David Ruddock
Contributing since June, 2010
-
3358articles
Page 34
About David Ruddock
David is the former Editor-in-Chief of Android Police and now the EIC of Esper.io. He's been an Android user since the early days - his first smartphone was a Google Nexus One! David graduated from the University of California, Davis where he received his bachelor's degree, and also attended the Pepperdine University School of Law.
Latest Articles
Remember Chromecast's "Fast Play" feature? Well, some of it is out there in the wild now: for example, apps now can be pre-fetched by the Chromecast when they're loaded on your phone (this works for all Chromecasts). But the one feature a lot of people were looking forward to - video prefetching, aka Content Prediction - still isn't released.
At a press conference in Los Angeles this morning, LeEco announced that it was acquiring the entirety of Vizio's hardware and software businesses for $2 billion. The acquisition, or at least an investment, had been rumored recently, but today it's official. Vizio will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of LeEco, meaning we can expect the Vizio brand to live on in the future, especially here in the US where Vizio is based.
CyanogenMod founder and Cyanogen Inc. cofounder Steve Kondik has published a blog post on the official CyanogenMod blog today. That is the blog associated with the community project, not Cyanogen Inc. Kondik's post appears to serve dual purposes: to ensure the community that CyanogenMod isn't going anywhere (and no one suggested it was), and that the company's alleged "pivot to apps" isn't happening.
Read update
- Google has announced the various changes to group chats, too. This includes the ability to share an invite to a chat via link, search your contacts for groups to start a chat, and a newly-added function to remove members from a group chat. You can check out the official Google Apps blog post for screenshots and more details here.
Corning announced today that the newest generation of Gorilla Glass, Gorilla Glass 5, is official. It will be available on devices starting later this year. The main improvement? Increased resistance to impact damage (i.e., shattering / cracking). That should mean that Gorilla Glass 5 will be the most drop-resistant version of the company's proprietary glass blend yet. How resistant is it? Corning's language is a bit... wishy-washy, but this is about as close as we get to a concrete (pun intended) statement on durability.
In what I am tempted to say may be the stupidest news I've read all morning (give me an hour, though, I just grabbed my coffee), the US Army's Special Operations Command is allegedly dumping its current Nett Warrior embedded tactical smartphone solution - a 4-year-old Galaxy Note II - for an iPhone 6S. Because, and I quote DoDBuzz's source here, the iPhone is "faster; smoother. Android freezes up." Wait, you're telling me a smartphone that's four years old trying to run a specialized government app isn't very fast or stable? I am shocked, sir - simply taken aback!
I'm using Amazon's $60 BLU R1 HD Prime Exclusive smartphone for a month - my next post on it should go live this week. But using the phone got me wondering: how many Android enthusiasts would be willing to deal with lockscreen ads in exchange for a [steeply] discount smartphone?
Samsung has been rumored to be working on iris scanning technology for smartphones for years now. A few weeks back, Evan Blass confirmed via his own sources that the Note7 would feature an iris scanner, but no further information was provided. A leak on Weibo today, picked up by Sammobile, gives us our first glimpse at the feature itself, and provides some much-needed visual evidence of its existence. Below, you can see what very much looks like a Note7 on the lockscreen, and it's asking you to use your eye-parts to unlock the phone. On the top left, we can see what looks like a notification LED, but if I had to guess, this may have something to do with the iris scanning.
Last month, the Chromebook Flip became the first Chrome OS device to gain access to Android apps and the Google Play Store. Today, it appears that rollout has continued as Google said it would, with the Chromebook Pixel (2015) and Acer R11. The build is still based on developer channel release version 53, though the Pixel 2015's version number specifically is 53.0.2785.15.