OxygenOS is the foundation of the OnePlus 3T’s Great User Experience

OxygenOS has been OnePlus’s default and primary ROM for almost two years now, first released for the OnePlus One as a flashable zip for users to break away from the increasingly-unsupported but excellent CyanogenMod S ROMs their phone originally shipped with.

This software offering took center-stage with the OnePlus 2 back in 2015, a year full of devices we mostly remember for their flaws rather than their virtues. The OnePlus 2 itself almost encompassed all of the issues many people had with 2015 flagships — its Snapdragon 810 held it back, it removed up-and-coming features like NFC for no good reason, and then offered me-too (or me-first) hardware that wasn’t properly utilized, like the Type-C port devoid of USB 3.0 speeds or fast charging. OnePlus had a really good thing with their original “flagship killer”, but they blew it with their sequel, the punchline being the comical label of “2016 flagship killer”. The OnePlus 2 was an exercise in disappointing compromises, yet there was a short period of time through which I used that device exclusively despite having prettier, faster, and less-compromised smartphones within my reach. It was all thanks to OxygenOS, the one redeeming quality that allowed me to enjoy the OnePlus 2.

OxygenOS back then was a lot more bare-bones than it is now, with a slightly different design philosophy. Back at their originally unveiling ahead of the OnePlus 2’s launch, we learned that OnePlus wanted to create a slim and fast experience, not unlike the CyanogenMod 11S ROM their first phone shipped with. The AMAs with the software team further revealed that they were emphasizing staying close to stock, but adding tactful features that could only add to the experience. They somewhat nailed it with their first attempt, and OxygenOS was indeed extremely close to Stock Android, with relatively-fast performance on the OnePlus 2 and some features that preemptively emulated future features from the then-upcoming Marshmallow, while borrowing some custom ROM favorites as well.

The Good

In a way, custom ROMs were part of Oxygen’s DNA — by then, the OnePlus One already built a reputation among enthusiasts for being developer-friendly, and plenty of users loved the fact that they could get whatever feature or customization they wanted going on it. It was no surprise, then, that OxygenOS – a ROM that was also developed by some legacy custom ROM developers that OnePlus hired – would offer a similar feel; it really felt like a lightweight custom ROM in many ways, though with a higher degree of consumer-grade polish (granted, it still had a long way to go, as we’ll detail below).

It was with the OnePlus 3 that OxygenOS really got to shine. No longer was the lightweight ROM overburdened by faulty silicon — now it packed a faster, more-efficient Snapdragon 820 flanked by a copious 6GB of RAM and zippy UFS 2.0 storage. The OnePlus 3’s OxygenOS kept all of what made the original great, then further added to its feature set once more, in tactful and measured ways. I would go as far as saying that my initial impressions with OxygenOS on the OnePlus 3 beat those I’ve had with both any other OEM stock ROM, and even recent OxygenOS releases that haven’t matched the surprise I found while originally reviewing the device. It was a breath of fresh air, and while we see a relatively larger number of OEMs offering Stock Android ROMs today, I think OnePlus nailed it there and then. Some Nougat features, speedy responsiveness, a proper dark theme to make use of the device’s AMOLED panel, and an aesthetically-pleasing UI were all positives I loved from the get-go. Then OnePlus had to change some of that, momentarily.

The Ugly

The OnePlus 3’s Community Builds adopted a new user interface that deviated from the Stock approach of the original OxygenOS, changing colors and generally making it less attractive with worse proportions and animations in system UI elements like the notification panel, recents menu and settings. This wasn’t surprising when one considers that these changes were instrumental in the eventual merger of the OxygenOS and HydrogenOS frameworks.

The company figured out that a unified team working on a unified base with different application layers could help speed up updates, and address one of the more-criticized aspects of previous devices. The Community Builds, then, were growing pains that culminated in the (luckily short-lived) Marshmallow stock ROM for the OnePlus 3T. The concept of having community builds with various testing channels is brilliant and a great community engine, but at the time, said updates had disappointed me.

