If you buy an LG G4 from Verizon between August 1st to August 12th, you are eligible to receive a $100 prepaid Visa card from Verizon. The G4 is already a great deal and a great device – the $100 is plenty of cash to buy a spare battery and SD card.
OnePlus is holding an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on Reddit right now, so if you want to learn more about the OnePlus 2 and where the company currently stands, be sure to follow the link and leave a question. The event is also being live-streamed on Periscope via @cmtdb.
Best Buy currently has the Amazon Fire stick on sale for only $25 ($15 off.) The Fire Stick is a capable media player with support for all the services you’d expect (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video), and some you might not (Plex, HBO Go, Starz, and Showtime.)
Samsung has dropped the price of both the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge by €100, making the current retail price of these phones €599 and €699, respectively. Though no new prices have been announced stateside, a cut is expected soon.
Last week, Samsung announced in their quarterly earnings report that they would “adjust the price” of the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge to both “[maintain] sales momentum” and make room at the high-end of the market for “new premium smartphone models.”
Following this announcement, we published an article discussing the future of Samsung and its flagships, as well as offering some speculation about which new premium models might be unveiled soon.
Samsung, itself, has stated that at least one new model, to be released in the second half of 2015, will include a “larger screen“. However, rumors and leaks suggest there will, in fact, be two new models with larger screens—the Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note 5.
Though the Galaxy S6 edge has proven to be more popular than expected—relative to the vanilla Galaxy S6—total sales of both were below expectations. However, Samsung initially priced these phones well above the competition—at the time of writing, a Galaxy S6 retails for at least $680 in-store, while the S6 edge demands a $100 premium even over that. A $100 price drop would put put the S6 in the range of its bitter rival—the LG G4—while the S6 edge would be priced similarly to the HTC One M9 or iPhone 6.
Given the fact that “new premium smartphone models” are known to be hitting the second half of 2015—and it’s already August—and both the S6 and S6 edge are receiving hefty price cuts in the European market, it’s probably safe to speculate that the new models should be launching very soon. It’s likely we’ll be seeing similar price cuts in the US and elsewhere in the near-future to make room for the upcoming Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note 5, both of which will be competing for attention from the ultra-premium phablet crowd.
Xperia Z4’s hardware may not impress, but its software is definitely good. You can port the Z4’s camera quite easily to other ROMs based on AOSP with just a few simple steps. Head over to this guide created by XDA Recognized Themer xperiaz2 to learn what’s needed to have this mod on your phone.
XDA Senior Member squid2 has posted experimental builds of TWRP for the Moto G 2015 [codename osprey]. These builds are not recommended to be flashed to the device, but rather to be booted off with the fastboot boot command. Nonetheless, initial replies confirm that the recovery is working and can root the device.
Join us in a fun Sunday Debate on Compromises. Come with your opinions and feel free to read some of our thoughts, then pick your side or play devil’s advocate to get your voice heard and engage in friendly discussion. You can read our food-for-thought or jump straight into the fray below!
Getting an upgrade is a big deal to us power users: it’s our little Android Christmas, where after a long time (for plenty of us, at least) of carrying a device we intensely research and drool over something new. But many, XDA writers included, feel that flagship upgrades today are more of a gamble that they have ever been, as many features or key aspects are sacrificed to boost others, or they are simply forgotten in the course of smartphone evolution. This leads to the nasty compromises that have us weighing every pro and con throughout days of pondering and anticipation.
Many phones this year have prevented users from leaving their older devices for the latest and greatest — often because the latest was not too great. The industry’s global context is likely at fault: affluent markets are approaching saturation, emerging markets are shifting the prices towards the low-end and mid-range, many technologies are hitting (sometimes momentary) plateaus and many reviewers and consumers seemingly demand premium quality instead of thorough technological advancements. These are, however, not the only factors, and we must keep these and more in mind to find a solution to the problem of smartphone compromises.
We are framing this as an open debate where you can suggest a way to minimize smartphone compromises in your upgrades, be it through expanded repertoires of offerings and availability, user-selected specifications through modularity and online stores, or whatever you might think of. Please try to explain your suggestions and solutions to make them understandable so that we can all engage in healthy discussion. Feel free to check some of our ideas below or jump straight into the comments!
Keep in mind that these are hypothetical scenarios and not necessarily isolated; many of them are currently happening to some degree, and they are happening at once. None of them are mutually exclusive!
There are many, many other alternatives and solutions, so feel free to bring them up!
There will never be a smartphone that is perfect for everyone, but the new models of pricing, hardware sales, and phone manufacturing might get us there, or at least closer to that. Availability, competitions, a bigger range of products, modularity and customization can all be relevant factors in the path towards a new model that is flexible enough to satisfy a bigger number of consumers. So keeping all of this in mind, we ask you the following questions:
