An ASUS phone on an American carrier only comes once in a blue moon and there always has to be a catch to it. Remember the PadFone X on AT&T? What fun we had. And then Verizon took on the ZenFone AR — Google Tango phone number two… only to be made to feel obsolete with ARCore technology.
Normal is a unicorn for ASUS phones in the United States. But the “Verizon exclusive” ZenFone V may be the on-ramp that the Taiwanese manufacturer needs to gain some support.
While it does utilize last year’s Snapdragon 820 from Qualcomm, it does have a competitive AMOLED display, USB 3.0 with Type-C and NXP Smart AMP technology on its five-magnet stereo speakers.
All that’s missing is a price tag — Verizon has yet to issue a press release or a product page.
The three big names in modems these days are Qualcomm, Qualcomm and Qualcomm. Some would say the chipmaker’s prominence and dominance has come to a legal impasse, but in any case, parallel competitors and smartphone manufacturers have their own ways of getting on the market: making their own chipsets and putting them to market in their own smartphones.
After introducing the HiSilicon-made Kirin 970, parent company Huawei has gone to brag about that chipset’s speeds. It conducted tests with telecom hardware testing firm Rohde & Schwarz and, with 4×4 MIMO and 256-QAM, was able to achieve LTE Category 13 upload speeds and Category 18 download speeds with a top rate of 1.2Gbps.
“A new milestone has been achieved to show that Huawei’s Kirin SoC is once again in a leading position in the LTE-[Advanced]-pro wireless communication industry,” said Ai Wei, HiSilicon Senior Vice President.
In addition to the above technologies, the chip can also support 5-carrier aggregation.
A similar speed was recently recorded with the Snapdragon 835’s modem on Verizon’s network and the upcoming Snapdragon 845’s modem on the T-Mobile network. The earliest we can expect the Snapdragon 845 on a device will be early next year. The Kirin 970, however, will almost certainly be in the Huawei Mate 10, to be released October 16.
Android Oreo while a small update it terms of visual changes brought some interesting new features. The new Autofill API paved the way to improve the way in which apps like LastPass interact with the OS, as well as things like Project Treble.
Another new feature enabled by Android Oreo is the Always on Ambient Display mode that seems to be reserved for the Google Pixel 2 and Pixel XL 2 as it is currently disabled.
Despite the next generation Pixel devices only a month away, the always on display feature seems to be fully functional in Android Oreo and just needs activating. This means you don’t have to wait for the new Pixel 2 devices and can get started with any device that supports Android Oreo AOSP.
The new ambient display setting works pretty similarly to all of those other “always on display” modes from Samsung or LG that have included it with its devices for a few generations. When you receive a notification, it’ll display on the AOD for a few seconds before facing away leaving just the icon below the clock.
The method to enable this in Android Oreo AOSP is pretty simple and comes courtesy of XDA that found the “alwaysOnAvailable” code that is tagged as “false” can be reversed by simply changing the method to “true”.
Check out XDA Developer Mishaal Rahman’s post to try it out and see for yourself.
With the Galaxy S8 pushing the boundaries of the display by extending the bezels on the device it set the way for other manufactures to follow suit. Samsung followed with the Note 8 and even Apple got into the game with the iPhone X.
The subtle differences between the Samsung and Apple implementation of a bezel-less display saw Apple opt for a top notch to house the front facing camera and various sensors, while Samsung extended the top bezel the entire way across the device.
One concept that has surfaced suggests the Samsung may take a design cue from Apple when it comes to the Galaxy S9 and reduce the bezels of the device even further with the top cutout.
We’ve seen this design on the Essential Phone as well where the camera is cut out from an otherwise edge-to-edge display.
The latest Samsung Galaxy S9 concept comes from the YouTube channel DBS Designing that sees the top and bottom bezel almost completely eliminated.
At the top of the Galaxy S9 there’s a small cutout to house the camera, speaker, iris scanner, and other sensors. The iPhone X cutout is more pronounced than that of the Galaxy S9 concept but arguably the cutout on the iPhone is that size for a reason given the available technology it has to pack in that small space.
Other key points of the Galaxy S9 concept are the inclusion of the 3.5mm jack that the designer believes Samsung will retain. The concept also has dual front-facing cameras with a 18:9 aspect ratio Quad HD+ Infinity OLED display. The device is said to have 6GB of RAM, 128GB of internal storage and will be the first device to run the upcoming Snapdragon 845 SoC.