It felt like change for the sake of change, perhaps a petty compromise between Hydrogen and Oxygen

In my OnePlus 3T review, I noted I wasn’t a big fan of this new approach to software. While it didn’t deviate too much from the original OxygenOS, none of the changes felt clever or meaningful, and none improved upon the simplicity and effortlessness of the original package.

It felt like change for the sake of change, perhaps a petty compromise between HydrogenOS and OxygenOS, given both featured such disparate design philosophies. Enthusiast outcry and fan feedback ensued, and the company reversed the change with the Nougat update, which offers a Pixel-like blue for its default accent color and a more traditional user interface. It was at this point where OxygenOS not only redeemed itself, but also became my favorite flavor of Android– finally surpassing the Pixel XL’s, which I held in the highest regard.

The Bad

OxygenOS has also had (and overcame) many hurdles and criticism. Some of its more pointless features stubbornly remain in there, such as the Shelf feature which was permissible on the OnePlus 2, as it was a promise of things to come, yet is still a not worthy contender today. There have been numerous conscious decisions and unconscious mistakes, though, that temporarily opaqued the better parts of the ROM. For example, upon the release of the OnePlus 3, OxygenOS was massively underutilizing the hardware of the device. I was one of the few that called this out and proposed a solution, and OnePlus was quick to act and react to the criticism by modifying its settings and allowing for more apps to remain in the background. Still, it made us all ponder, why would they not allow their 6GB smartphone to actually offer the capabilities they proudly advertised?

Another short-lived complaint was the exclusion of an sRGB mode to balance out the saturated default calibration of OnePlus’ “Optic AMOLED” panel. The company set out to make its display stand out and went as far as giving it its own buzzword, yet it turned out to be extremely color inaccurate and saturated, and it even displayed some banding and contrast issues off the bat. AnandTech and independent reporters were quick to point this out, and OnePlus offered reviewers an OTA with a proposed fix which quickly trickled down to consumer builds. It was, once more, a quick fix, but it still begs the question: why would OnePlus advertise Optic AMOLED as a better viewing experience, when no metrics backed that up? Especially since the changes were mostly calibration, which wasn’t well-received at launch (luckily, sRGB mode ended up being surprisingly color-accurate).

And that’s not all. We also caught OnePlus cheating on benchmarks, through a code block that specifically targeted certain application packages by name, and then adjusted scaling behavior to minimize score variance. This was unacceptable and the company addressed it quickly enough, but at the same time, once more it makes us wonder: why would they? It’s not like it introduced critical gains, it’s not like the OnePlus 3 couldn’t sustain class-leading performance without artificial cheating mechanisms. We suspect that it might have been a result of the merger between the two different software teams, but that wouldn’t excuse the previously-mentioned decisions.

Nor would it excuse a plethora of decisions that raised our concerns over the phone’s security and software integrity, with some of the problems we reported like IMEI leaking being wholly within their knowledge and control. None of this can be dismissed, even if it doesn’t directly impact our forward-facing UX (the point of this article).

I do take solace in the fact that OnePlus has been addressing all of these issues, however, and listening to feedback from its forum-goers and enthusiasts from communities like XDA and reddit, as well as reviewers. We’ve actually influenced OxygenOS and prompted OnePlus to fix issues, remove non-sense or add or refine useful functionality. The company is clearly open to feedback, and while they have messed up their software support on previous devices, they seem to committed enough to the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. Which brings me to my next and final point.

One of OnePlus’ Crown Jewels

It is actually really impressive, from a customer’s perspective, to see OxygenOS evolve so much with such frequent updates and ongoing feature inclusions. It has seen near-constant improvement, though not always consistent. In this regard, OnePlus has redeemed itself from the atrocious support that its older devices received (and are still suffering). If ignoring the OnePlus X and OnePlus 2 was instrumental in achieving a better user experience on the OnePlus 3, then I am inclined to say it was a smart decision for the future of the company. Truth be told, OxygenOS has improved a lot and has adopted many, many new and useful features while cleaning up its mistakes and embracing a new personality through UI refinements. All of this wasn’t without growing pains, and it’s been a tumultuous ride at times, but when I look at the final package I can’t help but recognize the software is near-perfect for the demographic I belong to, the niche I am part of (and you probably are too), and what I personally expect from my device.

