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No matter how much we may love a phone, there comes a time for it to head on to greener pastures, to shed its physical body and exchange bytes with the souls of other great handsets in the sky. Today I am sad to write the obituary for the Droid Maxx Developer Edition. This is a great phone with a massive 3500mAh battery and support for wireless charging, giving it the optimal power situation. Yet despite packing so much juice, even it can't last forever. The Droid Maxx Developer Edition has reached the end of its life, and Motorola has taken the phone down from its site.
The HTC Desire 610 is now available from AT&T, marking the first time in years that the Desire brand has appeared on carrier store shelves in the US. The phone is very affordable, going for just $199.99 without an annual contract. With one, it's only 99 cents.
The Amazon Appstore doesn't have as many games as Google Play, but it sure knows how to give them away. In addition to the long-running free app of the day (today, Age of Zombies), the store regularly dishes out discounted games in mass. Today all but two of Disney's sixteen paid games are available for 99 cents each, with ten of them usually costing a couple dollars more.
The Amazon Fire phone is interesting for a number of reasons. It's the company's first attempt at a smartphone. It crams Fire OS into a smaller form factor than it's had to accommodate before. It has five - yes, five - front-facing cameras, four of which serve as the backbone for what Amazon calls Dynamic Perspective. One thing the phone is not interesting for, however, is being a good deal (more on that below). Nevertheless, it's now available for purchase from Amazon and AT&T.
Cartoon Network has released The Great Prank War simultaneously for Android (including Amazon) and iOS, and to make things sweeter, the game retails for $2.99 without any in-app purchases. For Regular Show fans, that makes this an experience to be enjoyed without the anxiety.
Update, 7-25-14: It looks like this over-the-air update was delayed for some reason. Samsung says it's coming in now.
Some discoveries are exciting enough to reach out to every Android Police reader all over the globe and bring them into our comments section to summon their best GIFs and memes. Other discoveries are simply amusing. Consider this one the latter. As it turns out, Play Store changelogs are capable of displaying emoji.
VR headsets are all the rage of late, and Samsung is one of the players expected to throw its virtual reality-producing hat goggles into the ring. Earlier this month, SamMobile provided a shot of the upcoming Gear VR product and a small taste the companion smartphone app that will ship with it. Now the site is back with a more in-depth look at some of the software that will manage the device.
The King of Fighters '98 was a special release from the very beginning. As the fifth game in SNK's popular fighting game series, it attracted players by bringing back brawlers who were killed off in previous versions. Future releases would return to the storyline, but '98 did not care and lacked a plot of its own. The game was all about the fighting, and now it's available for Android.
Microsoft may have its own smartphone platform, but when so many Xbox gamers walk around with Android phones in their pockets, it would be a shame to ignore them (or their wallets). So the company has rolled out another update to its Xbox One SmartGlass beta app, and this one introduces the ability to purchase games and add-ons for the console remotely. It's a nice feature for people who have run out to buy an Xbox One with or without Kinect.
Hold on to your butts, everyone. I'm about to drop some news that will blow your minds. Samsung has a new phone in the works, and there's one thing that will supposedly make this thing different from all of the others. SamMobile has leaked images of the upcoming Galaxy Alpha, a Galaxy S5 variant that will apparently be constructed at least in part out of aluminum.
Four months ago, part one of the Kickstarter-funded fifth installment of the Broken Sword series hit the Play Store costing $6.99. It has since dropped to $4.99, and today part two of the saga is available for one dollar more, a reasonable $5.99. Okay, now that the math is out of the way, let's recap. Broken Sword is a long-running adventure series (the 5 in the name may have given that away) that has been picking up fans since 1996, and given the success the franchise found on Kickstarter, clearly many of them have stuck around.
Power! Unlimited power! Okay, technically the Skiva PowerFlow Octofire limits us to charging eight devices at once, but in a world of plugging devices into power outlets one at a time, this sounds like a gift from the gods. Users can charge two families' worth of devices (or, for the sake of imagination, half of a college class, every phone in a very small office, or all the handsets that can fit in the pockets contained within a clown car). If the Octofire were a vehicle, it would be the Bugatti Veyron, capable of speeding halfway across a state in the time it takes most drivers to fumble for their EZ Pass.
The problem with sharing files over the internet is that everything is permanent. Digify doesn't fix this issue, but it sure attempts to by taking the Snapchat approach to privacy and applying it to files. Rather than giving someone permanent access to a document, it gets a time limit from the sender and initiates a self-destruct at said time. It even goes so far as to provide information on who has opened the file and how long they've interacted with it. For the sake of convenience, users can also browse Dropbox and send a file all from within the app.
Update: It looks like the app isn't compatible with some versions of the M8 yet either. Feel free to chime in if any of your Sense 6 devices are currently listed as compatible.
Those of you who don't have kids may feel free to hit the back button right about now. Don't worry, I won't mind. Not every post is going to catch your interest, and unless you have little tykes (or big tykes) running around the house, this isn't going to be one of them. Go ahead. We'll wait.
There are many browsers available for Android, several of which serving as mobile counterparts to their desktop alternatives. Opera comes to mind here, as does Firefox. The latter browser has received an update to version 31 and received a number of new features in the process. The top item on the ol' changelog is the ability to reorder homescreen panels (or pages, as I think of them). If you happen to view your reading list more often than bookmarks, for example, then you can now re-arrange the two so that your preferred page comes first.
When certain things finally happen, they make us want to search for that hidden ladder that takes people up to the rooftop and scream "Hallelujah," religious or no. This is one of those things. Google apparently no longer requires people with two-factor authentication enabled to sign in twice when setting up a new Android device or adding another account. Better yet, this change doesn't require Android L or anything fancy. Here's a video of the magic taking place on an HTC One M8.
The Kenu Airframe+ mounts phones to a vehicle's vent, placing it in plain sight of the driver without requiring dedicated hardware to occupy precious windshield real estate. It's a simple concept, even if it's not particularly groundbreaking. I first came across the concept at a department store selling a mount for cheap. But Kenu's product has a secret up its sleeve - it's hyper portable, and it's really good. Considering just how many complicated options there are out there, it's good to see someone reduce a mount down to the bare essentials and get it right.