occasion has been rocked by piracy and plagiarism misconduct.
Interface Design
While interfaces cannot be pirated per se, plagiarism runs rampant among its community. Layouts, visual styles, aesthetic theming, and other UI elements are often the brainchild of a designer thinking out-of-the-box, but once a certain element gains enough popularity, variants or even direct manifestations of it are bound to be spotted in the wild. Take, for example, Tinder’s card-stack layout, which gained traction at a tremendous rate and now exists in a host of apps, albeit some have their own spin to it.
Experience Design
Experience design remains the class of design most impervious to any form of infringement. This category of design consists of a language that designers are continuously uncovering each day, a language that appeals to human being and conducts a subtle underlying conversation with the user’s consciousness, a language that is discovered and not created. As such, aside from the occasional blatant copy, experience design remains, for the most part, idiosyncratic to its creators.
The Android theming community has seen its fair share of wrongdoings in numerous forms, with some of the most prominent instances of plagiarism and theft being the uprising when supposed designers decompiled relatively simple icon packs, used them as base shapes, added filters and masks, and released new packs under their own developer account. Another exemplar of classic design plagiarism is the blatant recreation of existing designs then amended and redistributed by the offenders, with this occurrence being boosted by design showcase sites like Dribbble, Behance and MaterialUp.
However, the close-knit theming community has ensured that during trying times, no developer or designer is isolated and left to deal with the subsequent fallout alone, showing remarkable solidarity by banding together to reach out to all viable sources through all possible channels, giving the issue at hand the utmost visibility and attention that such matters necessitate.
A report from the Telegraph says that Google is finally getting ready to bring Android Pay to Britain next month. They are citing “industry sources”, but don’t go into further detail about it right now. It had been rumored about them waiting until Google I/O to launch Android Pay in the region, but if this report is correct then it could be coming sooner.
When LG announced the LG G5 last week at Mobile World Congress, we received official confirmation that it would be rocking the new Snapdragon 820. While this is true for some markets, it seems it won’t be true for others. It’s been revealed that the LG G5 for Latin America (and possibly other regions too) will have the Snapdragon 652 instead of the 820.
A new report from Strategy Analytics says Samsung LSI (which is the division in charge of the company’s Exynos SoC) now ranks in the top 5 of the global smartphone application processor market. The company actually ranks 4th, beating out Spreadtrum, thanks to the 50 million units shipped in 2015 in products like the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 5.
Xiaomi will be holding the company’s first flash sale for the Mi 5 on March 1st. To help gauge how much interest the device will have, they setup a registration page. While not officially pre-sales, it does show that over 16 million people have some interest in purchasing it. We doubt they’ll actually have that many units to ship, but it’s clear they will sell out quickly.
A few months ago it was reported that Jay-Z was spotted leaving the office of Samsung Research America. He was allegedly in talks with Samsung about an acquisition of his music streaming service, but things didn’t seem to pan out. Now, the New York Post cites multiple sources who say Jay-Z & Samsung have reignited those talks and Samsung could be preparing something big with it.
Before making a whole bunch of “Z” devices, Sony, or rather Sony Ericsson, was focused on bringing up some really good and affordable devices. In 2011, Sony released about a dozen mid-range devices that are still quite popular, and not only on XDA.
If you have one of these in your pockets, we have some really exciting news for you – prepare for some marshmallows, as CyanogenMod 13.0 is up and running!
Bringing the latest version of Android to an older device is a challenging task. There are some hardware limitations like storage or RAM and often an old kernel source that makes the porting a pain. A group of developers known as LegacyXperia has put these limitations in the bin and brought impressive builds of CyanogenMod for the following devices:
The list of bugs is very short and contains such things as the FM Radio, ANT+, HDMI and 720p video recording. These things are not deal breakers, so you can use the CyanogenMod 13 as your new daily driver. There is only one requirement that needs to be met – your device must have a fast SD card put in the slot. A class 10 or higher is required. We must admit that seeing the support for such old devices is definitely a pleasure to watch. Some newer devices are left behind while Sony’s development stage is thriving.
If you are interested in development and you have some ideas how to fix things, you can use team’s GitHub and Gerrit to make code contributions. In other scenarios, head over to the development thread to get the latest build for your rocking Xperia phone.
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XDA TV Host Jordan reviewed the ASUS Zenfone 2 in June. Since then ASUS had added pieces and parts to the ZenFone 2 to created new special models. Today we are looking at the ASUS ZenFone Zoom, the ASUS ZenFone 2 with an optical zoom.
After spending a couple weeks with the device, Jordan gives you his full review of the ASUS ZenFone Zoom. Check out this video to see what his thoughts are!
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More ZenFone Links:
Check out Jordan’s Tech Channel and Jordan’s Vlogging YouTube Channel
Need a quick way to access recently or frequently used apps? Diesel lets you do that by placing a shortcuts bar in your notification panel, with several options options to tweak it to your liking.