I am not the kind of person that believes Stock Android is an intrinsic good and a positive aspect of whatever phone decides to feature it, either. In fact, I find myself liking OxygenOS, and even TouchWiz for that matter, now that they are further from Stock — it just needs to be done right. The short-lived community builds pre-Nougat hadn’t done it well enough, just like Samsung’s awkward and early half-baked adoption of Material Design hadn’t done it right either. Now, both OxygenOS and TouchWiz have found their own identity and a matching UI that enables both to offer the features they need for the people they target. Not all OEM ROMs have been evolving equally in the past couple of years, and in my opinion, none have done it better than OxygenOS in the end, not even TouchWiz which I also believe has been getting a lot better.

It’s not that it’s close to Stock, but that it’s close-enough in all the right places, and that it changes what could use a better solution. It’s also not that it’s just fast, but that it’s as fast as I expect from this hardware. The features they added are ones I use frequently, such as scrolling screenshots and quick capture editing, and while they aren’t unique (Samsung, in particular, has introduced much of this way before), they are implemented rather seamlessly at no expense to the user. There are still bits and pieces to address (I, for one, would like to see more customization) but considering that this ROM was a quick patch to a rough legal problem, devised just over two years ago, OnePlus has done a very good job with OxygenOS and it makes for an exceptional daily driver.

What do you think of Oxygen OS? I want to hear your opinion as well, so sound off below!

Samsung has a long history of duplicating applications and services which are already offered by either AOSP or a proprietary service from Google. Some OEMs have chosen to embrace the fully-featured applications and services that Google offers (like we saw with the HTC 10), but then some OEMs like Samsung have chosen to be as independent from Google as possible. This actually results in a divisive debate within the community.

Some people feel this is filling up their internal storage with too many duplicated applications and services, while others enjoy it because they don’t like being tied down to Google’s ecosystem. We can’t really blame Samsung for doing this though because the more they rely on Google for these services then the more control they’re giving over (which sometimes results in less money they can potentially earn too). Samsung shut down their music service late last year (Samsung Milk Music), which is likely why they chose to go with Google Play Music this year.

So last week, Samsung announced they would be using Google Play Music as the default music player and the default music service on both the Galaxy S8 as well as the Galaxy S8+. Not only are the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ getting this treatment, but Samsung says it will happen on all Android-based Samsung phones and tablets launched in 2017.  However, there are some limitations and restrictions put in place depending on a couple of variables.

Samsung says this could change depending on which market you are located in, and which carrier you buy your device from. We’re also told that device support will be expanded on in the future too. These customers will have the ability to uploaded as many as 100,000 tracks to their own personal library (up from the regular 50,000). Lastly, those who purchase the Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+ or the Galaxy Tab S3 can activate a 3-month free trial of Google Play Music (which also includes access to YouTube Red).

Source: Samsung Newsroom

Early reports indicate that Samsung’s new flagship devices are off to a pretty great start, with the lineup breaking the previous pre-orders records set by the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. However, not all things are bright and beautiful: the Galaxy S8 and S8+ have attracted a quite a bit of criticism for its red-tinted display on some units.

The issue of reddish display first came to know when the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ went on sale in South Korea, with many owners posting images of red-tinted display of their Galaxy S8 units on social media sites. It was believed the culprit had to do with Samsung’s attempt to strengthen red color on their OLED panels. Samsung reportedly developed deep red OLED displays for Galaxy S8 devices in order to avoid the issue of too much green due to the uneven distribution of subpixels in a pentile matrix. Initially, Samsung denied such issue was due to a hardware fault and advised users to adjust the color balance on their devices from within the display settings. But as more consumers raised their voices on the issue, Samsung announced on Thursday that a new software update would be rolled out next week to readjust the color balance on affected units.

Now according to a new report from the US-based review publication, Consumer Reports, the problem of the reddish display on the Galaxy S8 is not something that one should worry about.

