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A dashcam is one of those things that seems only slightly important until about five minutes after a fender-bender, wherein it becomes retroactively essential. Even so, those dashboard-mounted cameras don't grown on trees, so most cars in the US still aren't equipped with them. Nexar, a new Android app that's currently in "unreleased" status on the Play Store, aims to fix that. It turns any Android device into an AI-powered dash cam - all you need is Android 4.1 or later, a rear camera, and some way to mount it in your vehicle.
If you want to find weaknesses in your vault or safe, it couldn't hurt to hire a thief to try and break into it. If you want to do the same thing for your brand new system-on-a-chip, the same principle applies to hackers and security experts. So goes the thinking behind Qualcomm's latest outreach to the security industry: a bug bounty program offering prizes of up to $15,000 for disclosed vulnerabilities in the company's Snapdragon chipsets and LTE modems.
Remember that scene from every action movie ever, where the headstrong but academically challenged hero has to be walked through an on-the-job lesson in bomb defusal by the specialist on the other end of the radio/phone/hyperspace ansible connection? Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is basically that experience, set up for two players (the on-the-job hero and remote specialist), and designed to create the maximum amount of tension possible. It debuted on Steam last year, but now it's available on the Play Store for early Daydream VR users.
As nice as it is to get a new Android TV app from a large web property (and also rare, natch), one might reasonably wonder what Twitter is doing on a platform almost exclusively dedicated to streaming video. The answer is, of course, streaming video: Twitter has a lucrative deal with the NFL to stream some but not all of this season's Thursday Night Football games for free on the service. This app would have been a lot more useful before we got 10 weeks into a 17-week season, but hey, gift horses and whatnot.
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Mobile security is a huge issue, but most consumers tend to think that at least a brand new phone is safe. That assumption may be in error, according to security research firm Kryptowire. In a new report Kryptowire documents the inclusion of software tools collectively called Adups, which allegedly shipped on phones like the Blu R1 HD and other devices sold internationally, including the US market via Amazon and Best Buy.
Rich Communications Services, more frequently abbreviated to RCS, is something of a hot-button topic in the mobile tech world right now. It's essentially a replacement for SMS that incorporates a lot of the functions of popular new messaging systems like WhatsApp, supplanting the antiquated text messaging standard with something more capable and flexible. The problem is that "RCS" is something of a generic term, and every gigantic international megacorp and their gigantic international mother wants their own standard. After today, you can add Samsung to the list.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
Google giveth, and Google taketh away. Nexus/Pixel buyers know this too well - from little-used features like lockscreen widgets to more interesting fare like wireless charging, a lot of things have showed up in one Nexus phone only to disappear in the next. The Pixel and Pixel XL, for example, are missing some of the ambient notification tools that debuted with the Nexus 6. But as usual, there's a developer willing to fill in the gap. Check out Ambi-Turner if you want some of those features back.
Video games can often be a source of escapist fantasy... and not always fantasy of the "save the princess" variety. Party Hard, released last year on SHIELD and on SHIELD this summer, falls squarely into the second category. This visceral stealth game is about a Jason Voorhees-style serial killer methodically murdering his partying neighbors. Now there's a mobile version for phones and tablets too, going for $7 with no in-app purchases. Needless to say, it's not for kids.
The Accelerated Mobile Pages standard is slowly proliferating across the web, to the delight of users on metered or slow connections. The "AMP" sites, implemented for large media outlets at the moment, dynamically reformat pages to shrink images, improve readability, and bring load times down to just a second or two even on a slow mobile network. The latest service to get access to the tool is the web-accessible version of Google+. Users on mobile Chrome and other browsers should start seeing the lightning bolt icons for AMP stories (in the lower left of the image above) starting now.
