A new application called Cardboard Camera will allow you to take what Google is calling a VR Photo and it will work perfectly in their Google Cardboard viewers. To take one of these VR Photos, you just hold out your phone and move it around you in a circle. Then, you can view that moment in VR by dropping the phone into a Google Cardboard viewer.
Android is undoubtedly the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Before Android’s supremacy there was one king – Windows Mobile. Now the fallen emperor is back after long years spent in the shadow of Android and iOS.
Ladies and gentlemen – Windows 10 is available to download for Xiaomi Mi 4! And here comes the best part – it’s officially supported by both Microsoft and Xiaomi.
The Asian market is still a place covered with fog of war for Microsoft. You can find plenty of Chinese and other Asian OEMs releasing hundreds of devices yearly, but most of them use Android as their operating system of choice. Microsoft wants to change that. The Windows 10 release for the Xiaomi Mi 4 is a cornerstone for global expansion of Microsoft’s mobile OS.
Xiaomi introduced its plan to launch Windows 10 for some devices in March, and they needed 9 months to prepare a working ROM for the Mi 4. If you have the LTE version of this device you can download the ROM from the MIUI forums. If you want to use Windows 10 on your phone, you need to become a part of the Windows Insider program, which allows users to test some beta stuff from Microsoft.
Installation is quite simple and requires you to use a Windows PC. It uses a well known soft-brick saver for Qualcomm devices – MiFlash. After setting up an application and drivers you need to simply connect your Mi 4 and click the flash button. It’s even simpler than installing a custom recovery or some home-baked kernels. Be aware that Windows 10 is still in its testing phase, so there are bugs – possibly a lot of them. Luckily, XDA developers and enthusiasts are not afraid of bugs as this means that there is room for improvement.
The Xiaomi Mi 4 is not a new device, but it sports a very popular Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 system-on-chip. This processor is present in notable devices such as the OnePlus One, HTC One M8, Sony Xperia Z3 or Samsung Galaxy S5. Releasing software compatible with a similar architecture makes the porting much easier for these phones. Hopefuly we will see a lot of Windows 10 projects for theoretically unsupported devices. There are significant differences between Linux kernel and the NT kernel, but we truly hope that developers will find the way. They always do!
Are you excited to see the Windows 10 on the Xiaomi Mi 4? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
If you’re a developer looking for an app to help with the quality assurance process (or for checking out your competitors’ apps), then you might be interested in Sony’s free app analysis tool called AppXplore. It’s a simple app, but it provides an incredible amount of useful data about each and every app.
Main View
When you launch the app, you get a nice list of each application currently installed. Opening the menu reveals a few useful operations you can perform to more easily find the app you’re looking for — namely you can search your app via keyword or use one of the built-in filter lists to re-populate the app list using specific criteria. And starting today, you can use new filters that account for features introduced in Android 6.0 Marshmallow (auto backup and permissions).
Package Details
Once you’ve found the application you’re looking to analyze in more detail, you can simply tap on the app to bring up its Package Details. In this view, you can see the package name, version number, a list of shared/native libraries, target SDK version, permissions, and more. In addition, if you pull up the menu you’re able to see the resources used by the application in great detail. All of the information you bring up can easily be saved directly onto your device or shared via email or text message. For regular users, the highlighted “dangerous” permissions could prove useful if you’re looking to restrict permissions to protect your sensitive personal data.
Most regular users won’t find much use out of this app, but if you’re a developer wanting to ensure your own app is being built properly then AppXplore provides a method to quickly look at your app’s details without diving into the cumbersome manifest files.
Do you find these kind of applications useful? Let us know how you use them below!
We all have our phones slip off our hands every now and then. Some of us opt for cases, but the bravest and sometimes most foolish among us refuse to do so in order to keep their phone’s design intact. Protected or not, what was your worst phone drop like? Did you sigh in relief or curse in frustration?
Google recently uploaded Android 6.0+ compatible versions of the Phone and Contacts app on the Play Store, but has now pulled them down for some reason. The existing url’s for both these apps now return a 404 error. If you were looking to get your hands on to these, you can still find Google Phone and Google Contacts on ApkMirror.
The team behind BlueStacks, the popular Android app player for desktop, has released the second iteration of the app, called BlueStacks 2. This brings along much needed multi tasking capabilities to the app player, along with optimizations and toolbar functions like shaking the screen and setting the location.
Right before the festive season, OnePlus has made the OnePlus 2 invite free, permanently. Starting from 5th Dec, users can now freely purchase the device without hunting for an invite. Along with the OP2, the OnePlus X will also be available invite free during December 5-7. OnePlus is also offering other deals and discounts, along with a guarantee of delivery before holidays on orders put in before December 7.
