xda android

lundi 11 mai 2015

What’s the Most Awesome Thing on XDA?

As most of you already know, there are tons of different interesting things happening in our community here at XDA. Some members come for the development and ROMs, while others come for discussions and support. But what brings you to XDA every day? Let us know what your favorite things about XDA are and which threads you would recommend to new members.

The post What’s the Most Awesome Thing on XDA? appeared first on xda-developers.

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Oppo R7 and R7 Plus Get Confirmed Via Official Renders

Finally putting design speculation to rest, Oppo has released official renders for its two upcoming devices, the R7 and the R7 Plus.

As per the renders, the R7 is not as bezel-less as we once believed. The device does employ thin bezels, but gives out an optical illusion of being bezel-less through clever use of 2.5D glass on the front.

While not being completely bezel-less may come as a surprise keeping in mind recent competition on these quarters, the more surprising part of these renders is the confirmation of the R7 Plus. The R7 Plus follows along the same design principles as its younger sibling, and features a bigger, edge-to-edge display.

Both the phones sport a similar metallic unibody design. The R7, which will likely have a 5″ display, will reportedly have two processor based variants depending on region. One variant will run a 1.5GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615, while the other will run on a 1.7GHz Octa-core Mediatek MT6752 processor. Both the variants will come with 3GB RAM and 16GB onboard storage. The device will also have a 13MP rear camera, along with capacitive buttons on the front.

For the R7 Plus, Oppo ditches the capacitive buttons in favor of on-screen button to make better use of the increased screen estate as the R7 Plus will most likely be in the phablet category with a 6″ display. The R7 Plus also features a fingerprint scanner on the rear of the device, and also what appears to be laser autofocus for the camera. For specs, as per a listing on GFXBench, the device will feature a 1.9GHz Octa-core Mediatek MT6795M processor with 3GB RAM and 32GB onboard storage.

The R7 and R7 Plus are slated for official launch on May 20th 2015. In anticipation, Oppo has also released teaser advertisements for these products to showcase their camera capabilities in action, along with honorable mentions of their VOOC fast charging feature, which is claimed to be superior to Qualcomm’s fast charging implementation.

What do you think of Oppo’s newest products? Do they have enough to distinguish them from the newly found competition in the “bezel-less” design category? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Oppo R7 and R7 Plus Get Confirmed Via Official Renders appeared first on xda-developers.

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G4 Supports Quick Charge, Feature Might Come Soon

The G4 is already on the spotlight for having inconsistent battery results in inconsistent reviews, and without wireless charging nor Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0, this is a turn-off for many users. The device does feature a 1.8 amp charger which does help in regaining juice, but Quick Charge is still a beloved feature. Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2 page got update today, however, and now it displays the G4 under supported devices. This could mean that it is now officially supported and that it will make it to the final release units.

Now, it is worth noting that we knew beforehand that the Snapdragon 808 was capable of Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0, so when the device was unveiled and we didn’t hear LG confirm it, we were rather puzzled and disappointed. The demo and review units sent ahead of release also had no quick-charging enabled, which led to many critics slamming the G4 for regressing in a time where charging capabilities have dramatically expanded. Now that Qualcomm’s page has been updated, we might see the feature come to the G4 to hopefully redeem the battery constraints.

Another thing worth noting is that no official announcement has been made by LG as of writing this. Their Discover G4 promotional page still does not list the feature in any specification sheet nor mentions it in any blurb yet. Android Central claims to have had confirmation from the smartphone’s manufacturer that this is the case, but until we hear a conclusive official announcement we can not be sure.

The feature might come enabled through updated firmware in retail units, or perhaps distributed through an OTA. If LG does indeed enable it by appealing to the “unfinished software” excuse, then they are still at fault for sending units without such an important feature and for not announcing it at the appropriate moment. Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 official page remains, nonetheless, a strong indicator that the G4 is in fact capable of faster charging – and if LG doesn’t act upon that at this point, we can expect a lot of angry power users to get up in arms.

