Honor 8 Camera Focus: Road Trip to Big Android BBQ

Miles from XDA TV set out to test one of the best features of the Honor 8 phone by taking it on a road trip all the way to the Big Android BBQ in Texas. This video takes a look at some of the photos and videos that were taken so you can see the quality for yourself. If you want to read more about the Honor 8's dual-camera setup and how it works, you can read our explainer.

The first photo is from a hotel in Texas. This is a prop of an old vintage camera. This was taken with the wide aperture mode in the Honor 8 camera app. Taking wide aperture photos can produce images with a shallow depth of field. In this photo you can see how the lens of the vintage camera is the part that is in focus and the background is blurred. This gives this picture a very professional look. This effect is handled entirely in the software side of the phone.

This is a picture of the conference building that the Big Android BBQ took place in. The camera did really well in handling this type of condition. On the right you have strong shadows coming from the trees, the sky is bright and even the building has a shadow over it. Normally this would make for a difficult picture to take. Notice how the shadow areas are still visible, the sky isn't blown out at all, and you can even see the small details on the building in the distance.

While it look like this video was taken at day time with good lighting conditions, it was actually taken in a dark restaurant at night time. There is virtually no noise and colors and details looks great. You can easily read the small text on the menu sitting on the table.

This is one of the best photos taken on this roadtrip. HDR mode was used to improve the details in the lightest and darkest areas of this photo. Look at how consistent the details are throughout the picture, even though you have varying levels of light going on.

Thanks to Honor for making this post possible. As a reminder, we have a partnership going with Honor which includes, among other things, an incentive program where you can win prizes just by being active in Honor forums on XDA.

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PSA: Google Assistant says it’s “Offline” when you’re on a VPN, but everything still works

Google Assistant is one of the most advertised features for the new Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, although there are ways to enable it on non-Pixel Nougat devices as well as on non-Nougat devices. Although Google has currently restricted official compatibility to a very small subset of Android devices, you can still get full use out of Assistant through these unofficial mods. Assistant is still clearly undergoing lots of changes, as many of the features shown off during the October 4th event have yet to make their way into the production build of the service. Though, we at XDA have been having some fun with the IFTTT integration that was recently released.

A few users have noticed a peculiar, yet ultimately benign bug in Google Assistant. If you regularly make use of VPN on your Android device, you will find that Google Assistant seemingly falls back to working only in offline mode. The choice of device does not matter nor does the means of getting Assistant working in the first place (eg. via build.prop edits or Xposed module), as the bug seems to be Google Assistant related. We say that the bug is benign because despite warning you that Google Assistant is in offline mode, everything still seems to work just fine. Some users of ad-blocking software that relies of creating a VPN are reporting that Assistant is not working for them, but we haven't been able to corroborate that claim.

In any case, to recreate the bug simply turn on any VPN connection (in my testing even Google's WiFi Assistant seems to trigger the bug) and open up Google Assistant. There you have it: in case you were confused why Google Assistant is saying you're offline, it's because of a bug triggered by whatever VPN you're currently running.

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Xposed Module LeEco EUI Modder allows for a Near-Vanilla Android UI

XDA Member zyberkiddy has created an Xposed Module called LeEco EUI Modder that lets you customize a number of features included in version 5.8 of LeEco's EUI OEM skin. You can bring back the vanilla lockscreen, vanilla recent app switcher, and more.

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ARM announces their second Bifrost GPU – the Mali-G51

Back in May of this year ARM announced the Mali-G71, the company's first GPU that utilized their new Bifrost architecture. This new architecture from ARM was quickly adopted into the high-end mobile market, due to growing demand for VR gaming along with other complex and constantly evolving power hungry mobile gaming content. When building their new Bifrost architecture, ARM wanted to create a GPU that could scale to any price point.