To check the veracity of the reddish tint issue, Consumer Reports tested eight Galaxy S8 devices and found that out of eight devices, four Galaxy S8 had slightly reddish tint. The publication also notes that the issue is not immediately noticeable unless the user is comparing the two devices side-by-side.

“Our display evaluators noted that displays of four of our test models appeared slightly more red than the other four. It’s unclear how much consumers might object to the red tint, especially if they weren’t looking at two phones side-by-side.”

Additionally, Consumer Reports also said Samsung would release the software update as early as next week to address the color balance problem.

So while the issue is still there in some units, the good news is that it’s just a result of a software calibration problem, or at least it can reportedly be addressed through software, and should be fixed with the upcoming software update.

Source: BusinessKorea

What do you think? Is Samsung underplaying the significance of the displays’ red tint, or is it really not a real issue? Sound off in the comments!

With the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ reaching the hands of more and more consumers, development on the devices was bound to begin sooner rather than later. Kickstarting the slew of software modifications on the S8+ Exynos variant is this release of TWRP.

XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor  has built TWRP for the Samsung Galaxy S8+ Exynos variant. The recovery build has been tested on the Korean and International variants of the devices and is confirmed as working on those, though the developer notes that it should work on other Exynos variants as well.

Installation for the recovery is through Odin. Users wanting to flash this must make sure to enable “OEM Unlock” in the Developer Options before proceeding with anything.

As kernel sources have not been released yet for the device, features like MTP are not available on this build. The developer recognizes that the recovery could be difficult to operate without MTP/ADB  (inability to transfer files from computer to phone) and when /data partition is encrypted (inability to view internal storage in TWRP). So to make life easier, two flashable zips are included in the recovery image itself. First, users can disable encryption by flashing the “no-verity-opt-encrypt.zip” and make /data encryption optional. Second, users can also root by simply flashing “Magisk-v12.0-arm64.zip” to install Magisk and then root their device using Magisk.

The availability of TWRP will make it easier to install other modifications on the device. While it might take a while for full-fledged AOSP based ROMs to appear on the device (especially on the Exynos variant), smaller modifications as well as TouchWiz-based modified stock ROMs will offer more choice to flash-happy users in the mean time.

Have you flashed this TWRP build yet on your Samsung Galaxy S8+? Let us know your experience in the comments below!

Android O is around the corner, yet according to official statistics, Nougat is still installed on less than 5% of devices. We have good news for the owners of the T-Mobile Galaxy Note 5, though:

T-Mobile confirmed that the Nougat update will be available to flash next week. News of the confirmation have been delivered by T-Mobile’s “Gadget Guy” Des. According to the tweet, the rollout is scheduled for early next week. It’s version 7.0, which is a little outdated nowadays, but it is still a welcome upgrade.

FRIDAY SOFTWARE UPDATE: Approval of Android 7.0 Nougat for #GalaxyNote5 today! @TMobile customers should start to see it early next week! pic.twitter.com/56VRHZoEdA

— Des (@askdes) 22 April 2017

The Galaxy Note5 is still technically the latest S-Pen device currently offered by the Korean OEM. Its successor, the Galaxy Note 7, was discontinued shortly after its premiere due to battery volatility.

This update for the Note5 is a good news both for users and developers working on custom ROMs for this device. A new version of Android means that users should see more TouchWiz Nougat ROMs in the near future.

When it comes to security, the recently-released Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus offers a plethora of authentication options a user can choose from to securely unlock their device. The user can choose whether they want convenience over security or vice versa and set an unlocking method accordingly. The device comes with a fingerprint scanner, iris scanner, facial recognition feature as well as all the standard Android security options such as PIN, pattern, and password to offer enhanced security.

While security options like the fingerprint scanner and face unlock can easily be found on other Android devices, too, the iris scanner is something which you will only find in the Galaxy S8. The iris scanner, as the name suggests, requires scanning user’s eyes before granting access to the device, and is arguably one of the most secure among other biometric security options.

The iris scanner is believed to be more secure and harder to manipulate for attackers than, say, fingerprint scans and passwords. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that banks and stores will be interested in taking advantage of the Galaxy S8’s iris scanning capabilities to authenticate mobile purchases in their services.

