David Imel / Android Authority
MediaTek courted controversy last week when a new report alleged that the company was facilitating benchmark cheating. The chip designer purportedly allowed OEMs to enable a “sports mode” in benchmark apps, using so-called whitelisting to identify these apps.
The Taiwanese firm defended itself against the report at the time, adding that this was a common industry practice and that its “key competitor” was also guilty of this practice.
You’re probably coming down right now from the craziness of the holidays. You might have gotten lucky and received some Amazon gift cards and they’re burning a hole in your pocket. Well, this Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus deal is something you should certainly look at!
For a limited time, you can get the Galaxy S10 Plus for just $700 at Amazon. For the record, that’s $300 off the list price of $1,000 or a full 30% off.
The Tronsmart Draco AW80 turns your TV into a powerful octa-core Android smart TV. Access YouTube, Netflix, the Google Play store, and so much more. Android is making big in-roads into our lounges and Google is leading the way. Media streaming devices like the Chromecast are gaining popularity, and now there is Android TV, as seen on the Nexus Player. However, there is still a lot to be said for having a fully functional Android box connected to your TV.
When the Xiaomi Redmi Go launched in India, we talked about how the phone is perfectly suited as a first smartphone. At just $65 (4,500 rupees in India), the Android Go-powered handset seems designed to be a transitional device for anyone thinking of upgrading from a feature phone.
Can the Redmi Go handle a modern work load? It really got me thinking though. We’ve come a long way with smartphones. Trickle down economics and the ensuing democratization of hardware means that even budget smartphones are approaching flagship grade performance from just a few years ago.
You know how amongst all the cool new Android N features there’s also native DPI scaling (the ability to resize on-screen content)? It turns out the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge have it too. Well, kind of. With a very simple process – no root or special skills required, I promise – you can squeeze more content onto your Galaxy S7’s screen. (Update: we’ve since been told the same method works for the Galaxy S6 and Note 5 as well.
Standard text messaging through mobile carriers doesn’t exactly provide you with a ton of unique and helpful features. Group messaging through SMS is a joke, and there’s no way to see when the other person you’re chatting with has read your message or not. That’s why third-party messaging services are so popular. WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, iMessage and Facebook Messenger can do all these things and more, which is why Google, among a large number of other companies, have committed to a new standard called Rich Communications Services (RCS) that allows them to employ these features.
In mobile reviews, we toss around the word “snappy” a lot. When we describe something as snappy, what we really mean is that the device has a low latency between input and output, right? A snappy touch screen feels like you’re actually moving physical objects around when you swipe and tap because the latency is so low that you barely perceive it. Although users can always feel whether a device is snappy, there aren’t a whole lot of tools available to developers to measure this metric.
Starting at the basics, DynamIQ is a new take on multi-core processing for ARM’s CPU cores. In previous arrangements, SoC designers utilizing ARM’s big.LITTLE technology were required to use multiple core clusters to mix between CPU core micro-architectures, and these could suffer a slight performance penalty when moving data between clusters across the CCI interconnect. In other words, your octa-core big.LITTLE CPU could consist of a number of clusters, typically two, with up to four cores in each, which had to consist of the same type of core.
Before we begin, a quick look back.
There’s something about working with a new kind of device that helps you learn something about yourself. Android, as an operating system, is growing at a rapid pace and will mature from Jelly Bean and soon become a delicious Key Lime Pie; and there’s no doubt that with it, Google will be hoping to show us horizons of everyday tech that we didn’t even realize existed.
Today’s Android smartphone market is a competitive beast, due in no small part to the increasing prevalence of Chinese flagships boasting cut throat price tags. The likes of OnePlus, Meizu, and Huawei’s Honor brand have not just captured shares of the low cost local market, but are becoming increasingly popular brands throughout Europe and are even breaking into the US.
While certainly smartphone brands are still able to charge a premium for their flagships, there seem to be an increasing number of manufacturers who aren’t offering an awful lot more than these lower cost Chinese OEMs yet still attempt to charge top tier prices.