We’ve heard previously that Samsung may expedite the arrival of the Galaxy S9 to combat sales of the iPhone X that may see a January or February arrival, a few months before when it is actually expected.
While there’s no doubt Samsung will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with display technology, it could be very possible Samsung reduce the bezels even further to mimic the design of the iPhone X. However, I think reducing the bezels to the amount shown in the concept simply isn’t possible with the available technology and the size of the components needed in that notch.
The Moto X Play was a great device for those looking for something with a bit more battery life than your regular smartphone offering. However, the device isn’t as young as it once was and with apps getting more resource demanding, you could find the Moto X Play to be slowing down. Luckily there is a hidden feature that you can change that will instantly speed up your device.
This tip will help speed up your Moto X Play by reducing the impact of the aging processor and resource hungry apps, as well as the lower processing power in the device, by reducing unnecessary animations that will make it feel the device is quicker. The best bit is there’s nothing extra to install or tons of settings to change, just a simple case of changing a setting with developer options enabled.
The little hack revolves around the animations applied to transitioning between windows and turning the device on or off. By simply turning this off, it contributes to making the device seem extremely snappy and fast by reducing the delay applied to the animation.
First, you’ll need to enable the Developer Options hidden menu. To do this, go into Settings -> About Device and scroll down to “Build Number”. Now, tap on “Build Number” five times and you’ll see a notification saying that “Developer mode has been enabled”.
With that hidden menu now enabled, we can head on into it to begin fastening up our Moto X Play.
Head on in to Developer Options in Settings.
Scroll down to the Drawing section.
Of interest here is the Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale, and Animator Duration Scale.
Click on them individually to change the scale.
You are able to turn the animations off completely, or set them to 0.5x (default is 1x) so the animations will be double speed for those who would like to retain them.
You’ll notice your Moto X Play feels substantially quicker without any hacks that affect your software, warranty, or device battery life.
The latest version of iTunes removes the App Store and thus the ability to manage iOS apps on an iPhone or iPad directly through iTunes. Instead, Apple wants users to manage and sync their iOS apps directly on the iOS device itself through the built-in App Store.
The removal of App Store and an Apps section from iTunes has confused some users, and annoyed others. But don’t distress, even if this change can take some adapting, because you can still easily manage apps, sync apps, and redownload apps and access apps through the App Store directly on an iPhone or iPad.
It’ll be helpful to think of the concept of app ‘syncing’ as now more like app re-downloading from the App Store, since syncing apps to and from iTunes is largely gone and instead replaced with redownloading apps if need be over the internet. (I say largely gone because you can still sort of work with .ipa files, more on that below.)
How to Redownload Apps to iPhone or iPad from iOS App Store, Without iTunes
You can download existing and old apps, as well as manage apps directly on the iPhone and iPad by using the App Store Purchased section. The Purchased section of the App Store includes all apps you have ever downloaded or bought before at any time with the Apple ID in use, as long as those apps are still on the App Store. This redownloading iOS app ability has been around for a long time in iOS, but now it is perhaps more important than ever before.
Here is how you can access Purchased and use it to download apps back to your iOS device, note the precise actions are slightly different on iPhone compared to iPad but the general behavior is the same:
Open the App Store app in iOS
Go to the Purchased section of the App Store
For iPhone and iPod touch: Go to “Updates” and then “Purchased”
For iPad: Tap your Apple ID account icon in the corner of the open App Store
On iPad App Store, then tap “Purchased”
Choose the “Not on this device” section
Tap the download icons alongside app names you wish to download to the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
This allows you to download and access apps that you have previously downloaded, owned, or purchased at some point, but that are not contained on the current iOS device.
These purchase listings will be different per iOS device, changing from “Not on this iPhone” or “Not on this iPad” depending on what device you are using with the same Apple ID, and depending on what apps are on the active iOS device.
Arranging iOS App Home Screen and Icon Layouts on iPhone and iPad
You can still arrange your iOS home screen as you like it to a custom icon layout, but now it must be done on the iPhone or iPad.
