Want to try out Android Auto but don’t have the cash to buy a new car? XDA recognized developer mikereidis has produced a version of the Head Unit APK that works on a range of Android phones and tablets, despite Google not releasing the code publicly. Head over to the forum to check it out!
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Android Police has just released an in depth look at Hangouts 4.0. The as of yet unreleased update includes changes such as: the addition of a status update screen, several changes to the chat screen UI, multiple attachment options and the removal of tabs, favoring a floating action button instead.
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By now many of you will have heard that Senior Recognized Developer jcase in collaboration with autoprime and thecubed were successfully able to root the LG G4. Many of you understandably had questions regarding the break through, so we reached out to jcase to find out some of the details and the stage of development they are on.
As you may have seen on his Youtube page, he has indeed achieved root on the LG G4. If you haven’t had a chance yet, take a minute to check out the video below and get up to speed.
Yes and no. The first LG G4 he attempted this on unfortunately did not survive the attempt and whilst he was successful on his second device it remains unsafe. When we asked, he had this to say on the subject “I don’t believe this one will ever be released, it is not easy, not safe and I am unable to package it in a way to protect it. I do plan to release a safer option when possible however there is no ETA on that at the moment.” For the moment the current method will be used for further research.
This is by no means the first time jcase has achieved root on a device, he has a long history on the subject. We do have to remember though that this is his career and not just a hobby, he may often have to hold off on releasing until he is completely ready, as was seen with his Motorola root last year.
We will keep you informed on the status of the root. If you are in the process of working on your own root method, by all means continue. We do not know when we will see a stable method. However, it is great to see that there is indeed some progress.
Are you waiting on root for your LG G4? Leave a comment below!
The post No, Root Is Not Coming To The LG G4 Just Yet appeared first on xda-developers.
If you’ve never heard of Gionee before, we won’t really blame you for it. Gionee is one of China’s biggest manufacturers of mobile phones, with recent forays into other Asian markets. They don’t really have an international presence at this stage, but the company has just launched a product which is making heads turn in the global market.
At an event held today in China, Gionee launched the Elife E8. On paper, the product is something straight out of a bucket list of features that could be packed in a smartphone.
Starting with the display, the Gionee Elife E8 features a 6-inch Quad HD display with a pixel density of 490 ppi. For the processor, the phone rocks a 64-bit Mediatek Helio X10 chipset with a 2GHz octa-core MT6795 processor. There’s a PowerVR 6200 for the GPU, with 3GB of RAM to hold everything together smoothly. There’s also 64GB of base storage with micro-sd expansion up to 128GB.
There is a reason why there is so much storage offered with this smartphone, and that is the camera. The rear camera is a 23.7 MP shooter with OIS with dual tone LED flash and video recording up to 4K. The phone also offers lossless zoom, which is boasted off as a first for Android smartphones. Using software, the rear camera can stitch together a 100 MP resolution image. The front camera also does not corners with an 8 MP shooter with autofocus.
The device is currently restricted to retail only in China for a price of CNY 3,999 ($645) from July 15 onwards. The device is also a rumored for an end-of-June launch in India. If you want to purchase this device out of China, you can buy the Allview X2 Xtreme from Romania, which is just a rebranded Elife E8, from August 15 onwards for a price of $550.
Keeping in mind the track record of Chinese OEM’s with regards enthusiast community interaction, the Gionee Elife E8 will not really be amassing a following in a GPL-compliant XDA. Nevertheless, it is good to see manufacturer’s continue on pushing the boundaries of what smartphones can do.
What do you think of the Gionee Elife E8? Would you like to purchase this device? Let us know yout thoughts in the comments below!
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2014 was going to be the year of the wearable. And it was, insofar as it was the first year that I started to notice news headlines outside of the normal enthusiast channels, covering stories regarding these futuristic devices. Android Wear was released alongside Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, Google Glass became available to anybody, and even the long-rumoured Apple Watch was, at least announced. The previous year, the Pebble watch had shown the demand for something that could provide us with our notifications without having to remove our phones from our pockets by raising a record amount of funding on Kickstarter, and some rivals like Sony were already on their second generation of connected gadget. It seemed as if the technological world had consumed the smartphone, and was now ready and eager to move into the next course and digest the more enticing smart-watch.
2015 was also meant to be the year of the wearable. We’d seen the first fledgling efforts of the major players (sometimes the second, or third, even) and those who hadn’t immediately jumped on board the hype-train were patiently awaiting the next wave of devices, with all the expected refinements that would make this technology essential this time around. But that hasn’t exactly been the case.
