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Asus was not on the radar of most US phone buyers until the ZenFone 2 popped up a few years ago with solid specs for a reasonable price, but the ZenFone 3 family hasn't been as prominent. It took Asus ages to roll these devices out in North America, and the pricing was not as generous. However, there are more variants of the ZenFone 3 still trickling out, from the flagship-level "Deluxe Special Edition" to the low-cost "Laser." The ZenFone 3 Zoom is somewhere in the middle with its $329 price tag and mid-range Snapdragon 625 chip.
Samsung just launched an app late last night for parents to keep track of their children's smartphone usage, but this one has an interesting twist. Instead of just being forced to follow whatever guidelines are set by the parent, this app relies on positive reinforcement via your offspring's initiative. They set their own limits, and the app rewards their self-control and independence. That's actually pretty awesome.
Oh, BLU. You make good phones for the money, but you've shown you just don't care about software time and time again. The brand new R1 Plus features some decent hardware, like 3GB of RAM and a 4000mAh battery, for $159.99... but it has Android 6.0 Marshmallow onboard. It's 2017, guys.
If you haven't been turned off by the 2015 software (not likely if you're a frequent reader of this site), the R1 Plus is actually a pretty good endurance machine. The Gorilla Glass 3-topped 5.5" 720p display with curved edges isn't super high-res, but that, along with the massive 4000mAh cell, should make the aluminum-bodied Plus last for quite a while. BLU claims that it has 30 days of standby and will last for 2-3 days without charging. Impressive.
Performance specs include a 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6737 quad-core processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 32GB of storage and a microSD slot. That shouldn't make for a speed demon, but it should be adequate in normal use, especially with that solid amount of RAM. It's also nice to see 32GB of storage becoming the norm on even sub-$200 devices.Out back, there's a 13MP shooter that's capable of a standard 1080p at 30fps - nothing special. On the front, though, there's an 8MP unit with LED flash, which should make for a great experience for those of you selfie-takers. There's also a headphone jack (thank God) and a rear-facing speaker.The BLU R1 Plus supports LTE (bands 2, 4, 7, 12, and 17), and is GSM unlocked for carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile. It only appears to come in one gray color, which does look pretty nice. It's already available at Amazon for 9.99, and should be at Best Buy shortly.Source: Amazon
No one is going to claim Android updates are perfect, but Google isn't hiding anything. As it does most months, it has just updated the developer dashboard with new platform distribution numbers. Nougat is still just picking up steam, but it had another solid month of growth. The combined share of 7.0 and 7.1 is at nearly 5%. I know that doesn't sound impressive, but it's not bad historically.
Huawei is keeping up its attempts to break into the saturated U.S. smartphone market with its sub-brand Honor. It started with the 5X and continued with the Honor 8. The premise is to bring mid- or high-tier specs and slap them in a premium chassis, then sell it at a very affordable price. However, as good as those devices have been, their weakness has been the software (again).
When Google announced that the Assistant would start rolling out to devices running Android 6.0 and above, there was one little detail we didn't pay close attention to: the official blog post only talked about "smartphones," "Android phones," and "Android partner phones." Tablets? Nada. So when the rollout started earlier this month and more and more phones received Assistant with nary a sign of a tablet getting the same treatment, many of our readers were left wondering: will tablets get Assistant?
I guess it was bound to happen: Google Assistant is finally breaking free from the shackles of the Pixels and launching onto the millions of devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and above, no need for GApps or root.
It's been a few months, but OnePlus is again updating its 2015 flagship to a new version of the OxygenOS software, v3.5.5. The OTA brings a slew of new things, the most notable being VoLTE support. This update comes with a few caveats, which we'll get into after the changelog.
We're in that awkward phase of the Android upgrade cycle, when customers want nothing more than the latest release of the OS on their phones... but manufacturers and carriers are still slowly, slowly making their way through the backlog of updates from over a year ago. So it is with the ZMAX 2, a big-screen budget ZTE phone offered on AT&T starting in September of 2015. Today AT&T is sending out the Marshmallow update that probably should have come at least a year ago. Hey, don't knock it - a lot of budget phones don't ever get upgraded at all.
When one buys a budget-priced smartphone from a carrier, especially one that doesn't get a wider release, the price tag is usually the primary concern. Software updates, not so much - maybe carriers and manufacturers know this, which is why those budget phones are the first ones to drop out of official support windows. The LG Leon, a relatively tiny phone that launched on T-Mobile back in April of 2015, is a happy exception. It's been updated with significant new software twice, first from Android 5.0 to 5.1, and now to 6.0 (Marshmallow).
The first DROID Turbo is over two years old at this point, and since it's a Motorola phone on Verizon, you might think that its software update days are numbered. Perhaps they are, but nevertheless users are starting to see an over-the-air update to Android 6.0.1 for the former flagship phone. Reports started popping up on the dedicated XDA-Developers forum this weekend following a soak test from last month, and it seems the update is going out en masse now.
The Lenovo Yoga Book is... odd. When it was announced in September, it was very different from any laptop or convertible I had seen before. Instead of the standard keyboard and touchpad combination, the bottom panel is a giant Wacom digitizer for sketching and taking notes. When you need to be productive, the bottom panel can switch to the 'Holo keyboard,' a touch keyboard and trackpad in the typical laptop layout.
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It's that time of the month—the new Android security patches are heading out to Nexus and Pixel devices. The OTA will show up on its own soon enough, but if that's not actually soon enough, the OTAs or images can be downloaded from Google's developer page right now.
It may have taken an extraordinarily long time, but OnePlus is finally sending out stable Marshmallow OTAs to the OnePlus X, the company's budget phone, in the form of OxygenOS 3.1.2 (and now 3.1.3). Although OnePlus did begin offering Marshmallow in the form of the OxygenOS 3.1.0 Community Build over a month ago, it had a few bugs that needed to be weeded out. At last, 6.0.1 is ready for prime time on the X.
Tasker is one of the most useful power tools on Android, allowing you to automate your device to do practically anything. Tasker plugins, like AutoShare, only seek to make Tasker even more feature-filled. If you have never used AutoShare, it allows you to send data to a Tasker tasks via Android's share menu.
The newest little phone from Sony has been made more developer-friendly today. The Xperia X Compact has joined the Sony Open Device program, allowing the more technically inclined out there to build stock Android from AOSP for the phone. Sony has made the necessary code available for both Nougat and Marshmallow builds on the X Compact.
There aren't a ton of devices running the commercial Cyanogen OS ROM these days, but the Wileyfox Spark and Spark+ are two of the most prominent (which really tells you something). These UK phones launched with Cyanogen OS 12 (Lollipop) earlier this year, but now Cyanogen OS 13 is finally rolling out.
Nearly a year after Android 6.0 Marshmallow first debuted on the Nexus 5X and 6P, the AT&T models of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge are finally receiving an OTA for 6.0.1. Samsung has never been reputable for fast updates, and neither has AT&T. This incredibly late update is what happens when you mash the two together.