Is fast charging important to you? Tell us below!

The post G4 Supports Quick Charge, Feature Might Come Soon appeared first on xda-developers.

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Discover XDA: The Senior Recognized Developers

Our senior developers are experts in their respective fields across all areas of development and have been specifically recognized for their contributions to XDA. You may already be familiar with their work or have seen them around the forums. While you may not know all of them, they are an integral part of our community. We reached out to them to find out a bit more about their work and which projects they admired from here.

pulser_g2

“Everything I do now is “behind the scenes” keeping things ticking over. In terms of my expertise, that would be in security and privacy of user data. I want to protect people’s data from apps they install, and protect their phones from malicious software.

There are a lot of projects that I like, and see great potential in. One would be XPrivacy, but it’s difficult to pick only one. It’s run by a dedicated developer, who is incredibly experienced and skilled, but it is trying to achieve difficult tasks on Android.

The piece of advice I’d give is more of a message to people thinking about the next “amazing” app idea. If you have a good idea, you should go ahead and make it. But it’s important to stand out from the crowd – services like Snapchat started off as simple ideas, but ended up ruined along the way due to simply not valuing and caring about their users, and not actually thinking about protecting people’s privacy, and negligently revealing the mappings between user names and phone numbers. Getting these things right is getting increasingly important for the future. It’s more important to ensure interoperability and reliability of things. Email is still one of the most relied-upon communications platforms. Why? Because it’s an open standard anyone can host and implement. This has been forgotten these days – Whatsapp, Snapchat, Facebook etc are not self-hostable, open source, and open standard. Yet to truly become huge, like Email, it’s necessary to implement and push forward these open standards.”

codeworkx

“Ok, let’s do this quick and dirty. 14 years ago, I did an apprenticeship in mechatronics. Which is not much help when it comes to smartphone hacking. But It is a cool hobby and I’ve learned everything by myself. My recipe is: Trial & Error until success. I am currently running projects on CM for the Honor 6, CM for the Xperia T and some hacking on the Yu Yureka. As far as other projects on XDA, I have no idea. I’m not looking at other projects. Home sweet home, job, pregnant wife and hacking are eating all of my time. But if I could instil one piece of advice in the community it is BUY NEXUS AND BE HAPPY!!! I’m using a stock Nexus 5 as main phone. No root, no hacks! Srsly!”

jcase

“I’m a mobile security researcher. I often contribute through my work, or directly to AOSP/OEMs/Carriers to make Android safer. On the side, I like to occasionally hack random android phones. I am currently involved in several projects however I cannot discuss them. Other Projects on XDA? Android itself! My piece of advice is READ, READ, Ask Questions, READ, READ and ask some more. Don’t just beg for help, learn and contribute.”

Rebellos

“In XDA scope – I’m specializing in any kind of low-level assembly and disassembly. That is bootloader developing and hacking. Privately I’m majoring in Electronics Engineering and I’m currently working as Software Developer. However, I’m more of an inactive SRD at this moment as I don’t have as much time and will as I used to dedicate it for XDA. I am not working on anything strictly XDA related ATM. I’m still somewhat looking after Badadroid repos but I’m not involved in development anymore.

Actually I consider Badadroid as one of my greatest successes. Not just in that the project itself was really big and pretty successful, but also Volk204 came on board there as a pretty much greenhorn with just general knowledge about programming, and I spent really hundreds of hours working with him on the project as he had two of the most important things IMO – time and motivation. Now Volk204 is a fully capable RD and maintains the project by himself. For other people’s projects again, I’m not really up to date nowadays. However, I love to read about ANY kind of HW mods (as in electronics mods, not stuff like modifying the phone case, duh).

As for advice I wanted to say “Use the f**king search button”… but that’s so yesterday!
a) Remember the electronic devices are just tools, what really counts is what’s in your head. That allows you to REALLY use these tools to do awesome things.
b) Don’t be afraid to play with any kind of hardware. It’s just an expendable stuff that can be easily replaced. Experience and knowledge stays for life. And these are worked out in big part from mistakes.
c) Do your research. Google and Wikipedia are awesome tools. Just remember to use your brain.”