Simply tap and hold on an app icon until all screen icons start to jiggle. Once the icons are jiggling on the iOS screen they can be moved around at will. Use this to arrange the Home Screen of an iPhone or iPad to suit your preferences.
If you drag a jiggling icon to the edge of the screen, continue holding and you can move the app icon to a different Home Screen page.
Removing Unwanted Apps from the iPhone or iPad
Removing apps from an iPhone or iPad is a matter of uninstalling the apps from iOS, the easiest way is by the tap-and-hold and then delete method detailed here.
You can also delete apps from an iOS device through the Settings > General section to manage storage.
Manually Syncing / Copying Apps via IPA Files to iPhone or iPad with iTunes
Interestingly, you can still drag and drop ringtones in .m4r format and iOS apps in .ipa file format into iTunes and to the target iOS device, and they should transfer over to the target iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
If you happen to have a .ipa file of an iOS app, you can still manually copy it over to the iPhone or iPad via iTunes by using this drag and drop method. This is sort of like syncing, but it’s really just copying a file over from the local computer to the target iOS device by using iTunes.
Apps stored as .ipa files, if you have any stored on a local computer, can be found within the iTunes Library locations on the Mac and Windows PC and a subfolder for Mobile Applications, typically the path would be as follows for Mac and Windows PC respectively:
IPA file path in Mac OS:
~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications/
IPA file path in Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10:
\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\
With an iPhone or iPad connected to the computer via USB, simply drag and drop the IPA file into iTunes onto the iOS device in question through the sidebar.
It’s alway possible this particular IPA file feature will disappear from iTunes in the future with another software update, or that the IPA files stored on a computer will vanish if you don’t copy them elsewhere for backup purposes, so it’s probably wise to not depend on this particular ability too much.
This Nokia is still designed in Finland, it’s still made like a tank, but the actual firm behind it is HMD Global and all the manufacturing is in China. So take the ‘Nokia’ branding with just a pinch of salt. There’s little DNA here from the classic Nokiadesigns of the past, though some visual clues have been taken from phones such as the Nokia N9 (running Meego, so that’s the fourth OS mentioned in the last two paragraphs!), Lumia 800 and Lumia 920.
As a smartphone, the ‘6’ is well styled, I was enormously impressed by how solid it is, with slab aluminium sides and polished chamfered edges. It’s heavy too, at almost 170g, almost in phablet territory with a 5.5” screen.
The fingerprint sensor, down the bottom, is 100% accurate, but the specification here means that it takes a second from placing your thumb to the Nokia 6 being unlocked and the display powered up. Is a second too long? Not for the target market, though anyone exposed to flagships (think iPhone 7, Google Pixel) will notice a difference.
Around the perimeter is a welcome 3.5mm headphone jack, all metal volume and power buttons, a speaker aperture (of which more later) and… a microUSB charging and data port.
That’s right – microUSB on a £200 smartphone in 2017, rather than the now ubiquitous USB Type C. It feels very out of place and my theory is that the Nokia 6design was actually finalised at least 18 months ago, back at the tail end of 2015, when USB Type C was still only on flagships (the Lumia 950 and 950 XL famously launched with this, among the first smartphones with ‘C’). The delays HMD Global faced getting the Nokia 6 to market have left it with this single anachronistic spec point. Most users won’t mind, of course, microUSB jacks and chargers are everywhere still – and, to be fair, it’s just about the only major disappointment in the Nokia 6. For the price.
On the back is the reassuring ‘NOKIA’ logo, just as on the Symbian phones and Lumias of old, plus a very ‘Nokia’ vertical raised camera island. I suspect that the raising is purely cosmetic, since there’s no reason for this pretty average phone camera to need the extra thickness. I’ll come back to the camera later on.
The display is IPS LCD and 1080p resolution. With the RGB stripe (i.e. all pixels represented, unlike on AMOLED screens), the screen is extremely crisp and decently bright, though I noted that contrast levels weren’t brilliant in the sun.
The top earpiece is used as a ‘tweeter’ and piped the left channel for any stereo audio. This is – absolutely – a hack of the highest order. The results when watching Netflix or similar are a definitely imbalance in the sound, with 90% of the volume coming from the bottom firing main speaker and 10% from the earpiece. Much of the time this doesn’t really matter, but just occasionally something’s supposed to be happening in the left channel in terms of music or effects and… you can hardly hear it. With proper stereo now on the HP Elite x3 and Alcatel IDOL 4 Pro (etc.) a mainly-right-channel hack just doesn’t cut it.