According to a report from The Korea Herald, a number of financial companies in South Korea are looking to offer users with an option to authenticate digital transactions with the iris scanner on their Galaxy S8. One of the companies seeking to implement such support in its mobile application is Samsung Card Co., a subsidiary of Samsung Life Insurance and also the largest credit card company in South Korea, the report states. Other big financial companies such as Shinhan, Hana, and Woori are also said to be planning to add the feature in their services.

The report squares with a previous report which also suggested that Samsung would make use of iris scanner and other biometric security options available on the Galaxy S8 to strengthen security while making mobile payments.

This will be the first time the iris scanner will be used to authenticate digital payments. The last year’s Galaxy Note 7 was the first to come with an iris scanner, but at the time, its usability was only limited to unlocking the device and logging into accounts.

SOURCE: The Korea Herald

Some of the “smallest” improvements found in the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ reside in the camera department. That is not entirely a bad thing, because the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge did set the bar really high for their camera performance.

The front camera on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ did receive a hardware upgrade. The S8 features an 8MP sensor with f/1.7 aperture, with the new highlight feature being its autofocus capabilities. This is the first Samsung device that features proper autofocus on the front, which should help with selfies.

Interestingly, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+’s front camera has another trick up its sleeve:

JerryRigEverything noticed in his teardown video that the front camera on the Galaxy S8 features a stabilization mechanism. The camera module and its internal movements suggest it was actually designed to make use of Optical Image Stabilization. The front camera on the retail and review units do not seem to have have OIS capabilities enabled though, so Samsung may have just been toying with the idea.

What are your thoughts on the disabled-OIS on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+’s front camera? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: YouTube: JerryRigEverything

Despite the fact that Google’s Chrome browser is the market leader in Internet browsers, Google is always working to bring additional features to millions of users in order to stay competitive. Scroll anchoring is one such feature that, after nearly 10 months in testing, was finally released to end users. But even if it takes Google months to officially release its experimental features, users can go to chrome://flags to try them out right now. Just recently we showed you how to enable the new Custom Context Menu feature in Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary, for instance. This time, we wanted to talk about a potentially exciting feature that Google is working on called copyless paste.

Copyless Paste

This new feature can be found in Chrome versions 59+, meaning users on the Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary channels can access it. All you have to do is paste the following text into your address bar: chrome://flags#enable-copyless-paste.

Just based on the description of this flag, it seems like a really smart change to potentially integrate Google Chrome with the rest of the apps on our device. The feature promises to provide suggestions for text input based on recent web browsing context, and as an example it states that if you are looking at a restaurant’s website and switch to the Google Maps app then the keyboard would display that restaurant’s name as a search suggestion.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that this flag actually works yet. I’ve tried going to numerous restaurants’ webpages and then opening the Maps app, but I never saw the text input suggestions in Gboard that the feature promised. I’ve also asked a friend running Android O to try to get this feature to work, but to no avail.

We’ve heard rumors of this feature being worked on before Android O was officially unveiled, and based on the description of the “Copy Less” feature that was exclusively provided to VentureBeat at the time, we have strong reason to suspect that this Chrome flag and the rumored feature are one and the same.

I am not exactly sure how this feature actually works under the hood (any experts in Chromium are free to chime in), but I do know that it is currently in active development and testing so it may take some time for this feature to actually start working.

We’ll be following the development of this feature to see how it pans out, and will update you if/when it starts working.

Google is constantly at work adding additional features to the world’s most popular internet browser, Chrome. Given the sheer number of users that rely on Google Chrome on a daily basis, Google rolls out new features after a lot of internal testing. It took nearly 10 months for the scroll anchoring feature to begin officially rolling out, for instance. Although some of these features may take a long time to officially roll out, users can still try them out by enabling the experimental flag in chrome://flags. Today, we would like to draw your attention towards one such experimental feature known as the custom context menu, which revamps the look and feel of the context menu that pops up when you long-press any link, image, or video.