Thus, the Mali-G51 GPU was born. Aimed at the "mainstream" smartphone market rather than the high-end market, the Mali-G51 is ARM's attempt at creating a GPU capable of handling high-level graphics requirements without pushing the cost requirement. The company was able to tune the Bifrost architecture to the performance level and power limitations that most smartphones and tablets have. ARM says they were able to optimize Bifrost's low-level instruction set even further with the introduction of the new Mali-G51, and they've also implemented a new dual-pixel shader core.

ARM states that they've also redesigned the texturing units and improved the framebuffer compression as well. There's been a lot of work put into this GPU over the past 5 months, and ARM is clearly pleased with their results. The Mali-G51 GPU supports scalable performance for the latest graphics APIs including OpenCL 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.2 and the popular Vulkan. When compared to the Mali-T830, ARM says the G51 offers a 60% boost in performance density.

This performance boost is also accompanied by a 60% increase in energy efficiency, and the GPU as a whole is 30% smaller when compared to the Mali-T830 as well. ARM says the Mali-G51 GPU offers sustained performance thanks to the their latest advancements in energy efficiency, which is really important for those long mobile gaming sessions. The company says they will bring the Mali-G51 to its first SoC sometime in 2017, and that means we'll likely start to see it appear in many mobile devices in 2018 at the latest.

Source: ARM Connected Community

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Mod Brings Night Mode Back to the Nexus 6P on Android 7.1.1

Many people have been disappointed with the removal of Night Mode on the Nexus 6P with the Android 7.1 Developer Preview. Now, a modification from XDA Senior Member SyCreed brings Night Mode, Pixel navigation bar icons, uncolored battery saver mode and more for the Nexus 6P.

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Root is Now Available for the LG V20

We saw SuperSU released for the Pixel phones this weekend, but now root has made its way to the LG V20 as well. This root method is possible thanks to XDA Recognized Developer jcadduono, who walks you through the entire rooting process in his forum thread.

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Sony publishes instructions on how to build Android 7.1 AOSP for Xperia Devices

Sony is one of the few OEMs that remains a firm believer in AOSP. Most companies do not bother providing necessary firmware binaries to allow developers to port AOSP onto the device. But while some OEMs actually do provide binaries for developers to make AOSP builds, like we saw with the OnePlus 3, Sony takes it a step further and ensures that AOSP functions properly on all of their devices. Although Sony's Open Device program does not extend to every device it releases, the work that they put out makes the lives of custom ROM developers far, far easier and the community could not be more appreciative for it.

Right now, Sony has published binaries and resources for the Xperia X Compact, Xperia X, Xperia Z5 Premium, Xperia Z5, Xperia Z5 Compact, Xperia Z3+, Xperia Z4 Tablet, Xperia Z3, Xperia Z3 Compact, Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact, Xperia Z2, Xperia Z2 Tablet, Xperia Z1, Xperia Z1 Compact, Xperia Z Ultra, Xperia Z, Xperia ZL, Xperia Tablet Z, Xperia E3, Xperia M2, Xperia T2 Ultra, Xperia T3, Xperia L and the Xperia S.

Sony has also been the only OEM to participate extensively in the Android N Developer Preview program as well. They have previously published a guide on how to build Android 7.0 AOSP for their various supported Xperia devices and this weekend they did the same for the newly released Android 7.1 Nougat Developer Previews. This is an early build though, and thus it is currently marked as Experimental. The guide assumes you're running Ubuntu, as the guide was made using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but it will work in a similar way on other Linux distributions.

The guide starts by having you prepare your Java environment, then has you installing the necessary tools to make an Android build and then has you download the Repo tool and set a PATH. Then, the guide walks you through initializing the AOSP tree, adding the necessary patches from the AOSP upstream branch, and then instructions on how to build AOSP images for Android 7.1 Nougat so they can be flashed to the device.

Be sure to check out the Sony Xperia Developer GitHub page and contribute in any way that you can.

Source: Sony Mobile Developer World

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