Virus

“My real name is Jesse and my area of expertise has always been porting and rom making. I used to be way more active on the forums with lots of threads and builds, but here recently I have been super busy with my family and playing guitar at church. I am an apple master technician at my job and am in the process of starting my own company iRepair. I have been behind the scenes for a year or so helping developers like baadnewz, team venom and the renovate guys port over to verizon m8 and m7. I am currently using the galaxy s6 edge for Verizon but currently there isn’t root for the device so I’m kind of stuck till we get root. I think lots of the SRD guys have threads with HUGE potential Chainfire has the best root application of all time and jacse is a master at exploiting android! I have been with the xda community for a long time now and love it here, I can’t think of much I would actually want to change.”

Some of our Senior Recognized Developers have even acquired a minor Android celebrity status for their work. Users such as Chainfire and Rovo89 have done incredible things for the community. I’m sure that the majority of readers will have used or know of their contributions and so I shall refrain from going in-depth on their usage and keep this as succinct as possible, the figures however speak for themselves.

Chainfire is the developer behind the app SuperSU (among many) which “allows for advanced management of Superuser access rights for all the apps on your device that need root” which on the Play Store alone has received over 10,000,000 installs (and less than 50,000,000 – thank you for the concise range there Google) and from his own website close to 30,000,000 downloads. Even taking in to account multiple installs/downloads due to the nature of our community, that is an incredible amount.

Rovo89 is the developer responsible for the Xposed Framework “for modules that can change the behavior of the system and apps without touching any APKs.” According to the download server provided by XDA, Xposed has had a total close to 3,450,000 downloads of which 14,000 of those have been in the last 24 hours.

These are by no means our only Senior Recognized Developers and all have been chosen for their active and constant contributions to the community. If you see them around the site be sure to check out their work.

Which of our SRDs do you see about the site most? What do you think to their work? Leave a comment below!

India Exclusive: Asus Zenfone 2 ZE551ML With 4GB Ram

To add more confusion to the product mix that is the Zenfone 2, Asus has launched yet another variant via their Facebook page, as an exclusive product for India. This variant comes with 4GB RAM but a 1.8GHz processor with 32GB onboard storage. This variant will have limited stocks and is priced at Rs. 18,999 ($300).

The post India Exclusive: Asus Zenfone 2 ZE551ML With 4GB Ram appeared first on xda-developers.

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ColorOS Based on Lollipop Headed to Find 7 and 7A

Oppo chose to release ColorOS 2.0 based on Android KitKat back in October in what seemed to be a severely mistimed move, given that Lollipop was just around the corner and only today, more than six months later, have they taken to Twitter to announce that a Lollipop version of Color OS is on its way to the Find 7 and 7A.

The post ColorOS Based on Lollipop Headed to Find 7 and 7A appeared first on xda-developers.

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Inconsistent & Misleading Reviews: Can We Fix Them?

The blogosphere of Android has something for everyone – sites that focus on geek lifestyles, others that center on hardware, and then there’s websites like XDA that put a strong emphasis on the software and what it can do. Just like with Android itself, the diverse options allow anyone to find a favorite site or even groups of journalists. Youtube also has many important Android channels full of interesting analysis and videos. When compared to the iPhone scene, Android online journalism is much more interesting to say the least.