Chrome’s New Context Menu

For years, anytime you long-pressed a link, image, or video in Google Chrome you would see a dialog of text buttons show up. Spend enough time with Chrome and you’ll grow accustomed to where exactly you need to tap as soon as the dialog shows up. Google wants to do away with potential misclicks and confusion by changing the way the long-press context menu looks.

Here are some screenshots of the changes to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about:

As you can see in the screenshots above, the new context menu adds icons to help you quickly decide which option to press. For the link context menu, the URL is collapsed by default, which makes longer URLs (such as those copied from a Google search) take up much less screen space. Tapping on the URL in the new context menu will expand it. The new image context menu also adds a small thumbnail of the image that you long-pressed on, which is pretty cool. The video context menu doesn’t add anything extra apart from a download icon next to the text.

Finally, in those cases where long-pressing opens up a context menu that lists both link-based and image-based options, such as when you long-press on a thumbnail image that is part of an article, the new context menu separates the link and image context menu options.

Admittedly, the new Custom Context Menu doesn’t really add much to Google Chrome in terms of features. However, for those of us who frequently use the context menu to share links, images, or videos, this revamp is certainly a welcome quality of life change.

Enabling the new Context Menu

Chrome’s new Custom Context Menu can be enabled on Chrome versions 59+. On Android, that means users who are on the Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary channels. If you are on either of these builds, you can enable the flag by pasting the following text into your address bar:

chrome://flags#enable-custom-context-menu

Change “default” to “enabled” then tap on the button that shows up asking you to restart the browser. You should now see Chrome’s new context menu.

What do you think of this UI change? Let us know in the comments below!

Since the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ was first introduced, a few people noticed that some of them had a red tint to it. The first time I perosnally saw someone notice this was in Erica Griffin’s hands-on video at the Unpacked launch event here in the United States. But then a few days ago we started to see reports about the issue being widespread, and that many owners in South Korea right are facing this issue. Some thought this was just the nature of OLED technology.

Because it’s organic, it is expected to have some sort of variance from one device to another. We’ve seen this time and time again on Samsung devices, and others which are using AMOLED panels that were sourced from Samsung. This is generally not a widespread issue though and most of the time the difference is rather small. For whatever reason though, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+.

In her video, Erica showed that you could adjust the red color balance slider to reduce the amount that is shown on the screen. This is certainly not an ideal solution though and a new announcement from Samsung says the issue will be fixed with a software update. This new OTA update to fix the red tint issue is said to be coming next week at the end of April, and Samsung assures their customers that there isn’t a problem with the phone itself.

Instead, they feel the issue lies within the software itself and that it is simply a bug with the color balance feature within TouchWiz. Even with the red tint issue being known, it doesn’t seem to be impacting sales of the device. The Galaxy S8 and S8+ has been able to amass ~1 million pre-orders in South Korea. This is more than 5 times the amount of pre-orders the company saw for the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge in the country last year.

Source: The Korea Herald

The last time we talked about Paranoid Android was in September 2016, when the PA team had announced their ROM base update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Stable builds were made available for their list of supported devices, and more features and a Nougat update were also promised for the future. But since then, we haven’t heard much from the team.

But today, the Paranoid Android team began to tease another return.

Image is titled: “PA – Nice Try”, with the hashtag: #stayparanoid

The teaser is, as one would expect, cryptic and does not say much on what we should expect. The image alludes to Android O with the ‘O’ symbolization, but since Android O is still available only as Developer Previews and not available in AOSP yet, we are not counting on an Android O update anytime soon.

What is a possibility is an upcoming Android 7.1 Nougat update for the ROM. You can see work ongoing on Paranoid Android’s Gerrit for an upcoming Nougat MR1 release.

Paranoid Android’s Project Lead, Arz Bhatia, also had a few words to say in their teaser:

Just to clear out a few things – We try to release builds when they’re stable enough to be called public releases and abandoned the concept of nightlies a long time back.

Paranoid Android 6 was released when it was stable enough for daily use and was updated only when there were critical bug fixes needed. Due to the lack of manpower, we shifted our focus from features first to stability first.