I realize, of course, that we’re only half way through the year, and that anyone with an interest in this area is waiting for the new Moto 360, the Samsung Gear A, the Pebble Time, or even the plethora of existing watch manufacturers who are now trying their hand in the smart arena. The fact remains, however, that smartwatches are a nice thing to have, they’re just not completely necessary yet, even though they’re fun and you might miss them when they’re not there. There are a number of reasons for this, and they are issues that have been widely raised – the same issues for the most part that were predicted a few years back. Battery life has to be one of the most prevalent, with most smartwatches having to be charged nightly if used for much more than just glancing at the time. The size, weight and design of current models is still generally on the large or bulky side; after all, watches have been fashion accessories as much as timepieces for a couple of centuries. The aforementioned Moto 360 for example, did well mostly because it looked desirable, and despite the fact that it was released with some underwhelming or out of date internals (that now apparently don’t work very well with the Wear 5.1.1 update). The other thing to note, which hasn’t been fully realized yet due to the age of these gadgets, is the fact that these are essentially mini-computers we’re wearing and will need replacing every few years. They will become out-dated, or stop receiving software updates, or their batteries will suffer the ravages of the daily charge/discharge cycle. It’s hard to stay objective on this subject when you’re a developer with the latest gear and the people you speak to all the time are in the same frame of mind, but I believe these reasons, added to their collective price, have made smart-devices a tough choice for the average consumer.
But there’s a final point that I believe is worth raising (especially here on XDA) that may have been a notable cause of this lack of traction, and it pertains to Android Wear in particular. Google made an interesting choice when creating the current leader in wearable operating systems, by preventing OEM’s from modifying the software and creating their own flavors of it. I admit that this does make a lot of sense, providing not only a consistent user-experience across the board (important with a new platform), but also hugely assisting with the constant ordeal of software updates. But Android has always been open (for the most part), and the fact that smartphone manufacturers were given the freedom to create their own UI’s, add features, and generally demonstrate their own ideas of what the customer needed in a phone, meant that consumers were given a huge range of different options and price points, and had a better chance of finding the right fit for them. With Android Wear, we don’t have that; every smartwatch that runs it works in almost the exact same way, with the only differentiation being the hardware aspect. This means that Google has to directly drive the features that we see, and the options for developers are somewhat limited. Personally, the developers here at XDA are the main reason that I fell in love with Android in the first place; the sheer number of ideas floating around the forums is staggering! Someone, somewhere has managed to get almost every device running the current version of the OS regardless of its age, or its limited specifications, or in some cases, even whether it’s worth doing in the first place. Many of the features we now take for granted were pioneered by an independent developer or third party, and are only now making their way to vanilla Android. Some, like me, prefer the look and feel of an unmodified, Nexus-like experience, but you cannot deny what Samsung’s Touchwiz or HTC’s Sense has done for the adoption of Android as an operating system. You can root Android Wear, you can unlock the Bootloader, you can side-load apps and you can install a custom recovery, but then what? There is no Cyanogenmod for Android Wear, because we’re all running stock anyway, and at the moment it’s down to the developers to come up with apps, and apps only, to make these things sell.
Of course, it’s never going to be one single element that cripples a range of products, it’ll be a combination of a few, but perhaps it is this which is lacking with the current crop of smartwatches. I’ve definitely noticed it, but not everyone will, and it’s important to remember that often with OEM skins comes bloat, messy user interfaces and buggy software experiences. Customization is a corner-stone of Android, and without everyone being able to fiddle around with the software experience on their wrists, Google is, in one way, preventing developers and manufacturers from coming up with the kind of features that could potentially make this platform really attractive to a really important demographic; the first time buyer. Once those users are on-board this technology could really snowball. So perhaps it is up to Google to provide a little wiggle-room on the OS-front, whilst keeping the core experience clean and stable, thus providing a flexible product, great for the basic and advanced user alike. Hey, you can dream, right?
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
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OnePlus is prepping itself up for the eventual launch of the OnePlus 2, and it’s back to using the power of crowd marketing to build up hype for its yet-to-be-launched flagship.
This time, the company is holding contests to give users a chance to experience the OnePlus 2 with an all expense paid trip to OnePlus HQ in Hong Kong for 3 lucky winners. Along with this, the winners will get a chance to “play a pivotal role in a secret project” that is planned for the OnePlus 2 launch. Knowing the company, we can only take wild guesses to what this could be as they often end up with rather out-of-the-box ideas.
Coming to the contests, there are two of them, one for photo aficionados and one for video enthusiasts.