Still, for sat-nav, podcast and speakerphone use, the speaker combination is absolutely fine and pretty loud. Also on the audio front is a FM radio aerial built-in, not something you get on every phone nowadays, and indicating the Nokia 6’s potential markets, in countries where data isn’t ubiquitous and where FM radio is still a major source of news and entertainment.
You also get support for 5GHz Wi-fi and for NFC, the former meaning that HMD has gone the extra mile in terms of licensing all the Snapdragon 430’s capabilities, and the latter meaning that Android Pay is a ‘go’.
Imaging was always going to be a let down after the best of Nokia cameras in the Symbian and Windows Phone worlds, of course. And it is. The 16MP f/2.0 main camera shoot in 12MP in 16:9 and results are generally OK. The Phase Detection Auto-Focus regularly got confused by some of my arty macro shots, but you’ll have no issues for regular shots. In low light, results are distinctly ‘meh’, though not overly noisy, so there’s some effective noise reduction at work, even if details are then not as clear as you’d like. Again, think of the price, though – results are inline with this. Just don’t see the word ‘NOKIA‘ and think ‘great camera’!
Although there’s no physical shutter button on the Nokia 6, a tap on the volume up button also takes the shot and you quickly get used to this arrangement. Importantly, the squared sides of the phone mean that keeping a grip while snapping is very easy.
Video capture is at 1080p but there’s no software or hardware stabilisation (OIS), so results are unremarkable. The front camera’s 8MP, by the way, and also not worth dwelling on.
The Snapdragon 430 chipset in here is paired with 3GB RAM and the Nokia 6chugs along happily in this configuration, without ever really seeming speedy. The target market won’t mind and games work just fine. 32GB of internal storage is backed by microSD support, though you do have to sacrifice the optional second (2G-only) nanoSIM slot for this – not a big deal for most users, I suspect.
The OS here is vanilla Android 7.1.1, with nothing fancy added. Because of this, I suspect, it’s trivial for Nokia to keep things up to date, with the August security updates from Google only days after the Nexus and Pixel phones, with Google Assistant available out of the box, and with the official Google Pixel launcher. If you’re thinking of switching to Android from Symbian or Windows Phone then start with something ‘stock’ like this – it’ll break you into Android very easily.
Android is an easy transition from Symbian, with many similar UI and OS concepts, though it’s unlikely anyone’s coming straight from the latter to the former – but it will still seem familiar to AAS readers who have been out of touch with the phone world recently. Android is also pretty accessible to anyone used to Windows 10 Mobile, given the latter’s UI convergence with the rest of the world recently – think hamburger and ‘…’ menus, for example.
Moving straight to this Android-powered Nokia from Windows Phone 8.1 is more of a culture shock, though at least the massively better stocked application store is a sweetener. Any application that you’ve ever heard of is available here. Every shop, every service, every bank, you hardly need to touch the Chrome web browser – though that too is excellent and arguably better than Edge on Windows 10 Mobile and certainly superior to Web on Symbian and IE on WP8.1, of course.
Battery life was good in my tests, with the 3000mAh battery working with the comparatively low end chipset to easily get through a day. In theory there’s fast charging, compatible with Quick Charge 3.0 – this comes with the Snapdragon 430, though in my tests I couldn’t get the Nokia 6 to acknowledge any of my fast chargers, so perhaps there’s a software update needed to enable this.
Overall, the Nokia 6 is an unremarkable smartphone, almost every component is a downgrade from the Lumia 950, for example, it performs and is in the same realm as the Lumia 650, though I have to give props to Nokia/HMD for the terrifically solid construction and design. It’s a phone I kept picking up, it feels like a serious tool, and it’s a damn good start to the reinvention of the Nokia brand.