By head count, we only have 3-5 active developers working on the project – the team is still amazing but we lost a few of our key members a while back.

Paranoid Android is still a community project, it’s free to use and open for all. The developers working on the project do it for the community with no profit-making involved. I’m here to represent my team and the comments over here are not really helping in motivating them to continue working on the project.

We’re passionate about building good products and we only release when we’ve reached the level of goodness, perfection & stability that we had in mind when we first started working on the project.

Having more updated options in the custom ROM scene is definitely a good thing for a device and its third-party development scenario. We look forward to what Paranoid Android has in store for us.

What are your thoughts on Paranoid Android’s teaser? What do you think their update will bring? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Thanks to XDA Senior Member EvoWizz for the tip!

HTC took to Twitter to tease its new upcoming product — the HTC U, which is internally known as the HTC Ocean. The device is scheduled for launch on 16th May 2017.

Squeeze for the Brilliant U. 05.16.2017 https://t.co/89OuHXbBlt pic.twitter.com/jLaeFD2wMW

— HTC (@htc) April 20, 2017

The highlight of the HTC U will be its “squeezable” mid-frame, which will add a novel input and control method to the device. Users will be able to utilize the touch-sensitive frame of the device to control actions. Details are sparse on the level of input and control the device and its software would allow, but it will definitely give the device a feature that will stand out from the rest of the crowd.

We have had a brief look at the device thanks to a live image leaked earlier by notable leaker Evan Blass. For its specs, the HTC U is rumored to come with a 5.5″ QHD display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, 64/128GB of internal storage with microSD expandability, a 12MP Sony IMX362 on the rear and a 16MP Sony IMX351 on the front. The phone will also launch with Android 7.1 Nougat with HTC’s Sense 9 UX skin on top.

Are you excited for HTC’s next flagship, the HTC U? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: Twitter: HTC

The Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ were near the end of March, and Samsung’s marketing and advertising machinery has been hard at work to ensure word about the devices and all of their new features and functionality reaches far and wide. Being Samsung’s current flagships, there are a lot of expectations from the devices, and early opinions suggest Samsung may be onto yet another successful flagship.

With the devices now reaching the hands of consumers, we’d like to pose this question to the people that matter: you!

What do you think of the new Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+? Did you pre-order the device and have you received it yet? How has your early experience been so far with the device? Do you like Samsung’s newest design language? What do you not like about the device so far? Is the device living up to your expectations so far?

Let us know in the comments below!

And just like that – Google Home is now far more useful for multi-member households. Google has today announced that multi-user support is rolling out for the Google Home. In a blog post today, Google states that families can now connect up to 6 Google accounts with a single Google Home device.

The Google Home will be able to distinguish the voice data between each individual member and provide personalized responses to user queries. For instance, users can now ask about playing a specific playlist from their personal Google Play Music library, ask about their own commute time, their schedule, or more and the Google Home will be able to pick out which user is asking this question and answer appropriately.

The feature is rolling out to Google Home users in the United States today, while users in the United Kingdom will receive an update in the coming months. Users on the latest version of the Google Home app should be able to link additional accounts to the Google Home by opening up the app and looking for a card that states “multi-user is available.” If this card does not show up, then you can tap the menu icon to bring up your connected devices and select to add your linked account from there. During the new account linking process, users will be asked to teach the Google Assistant to recognize their voice. Other features such as personalized commute and music playback can also be setup in the Google Home app.

Although I’m the only one in my household who actually uses the Google Home, I believe this is a massive step forward for the home assistant device to receive its due attention. Now, the Google Home won’t annoyingly be restricted to acting as a personal assistant for a single user, but rather the device will become what it always should have been – a true home assistant for the entire family.

In July of last year, Google announced two new APIs for their Google Cloud Platform customers that had to do with speech recognition. These were made available in beta form to a limited number of developers and the Cloud Natural Language API and the Cloud Speech API. Along with being limited to a certain number of developers, the functionality of these APIs were also quite limited as Google was still working to enhance and optimize their capabilities.

