The developers at Pebble said their goal with the 4.0 update was to maximize your ability to “glance and go.” With the update, they make Pebble Health quicker and easier to access, improves the handling of your personal Timeline, adds a new Launcher menu, improved overall performance, and they have increased system animations.
Google launched a carpool pilot program with Waze in the San Francisco area back in May of this year. It was only open to select businesses, but now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will take it into open beta this fall. It will still only be accessible in San Francisco for now, but should be cheaper than Uber and Lyft rides.
Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 821 back in July, but they didn’t reveal many details about their latest SoC at that time. Now we know the low-power clusters will be a dual-core Kryo CPU clocked at 2.19 GHz, and the GPU will be the Adreno 530 that’s clocked at 653 MHz. We also learn it has support for Snapdragon VR SDK (for Daydream), as well as dual phase detection.
We had previously seen the first hint of this “In Apps” feature in the recent LG V20 leak, but now we know what it is. The feature is baked into the Google application, and will allow you to search for content within the applications you have installed. It only supports apps like Gmail, Spotify and YouTube right now, but they’ll add more in the future.
When the HTC One A9 came out, HTC stressed that it was not the one “copying” others around. Metallic builds and plastic antenna bands were its gift to the mobile world, and so the A9 was not to be misinterpreted as an iPhone clone, despite its similarities. And with the One A9s, the device is far from the iPhone on the inside as it could ever be.
Sure, design wise, the HTC One A9s looks just like its actual and spiritual predecessor. There’s the flat metallic back with side curves, there’s the signature antenna bands and the fingerprint sensor on the front. The front and back camera see some repositioning, and the HTC branding below the display is no longer to be found. The display is a downgrade actually, with the One A9s sporting a 5″ 720p Super LCD display, a noticeable step down from the 5″ 1080p AMOLED display.
The downgrade does not stop there. Inside, the HTC One A9s comes with a MediaTek MT6755 Helio P10 SoC with 2x four-core clusters of Cortex-A53’s. While the HTC One A9 was not a flagship with its mediocre-at-best Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 with 2x four-core clusters of Cortex-A53, the Helio P10 on the One A9s is very far behind in the current competition against the Snapdragon 650 and 652. The GPU on the One A9s is the Mali-T860MP2, while the RAM and storage situation remains unchanged with options of 16GB internal storage with 2GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage with 3GB RAM. You still get microSD expandability, and the battery gets a slight bump in capacity up to 2,300 mAh now. But if you got too happy with all of this, Quick Charge 3.0 is being replaced with quick charging limited to 5V at 1.5A only.
The camera on the One A9s is a 13MP shooter with f/2.2 aperture, but it loses out on OIS from its predecessor. The front 4MP Ultra Pixel shooter found on One A9 is now replaced with a regular 5MP camera with a f/2.8 aperture and 1080p video recording.
HTC made a 15-day promise of rolling out a new Android version update when the One A9 was launched. But it is unlikely to keep the promise this time around, so they aren’t making any new promises either. The One A9s comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box (like last year’s A9) but no time solid commitment has been offered for Android 7.0 Nougat.
Pricing and availability of the HTC One A9s has not been released, though the phone is likely to be made available in October. The One A9 was not known for its cheap price and bang-for-buck, so the One A9s will have to do better if it wants to succeed as a successor. Even optimistically, the One A9s feels like another variant of the One A9, one that should have been launched in 2015.
What are your thoughts on the HTC One A9s? Let us know in the comments below!
Back in February, Samsung made a big deal about the gaming performance of their new Galaxy S7 smartphone. One of the key features of the S7 that they were showcasing was that it would be the first smartphone to support the Vulkan API.
Samsung representatives talked extensively at the time about how Vulkan support would allow the S7 to outperform other devices with similar chipsets like the HTC 10 and the LG G5. They quoted numbers like “67% Higher GPU Performance” and “80% More Efficient CPU”. Samsung felt that being the first to support Vulkan would help them get more games into their store, providing value added for the S7 compared to other phones, specifically mentioning upcoming mobile specific games from Nintendo and Konami and integration with Gear VR and Oculus. It was almost surprising how heavily Samsung was pushing Vulkan as a killer feature.
It appears that Samsung ran into some difficulties getting it ready in time for launch, and had to delay support of Vulkan. Despite the delays, they continued with their media campaign promoting Vulkan. The S7 shipped with everything required for Vulkan other than the VK_KHR_swapchain extension. Vulkan support is now finally rolling out to the S7 alongside the August security patch.
Unfortunately, that means that their claim that the “Galaxy S7 and S7 edge are the first smartphones to support the Vulkan API” just isn’t true.
Developers and users alike were left disappointed by Samsung failing to follow through on their promise. Developers were forced to look elsewhere for their Vulkan testbeds, and users were left without the gaming performance improvements and “console quality gaming” that they were sold on.
The Nvidia Shield TV was the first available production option, adding support for Vulkan back in February, the day after the S7 announced, and the Shield Tablet K1 and the Shield Tablet received updates to support Vulkan on 13 April 2016 and 12 May 2016 respectively. But that’s OK, Samsung’s claim didn’t really include Android TV boxes and tablets.
The Samsung Note 7 was up next, launching on 19 August 2016 with Vulkan support (with the same processor as the Galaxy S7). Samsung followed through on their claims of having the first phone with stock software supporting Vulkan, it just wasn’t on the S7. Then Nougat came out. Vulkan support was added to the Nexus 6P, the Nexus 5X, and the Pixel C with the second Developer Preview on 13 April 2016, and then launched officially on 22 August 2016.
Now, that’s not very long between when the Note 7 launched and when the S7 received the update, but it is 6 months of Samsung claiming that the S7 supports Vulkan, without actually implementing it. It’s 6 months of devs waiting for their phone to receive a feature that was advertised as being ready on day one. We’ve had over four months of other phones having support (and even longer for tablets), allowing devs that purchased Nexus devices to get a head start on preparing their games for Vulkan.
Even worse, the Vulkan driver was registered and ready for them to roll out earlier this month (it had to be for the Note 7 launch). If they had pushed their August security patch out just a couple days earlier (let alone near the beginning of the month like they ideally should be), they would have beaten the Nexus devices and the Note 7 to an official stable release with Vulkan support. They could have kept (part of) their advertising accurate to the letter by releasing just a couple days earlier than they did.
But that’s beside the point. Having truth in advertising to the letter is important, but being accurate in spirit is critical. Any developer that bought the S7 intending to spend the last half a year preparing for Vulkan games on mobile was mislead. Users that bought an S7 because they thought that they would have immediate access to Vulkan games instead of buying a different phone could have justifiable buyer’s remorse.
For those that reached out to Samsung about the lack of Vulkan in the S7, how did they respond? How do you think they should have responded to people who bought the phone? How should Samsung have adjusted product advertising when Vulkan was delayed? Could Samsung have released a public beta version with Vulkan support to the developer community? Sound off below!