The European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA) has now announced its mobile device awards for 2017-2018. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Samsung took home top honors, with the company’s Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ devices collectively winning the “Best Smartphone” award. According to EISA’s judges, who described the Samsung’s flagship devices as “formidable, do-it-all devices” that’s down to a great camera and camera features, the comfortable bezel-free Infinity display, and several other innovations. It’s worth noting that the award was provided to the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Samsung Galaxy S8+ that are powered by Samsung’s own Exynos 8895 S0C, as opposed to the Snapdragon variant of the devices
As to the other awards, Huawei snagged no fewer than three awards, starting with the Smartphone Camera award being granted to the company’s P10 and its Leica-branded dual sensor setup – which features a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and a 12-megapixel color sensor, which enable enhanced portrait shots. EISA also cites the front camera as playing a role in the decision since the P10’s 8-megapixel selfie camera features Leica technology which automatically widens the angle to fit more people. Beyond the Huawei P10, the company also won in the best Wearable Device category with its Huawei Watch 2, thanks to its appealing aesthetics, battery life, and water-resistance. Meanwhile, the award for Best Consumer Smartphone also went to Huawei for its Honor 8 Pro. EISA judges referred to the device as a “seriously capable smartphone,” thanks to its 6GB of RAM coupled with 64GB of storage, backed by a Kirin 960 SoC and powered by a 4,000 mAh battery. They were equally impressed by Huawei’s generously proportioned 5.7-inch QHD screen.
Finally, and rounding out awards given to the best of the best among mobile devices, the comparatively unknown NOA Element H10Le won the award for Best Buy Smartphone because of its exceptional “price-to-performance ratio” thanks to its ten-core MediaTek Helio X27 SoC, coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The EISA also points to the device’s 7.1mm thick “sleek metal unibody finish,” 5.5-inch AMOLED display, and cameras as justification for the award. Awards were also handed to manufacturers for other categories, including Best Mobile Audio Player, Wireless In-Ear Headphones, Mobile Speaker, Mobile Headphones, and Portable DAC/Headphone Amplifier.
Zack Nelson hasn’t tested the durability of any Nokia Android phone yet until this week. Because HMD is scheduled to release its first ever flagship phone soon, it may be good to see how the budget-friendly Nokia phone fares against the competition. The Nokia 3 undergoes JerryRigEverything’s Durability Test where the device scratches at level 6 with the Mohs pick. This is normal for any tempered glass screen., specifically a Gorilla Glass display but we have no idea what version.
Scratching the selfie camera part leaves no mark so you know it is protected well. As for the earpiece, it is found below the glass but only as a temporary attachment. It easily loosens so we can assume it will fall out of place over some time.
The Nokia 3 doesn’t have any fingerprint sensor but there are capacitive buttons on the front display. At the back panel is a plastic camera lens that quickly scratches. The back cover is also made of plastic so again, it scratches easily.
The sides of the Nokia 3 are made of metal. They scratch but are still intact. There is a headphone jack on top, SD card slot on the side, plus a micro USB slot at the bottom. (Sorry, there is no USB-C.)
Moving on to the Burn Test, the IPS display burns within ten seconds which is still normal. The black pixels recover quickly so it’s safe.
The Bend Test shows us Nokia once again did good in the construction of the device despite its affordable price. Bending from the back and the display does nothing to the smartphone.
The Nokia 3 definitely passes Zack Nelson’s Durability Test so we can say it’s a great choice if you are looking for a new budget Android phone that can last longer than its many rivals.
So it has been a while since the last update to the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T, and it has had some of the users a little bit jittery on whether the company will continue to support last year’s flagships, now that the OnePlus 5 has been launched and in full flow. OnePlus had moved to quell those doubts by making an official statement recently, and now a new update is here.
This new update will bump OxygenOS on the OnePlus 3 and 3T to version 4.1.7, and with it comes Google’s updated Android security patches for August. That lines up with the statement OnePlus put out, saying that it will update the security patch first before updating to the finalized features of the beta program that has now officially ended.
Here are the other contents of this update.
Improvements:
– Enhanced system fluidity
– Battery optimizations
– Android security patch updated to August
Bug fixes:
– Sound channel error while recording videos
– Call is routed to speaker accidentally by some 3rd party apps
– Rendering issue in Indian Kannada language
– App locker issue caused by some 3rd party apps
– As requested by Google, Hangouts will be removed if you have never updated it on Play Store. To keep Hangouts, please update it prior to the upgrade
As per usual, this will roll out OTA to your OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T devices in incremental fashion, so you may need to wait a bit for the update to get to you. As always, you can try to use a VPN to check if it has rolled out to other territories as well.