The Cloud Speech API is Google’s own Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) service and it actually powers the speech recognition capabilities for a number of Google’s products (such as Google Search, Google Now, Google Assistant). Google took that technology and adapted it to fit the needs of Google Cloud customers and this was how the Cloud Speech API was born. Earlier this week, Google not only made this technology generally available to developers, but they also announced a big update for it as well.

This update includes a couple of enhancements to previous features and added support for some new file types. Some developers had complained that transcribing long-form audio wasn’t very accurate, so Google says this update will improve things on that end. The service is also faster in certain cases with developers seeing it being 3 times as fast as before for batch scenarios. The last highlight of this update is the added support for WAV, Opus and Speex file formats.

Since the launch of the Google Cloud Speech API, the company has seen a couple of popular use cases for the service. Naturally, Google has seen a number of developers adopting the service to add voice search, voice commands and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to their product. But they’re also seeing it being used for speech analytics and this has proven useful for businesses who are looking for real-time insights from their call centers.

Source: Google Cloud Platfrom Blog

According to a new report by The Wall Street Journal, Google is working on a built-in ad blocker solution for desktop and mobile versions of its Chrome web browser. The ad blocker will be turned on by default and will block out those specific types of ads which are responsible for ruining the browsing experience, the report says.

Not all ads will be blocked, though: Google’s own ads will still be displayed. The ad blocker will reportedly filter out pop-up ads, countdown timers, auto-playing audio and video ads and other objectional ad experiences which are defined to be unacceptable as per the standards of Coalition for Better Ads. According to the report, Google will require site owners to follow a specific set of standards to ensure their ads doesn’t get block by the Chrome’s built-in ad blocker. In short, say bye to those annoying, buzzing adds taking over your phone for a few seconds.

The move is said to be an attempt to combat the annoying ads and bad advertising practices. By implementing a native ad blocker, Google is also seeking to lower down the increasing usage of ad blockers.

A built-in ad blocker will make far more sense for the mobile version of Chrome than its desktop counterpart. On the desktop version, you can install a third-party ad blocker to effectively block all ads, but there is presently no such way to do so on Chrome for mobile, not without modifications most people don’t have access to at least.

The WSJ says the feature is currently being developed, and Google could announce the new feature “within weeks.” At the same time, the report also notes that such feature may never come to fruition and that Google could decide to scrap the plan altogether, just like it has done with many other projects in the past.

Either way, a built-in ad blocker in Chrome sounds like a great idea and even if doesn’t help get rid of all the ads, it can, at least, improve the browsing experience to a great extent for end users by blocking out only the nasty ones. By making this a default feature, ad companies would be compelled to weed out bad ads and actors. It’s also a smart move for Google, as it’d mean the ad-creator controls the ad-blocker… for better or worse.

What do you think of this kind of ad-blocking strategy? Is it a genius idea, or is it bound to fail? Sound off in the comments below!

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The LineageOS team has been graciously providing the community a weekly summary of all the notable changes that have occurred with the successor of the most popular custom ROM in the Android community.

The highlight of this week’s update is that LineageOS has been merged up to Android Nougat’s 7.1.2 branch as well as including April’s Security Patch. This merge includes all AOSP security patches and features that Google has integrated into the platform. Builds starting from April 14th will be including the merge.

Apart from Android 7.1.2, the LineageOS team has also fixed the issue where Extra Tiles led to an increase in battery usage. All of the April fools goodies have also been removed, though there is still no word on what their actual new mascot will be. The LineageOS website and Wiki page now also make use of HTTPS by default, for added security.

The following devices were also added to the build roster for LineageOS 14.1 automated builds:

The following device was removed from the build roster by the maintainers until some major bugs are fixed:

Other changes such as:

Along with these changes, the LineageOS team has setup a monthly LineageOS infrastructure costs wiki page to let donors know how the funding is being used. Donations can currently be made in Bitcoin, although the team is working to bring support for other means of payment as well. If you take advantage of the awesome work that the LineageOS team does (and given how many other ROMs use LOS as their base, you probably do even if you aren’t directly running LOS), then consider supporting their development work!