OnePlus is launching a new smartphone at the end of the month and we’ve been seeing a number of teasers about the device already. An ‘X’ seems to be the central theme to the launch and this is why the community is calling it the OnePlus X. A new leak on Weibo shows the upcoming device in both black and white variants.
Huawei has released their roadmap for Android 6.0 Marshmallow updates. So far, the Ascend P8, Ascend P8max, Mate S, Mate 7, Ascend G7, Ascend G7 Plus, Ascend G8, Honor 7, Honor 7i, Honor 6 Plus, Honor 6, MediaPad X2, Honor 4X, and Honor 4C are all on track to receive the latest Android update.
A while ago, during the height of the Stagefright scare, major manufacturers made promises to provide monthly security patches. Samsung was amongst the ones who promised, and now, the OEM has launched a security focused blog intending to keep users up to date on the security updates that the company pushes out.
Starting off, the website can be found at security.samsungmobile.com. The website lists its purposes as keeping users informed on developing security issues, providing information on recent security updates and serve as a main resource hub for Samsung security notifications. The monthly updates that the company intends to push will contain patches for Android-wide security issues that are released by Google, as well as patches for Samsung-specific security issues.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, there is a catch. The monthly updates are restricted to only the top, flagship level devices of 2014 and 2015. The list includes the Galaxy S series, but specifies only the Galaxy S5, S6, S6 Edge and S6 Edge+; the Galaxy Note series, again with only the Note 4, Note Edge and Note 5 specified; and the Galaxy Tab series, with the Tab S and the Tab S2 specified. Given the sheer number of devices that Samsung launches in a year, along with the elephant in the room that is Touchwiz, it comes as no surprise that the list is missing a lot of devices, many of which were launched in this year. This essentially means that you are restricted to top tier flagships if you wish to receive regular and frequent security-focused patches.
The blog post does note that the models list may vary depending on regions and carriers, which in effect, does further limit the number of devices that will actually receive the security patches. Wherever there are carriers involved, there are bound to be roadblocks and as such, delays would be inevitable. Samsung previously did speak of improving on this aspect, stating that it was “conversation with carriers around the world to implement the new approach”, but as of now, there has been no progress which the public can see.
Samsung also has outlined a procedure for reporting vulnerabilities found in Samsung devices. You can find more information about it here.
Nonetheless, with all things said and done, a step taken is better than none, more so in the case of matters of grave concerns. We hope that Samsung does work indeed on providing the promised updates, as well as covering more devices in the future.
Is your device in the mentioned list of supported devices? Would like the focus of updates be spread on to more devices, including the mid and lower tiers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Read on for more related content:
Cover Image Credits: The Guardian
Chainfire has published a BETA update to CM.lumen in the XDA forums. This brings the version up to 3.10 and it comes with support for Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Chainfire is also testing out a new driver that enables CF.lumen to work without modifications to the /system partition. There are minor bugs but remember, it is a BETA release so some bugs are expected.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
With the advent of bigger phone screens, it’s nearly impossible for most people to reach every corner of their phone using only one-hand (unless you’re LeBron James). Yet big phones like those from the Note series are still very popular due to how comfortable they are is to consume video and web content. Some manufacturers recognize that their customers will often face a situation where they want to use their phone with only one hand, so they’ve built in ‘one-handed mode’ options to resize the contents of the display on the fly. For example, Galaxy Note phones have a setting to shrink the screen to a single corner, and Apple has recently introduced their own solution called ‘Reachability’ to bump the screen contents halfway down the display. But for phones like the Nexus 6, you don’t have any stock options to enable one-handed mode.
Overscan Compensation
Luckily, we can take advantage of a feature that’s typically not supposed to be used for phone displays at all. It’s called correcting for ‘overscan’. In an effort to always present a full-screen experience for TV viewers, many TVs may clip the edges of the input display, resulting in overscan. Thus to correct for this in Android, Google allowed developers with API Level 18 (Android 4.3 KitKat) to start using overscan margins to compensate for the display mismatch. Google also shifted a few display options such as resolution/DPI changing from the ‘am’ shell command (ActivityManager) to ‘wm’ shell command (WindowManager) and introduced the ‘overscan’ command to enable developers to easily test their apps right on their devices.
One-Handed Mode Demonstration
Requirements
Here are the commands you’ll need.
wm overscan LEFT,TOP,RIGHT,BOTTOM
where each direction is a pixel count that represents how far from that direction the display should move. For example, if you set TOP to 600, the contents of your screen will move 600 pixels down. You can experiment with a combination of each to best find a set of values that will shrink the screen to your liking. You can mimic Apple’s Reachability for example by setting TOP to half your vertical resolution. In order to reset the overscan, simply use:
wm overscan reset
Pretty simple! It works well for shrinking the screen down to reach a button, but I’ve personally had some Google keyboard issues with it. Give it a shot and let us know in the comments if you find any issues!
Reddit User OiYou has posted a very short video where the Nexus 5X Notification LED is blinking. The LED on the Nexus have not been talked about much, and being behind the speaker grilles, people expect them to be small and substandard. The video, however, demonstrates a clear and rather unmistakable LED on the Nexus 5X