CPU Hardware and System Infos combines all the info you might need about your device in one lightweight app. From screen and battery stats to network info and sensors data, you’ll find it all here.
For those of you who would like to compile Android, Ubuntu is one of the obvious choices. An interesting transformation pack has showed up recently. With a little effort, you can transform your Willy Werewolf into… OS X. Of course, it’s still Linux, but it looks like a system made by Apple. An interesting thing to try out!
We constantly hear about Android’s malware problems, the security issues that periodically raise havok in the blogosphere, and the huge privacy infringements committed by various companies and apps. Despite this, most users rarely find or consider themselves victims of serious malware and “viruses”. Have you had negative experiences with malicious software of any kind on Android? Is it a matter of “common sense”?
The great thing about Android is its customizability. One part of the customization is background wallpapers. This is the most prominent part of a device’s visual appeal, picking the right one allows you to achieve your desired look. There are many backgrounds available and today XDA TV Host Zach talks about his 5 favorite wallpaper apps. Check of which one he thinks is great and tell us about your favorites in the comments below.
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Background App Links:
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Microsoft has put a lot of efforts to at least pick up the gauntlet in the fight against Android or iOS. The mid-range Lumia 650 is now available to pre-order in Poland and Romania. It’s not overly expensive, as it costs roughly $250, so you can put some money if you want to experience something different for a change.
Microsoft is a large company, and while we may just think of them as making Windows and failing at making Windows Phone success that is now all they do. They have a lot of apps that are available for Android. Some of these apps are cross platform, but if you wanted to know which Microsoft apps available on Android are best, check out this video. Ronald talks about the apps and gives demonstrations of their features. There are all sorts of cool and interesting apps that you probably have never heard of on the XDA forum “The Best Apps You’ve Never Heard of”.
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Best Apps You’ve Never Heard of Forum Link
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You’ve probably heard of Baidu before. Known somewhat as China’s Google (though that may change if Google finally decides to re-enter the market this year), the mammoth search engine giant/advertising platform/online encyclopedia has dabbled in developing numerous applications designed around its service ecosystem for both Android and Windows (much like Google).
These apps have millions of users, most of whom are located in China, but as evidenced by the install count of Baidu Browser and other apps on the Play Store, there are a lot of users outside of China as well. Which makes a recent report from Toronto’s Citizen Lab all the more worrying. According to the group, Baidu Browser has been caught leaking sensitive personal information from its users.
Baidu Not Track
Man-in-the-middle attack on Baidu Browser’s Updater
The firm has summarized its research of Baidu Browser’s security failings into several key findings:
If you’ve installed the browser, or any application that was developed using the Baidu SDK (such as ES File Explorer), then it’s possible some of your personal data may have been compromised. The security leakage found in applications developed using Baidu’s SDK is massive, and the fact that the data was transmitted unencrypted (or with easily decryptable encryption) shows how little effort Baidu took in securing your personal data. Was it all transmitted to the Chinese government? While we can’t confirm either way, Baidu denies any such allegation according to a statement made to Citizen Lab.
Baidu’s and Don’ts
To be fair to Baidu, they have patched some of the security holes leading to leaked sensitive data. Keyword “some.” After Citizen Lab performed its due diligence and reported the security issues to the company, Baidu updated its application. Citizen Lab re-tested Baidu’s browser, and found the following for the Android version:
And for the Windows version:
So in short, most of the critical security compromises allowing malicious attackers from taking over your browser have been patched, and your data is now safe from leakage (albeit still being transmitted to Baidu’s servers itself). If you’re worried about third-parties from getting a look at your personal data, then you’re safe for now. But if you’re worried about the Chinese government or Baidu selling your data, well, then you’ll remain skeptical of the app. We hope such a security issue doesn’t turn you off of applications made by Chinese developers, but rather makes you more critical of what apps you’re installing and what permissions they request.
Ever used Baidu? If so, let us know in the comments!
The LG G5 now allows you to detach the bottom chin of the otherwise-unibody design in order to remove the battery and also expand the phone’s functionality through its “friends”… little hardware modules that can add camera controls, better sound through a special DAC, a bigger battery and more. The feature also allows LG to create even more modules later on, expanding the functionality and perhaps the lifespan of the device.
But would you use the modules? Is this an actually-good selling point?
For some module ideas and discussion, head over to this thread!
ASUS says they will be updating the following devices to Android 6.0 Marshmallow in the 2nd quarter of this year: PadFone S (PF500KL), ZenFone 2 (ZE550ML, ZE551ML), ZenFone 2 Deluxe (ZE551ML), ZenFone 2 Deluxe Special Edition (ZE551ML), ZenFone 2 Laser (ZE500KG, ZE500KL, ZE550KL, ZE551KL, ZE600KL, ZE601KL), ZenFone Selfie (ZD551KL), ZenFone Max (ZC550KL) and the ZenFone Zoom (ZX551ML).