Yet there is something that we can’t help but notice at the XDA office, and that is that subjectivity is increasingly overtaking the scene. By this we mean that many stories, coverages and especially reviews tend to have a more “editorial” feel than what Android power users want. Hardcore Android fans are obviously not the only demographic that the internet takes into account, but in this quest for mass appeal we can’t help but feel that the quality of features and analysis, overall, drops dramatically. This is something that is most noticeable during phone releases, as hundreds of sites rush to put out a review that will net them recognition, awareness and of course hits. Chances are that if you agree so far, you will know the culprits. But reviews are where the inconsistencies show. Let me explain:

There are reviews that specialize on the technical details of new hardware: how its processor performs, how accurate the screen is, how long a battery lasts in comparable terms. These reviews take a lot of testing (and benchmarks) and thus, time. There are sites that excel at these kind of reviews, and we can not be more grateful for their existence. Then there are holistic reviews that do not require the same amount of time nor testing, and focus more on the user experience and what the reviewer thinks about the phone. This format in itself is not bad – in fact, it is needed, but the problem comes when the holistic findings contradict rigorous measurement, testing, other holistic reviews and sometimes even logic itself. And even worse, sometimes said reviews read like a salesman script.

At our XDA chatroom we tend to discuss the latest reviews for the latest phones, and as more come in we notice that sometimes they are too subjective. Things like battery life, for example, depend on what the user does with the phone, and this is something we see contradicted all the time. Sometimes a phone has mediocre battery life and it gets passed off as great, and sometimes it has great battery life and it gets passed off as mediocre. Technical reviews do a fair job at estimating battery performance by testing it with a common methodology on every device, which produces results that can at the very least be compared to others for a general idea. If a review does not break down the recorded usage pattern properly to the audience, it is very hard for readers or watchers to form an objective idea of how it would perform in comparison to other phones.

Apart from contradictions between sites, we also see statements that directly contradict physical reality. For example, Samsung devices have had a history of saturated screens, but the saturation has dramatically decreased with each of the past few panel generations. The Note 4, in particular, features a rather color accurate screen, as does the S6. That didn’t stop many reviewers from saying that the screens are still saturated. When it comes to performance, holistic reviews have small blurbs that do not give much depth as to how it actually performs and they sometimes mitigate the issues that faulty processors or bloated software might bring.

Which brings us to a bigger problem: a small number of reviews seem afraid to point out faults in a device, or to criticize certain aspects of it. We see a lot of ambiguous or vague descriptions for some device cons, for example. A review should not hide nor mitigate issues nor frame them as insignificant to users that might very well care about such problems. Not every review has to be positive, and if a device severely underperforms in key aspects it should always be noted. All of these factors and more cause many reviews to be uninformative and contradictory, and in most cases misleading as well. To reiterate, we’ve seen this more times than we can count, and we’ve seen many users here, on reddit, youtube and those very sites realise that as well. Some devices like the Nexus 9 saw levels of inconsistency that suggest that there is something seriously wrong here, and devices in 2015 still see these kind of reviews (I’m looking at you, G4).

There is an Android for you, and finding it could be easier. We just need to know how they compare!

Now, many of these faults are due to human error. We all make mistakes, and no journalist is perfect nor knows it all. Holistic reviews simply do not yield accurate results either, and everyone uses Android differently. We do not put our site above others in these regards, but I know for a fact that our team works very hard to inform users truthfully, because that is what XDA’s mantra is all about. We are known to speak out against the companies that transgress upon consumers’ rights or respect. Ultimately, we try to be as fair and honest as possible – I hope that you, our readers, see us that way. If every site did technical reviews and found similar or the same data results, then reviews would also get pretty boring. After all, we also read and watch Android content for the personalities behind it, some of which we grow very fond of.

We do believe, however, that something must change – because otherwise, many consumers, users and Android fans will get misled or misinformed at some point or another. How can we do that? We have a few ideas in mind that we want to expand upon to hopefully agree on a standard with the community at large. We will let you know about them soon. For now, we just have to wait. Not all sites and blogs commit all faults nor do they commit them at the same degree. We are most likely not exempt from some of this, but we do try to focus on being informative, technical and thorough. Until reviews become more objective and informative, though, I personally will stick to my handful of in-depth reviewers. We want to hear what you have to say about this, as the power users behind the news portal discuss this almost daily. So we ask you:

What do you think of inconsistent reviews? What would suggest reviewers did to fix this? Discuss it with us in the comments!

The post Inconsistent & Misleading Reviews: Can We Fix Them? appeared first on xda-developers.

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