This contest will select only one winner. To compete, users have to send an unedited and no-filter photo taken on the OnePlus One and post them on Instagram through a public account. Entrants also need to tag @oneplustech in the photo and give details for the shot in the caption, along with submitting their entry through this form. 10 finalists will be chosen on the basis of Instagram “Likes” that the photo gets and the technical ability involved. The final winner will be chosen by votes from the community. Additional rules for this contest can be found here.
This contest will select two winners. To compete, users will have to create an original video of atleast 1080p quality in landscape format using their OnePlus One, with preferred quality being the full 4k quality the OnePlus One is capable of. The video should revolve around the user and OnePlus, and could range from what they love about the OnePlus One to what they look forward to in the OnePlus 2. All entries have to submitted by uploading to cloud storage and submitting via this form, with judgement being passed on the basis of quality, production and originality of content. For the winners, one will be selected via a judge panel in OnePlus HQ while the other will be chosen via the community. Eight other runner ups will also receive OnePlus gift bags in lieu of having their videos featured in an upcoming OnePlus 2 project. Additional rules for the contest can be found here.
Both of these contests end on June 15, 2015. The winners will have to be eligible for travel to Hong Kong on or before June 28, 2015, so we can expect some more info of the upcoming phone to be revealed around that period.
One thing that we like about OnePlus is they focus a lot on the community, whether it be involving them for future launches or harnessing them for producing promotional material and marketing through Instagram popularity. With the company claiming to have improved their customer service from previous times, OnePlus is going on the right track towards a successful second product. But will it be worthy of being a successor to the One? Or will the company still end up repeating previous mistakes? Only time can tell this One tale.
What do you think of OnePlus’ latest marketing technique? Will the OnePlus 2 build enough hype for its release? And more importantly, will it be able to deliver? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Read on for related coverage:
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Editor’s note: This weeks feature has been written by forum member laufersteppenwolf and takes a look at a popular misconception that everyone at XDA faces on a regular basis; we are in fact not all involved in IT outside of XDA in either career or education.
It’s no secret that here at XDA we have many exceptional developers. They are so good in fact that they must be developers, programmers, CS professors and such in real life as well, right? This at least, is what most users not just here on XDA but also outside of the community think. To be honest, before I became a Forum Moderator I did as well. Now after actively working on XDA for quite some time, I have come to know better.
No doubt many, if not most “famous” developers here on XDA are working in the IT business in real life. As already reported here. Our Senior Recognized Developer’s would be a prime example of this: jcase, for example, works as a mobile security researcher, Rebellos works as a Software Developer and Virus is a master technician at Apple. Whilst discussing this phenomenon with several of the Recognized Developers, I discovered that many were Computer Science students (AChep, GermainZ) or Computer Science lecturers (doixanh).
So, all that I just said proved me wrong, right? All of said developers are actually working or studying something related to software engineering, right? Well I also found developers not working in the IT business. One of the most widely known developers would be codeworkx, who completed an apprenticeship in mechatronics and works on XDA and smartphone hacking as a hobby. The same applies to myself, I am currently doing an apprenticeship as a mechatronics engineer and keep developing as a big hobby. Last but not least, we have our Portal Editor MathewBrack who just graduated in agriculture. You can find many more examples like this in this thread, dedicated to discussing the jobs of our members.
You may ask yourself now “That’s great and all, but wouldn’t it be best to leave the software developing to the guys actually knowing what they are doing?”, but then I have to ask, why? I guess people like codeworkx have more than proven that you don’t have to study computer science in order to be good in software development. In fact, I can see many benefits to knowing more than just the one side to a subject; you as a developer have better insight in to what the user actually needs than if you would just write a piece of software “blindly”. While it may do the exact same thing, tiny details could make the difference in the end-user’s choice and experience.
As an example, during my apprenticeship I am working a lot with mills, lathes and of course drills. This means I have to calculate my cutting data for every tool and material. The logical thought was that there has to be an app out there that could do this job quite easily within a few seconds – but I was wrong. While there were a handful of such calculators out there, they were anything but easy to use. Actually, it was faster calculating the data manually than using the app. If I would have been a “normal” worker I would have had to either use those available apps or do my calculations manually. Luckily, however, my hobby was software developing for mobile, because of which I had the opportunity to create an app specifically designed for simplicity and speed.
There is yet another side effect, and definitely a positive one for your colleagues: When they have an issue with their phone, they always know who to ask to resolve the issues
So now that you know my opinion, what’s yours? Do you prefer having developers who are working in the IT business in real life, developers who do not work in IT or do you not care at all? Leave a comment below!
This article was part of our new series “Voices of XDA”. The new articles you will start to see under “Voices” are entirely thought of and written by you, the members of XDA. If you have an idea for an article you would like to write to be featured on the portal you can find more information here and apply here.
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