Last April the European Commission, the EU's executive body, issued a statement criticizing Google's management of Android. The Commission accused Google of facilitating monopolistic practices, specifically by tying the Play Store, the Android version of Chrome, and other common Google apps to Google's Search services among licensed Android manufacturers. Keeping manufacturers from releasing forks of Android as a condition of participating in the Google ecosystem - a process which Google calls "anti-fragmentation" - was also an issue. It took a while, but Google has finally published a full response to the Commission.
OtterBox is one of those products that has a fairly niche appeal, at least for its original practically bomb-proof protective cases, but does its job so well that people keep coming back. The company has been making a mint off of its durable Defender series, and it hasn't wasted any time bringing out new versions for Google's Pixel and Pixel XL flagships.
A lucky few Pixel owners are already receiving their Daydream View phone headsets, but most pre-orders will be shipped starting tomorrow. Along with a few other vendors, Google is preparing for the launch by getting the official Daydream app good and ready. It's up on the Play Store right now, and if for some reason you can't access that, we have a copy over on APK Mirror too.
If you missed the $100 discount on LeEco's two debut phones for the American market, you have another chance to snag one today. The company is selling its higher-powered phone, the Le Pro3, for just $299, while the more down-market Le S3 will be just $149. Apparently the manufacturer didn't see the stampede of sales that it wanted last week, so it's making that generous offer again. The deep discounts on LeEco's televisions remain, minus the dramatic 85" model. The sale will start at 10 AM Pacific and end tonight, or sooner if supplies run out.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
If you haven't at least glanced at YouTube gadget aficionado JerryRigEverything (whose real name is Zack), you should close this tab and go do that. He puts new phones through excruciating damage tests for "entertainment purposes only" - it's the kind of thing that we're not really supposed to do in our standard reviews (unless the phone dares us to kill it). In a breakdown of the Xperia XZ, Sony's current premium flagship which retails for $700, Zack found a surprising amount of materials that were less than premium.
As mobile bloggers, watching national carriers with revenue in the billions snip at each other like gossiping high school students is the closest thing we have to a spectator sport. Between Sprint hiring Verizon's old spokesman, T-Mobile continuing its cloying David-versus-Goliath narrative, and Verizon using textbook straw man attacks against both of them in all those Jaime Foxx spots, we can hardly make the popcorn fast enough.
Some Daydream View VR headsets are already shipping out, but the necessary Play Store app is missing
Well here's a bit of a buzzkill from Google. The much-ballyhooed Daydream View VR headset, set for launch later this month and currently only compatible with the Pixel and Pixel XL phones, appears to be shipping out early to at least some users. Despite the fact that the View isn't supposed to be hitting mailboxes until November 10th, Android Police reader Sean Hunter received his today. But he can't play with it yet, and neither can anyone else who's received their VR headsets early.
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- AT&T will start taking pre-orders for its LTE variant of the Gear S3 Frontier tomorrow, November 4th. You can get one for just $49.99 if you also buy a new Galaxy phone on a two-year plan, which isn't bad if you were going to get one anyway. If you'd rather buy it outright, it'll be $17.50 a month for 20 months, or $350 total... the same price as the Wi-Fi version. So yes, my prediction above was dead wrong. Not bad.
It's been around two months since Samsung announced the Gear S3, the third generation of its premium Tizen-powered wearable, at the IFA trade show in Berlin. Things have been surprisingly quiet since then, and certainly not so breathless as previous Samsung wearable launches... perhaps reflecting the cooling of the market towards smartwatches in general. Anyway, you'll soon be able to pre-order a new Samsung watch, and wait then wait a couple of weeks for it to arrive: pre-orders begin on Sunday, November 6th, with orders shipping out on the 18th.
Long ago in days of yore, Google provided a plugin for the popular Eclipse integrated development environment, the better for aspiring mobile devs to work with their favorite IDE while making new apps. Months after the release of the stand-alone Android Studio version 2.2, Google is officially getting rid of support for the older IDE in favor of its own internal project. To be clear, Eclipse is still very much alive and in active development (it's not a Google program), it's just the plugin that's no longer supported.