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samedi 17 septembre 2016

Weekly Debrief

While this was a pretty slow week for Android news, there were at least a few interesting things going down. The Galaxy Note 7 issue continues to get more absurd every day, even though most of us are probably tired of talking about it. There are also a few other stories that you might want to check out, so here are some of the best articles of the week.

What's New in Google Pixel Launcher

Yesterday we posted about the Google Pixel launcher unofficially being available for download. Today we have a video tour of everything that's new in the launcher. Check out this short video and get the launcher for yourself from this article here.

As the Note 7 Battery Saga Escalates, Samsung Prompts Users to Power Down Devices

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 drama is reaching new proportions ever since Samsung came clean on the defect of the device. Even though the company did the right thing by recalling all devices sold up to that point, along with an inventory clean up of devices unsold, the market is still witnessing the repercussions of the potentially lethal flaw of a device that was destined to be amongst one of the most popular Android devices around.

First Gen Moto E Gets Unofficial CyanogenMod 14

The first generation Moto E, released in 2014, has received its first builds of CyanogenMod 14. The bug list of the device includes issues with video recording and dual SIM…

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Aukey Qualcomm Quick Charge Product Reviews and Giveaway [20 IN TOTAL] + Discounts!

Charging our devices will always be an absolute necessity. Some of us end up needing to charge multiple devices at once. Me, personally, I have to keep track of charging my wireless headset, my Moto 360, my current review device, and my daily driver Nexus 6P. Instead of fiddling with multiple chargers around a multi-plug, why not use a multi-port charging dock? If you're on the go and you can't find an outlet, why not use a portable power bank?

What about when you're in the car and you need a quick top-up of your battery? Most cheap car chargers on the market won't do a very good job of that. That's why you'll need a high quality car charger capable of delivering a lot of power (say – using Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0) to your device. But when you buy a new charger, you'll want to make sure it's not only as fast as advertised but also safe to use. There are many charger/cable accessory vendors on the market, but today we're here to showcase some of the ones from Aukey.

We'll be reviewing 4 of Aukey's current Qualcomm Quick Charge compatible charging products: one power bank, one 6 port charging dock, one car charger, and one wall charger. In addition, we will be giving you a chance to win one of these products through a giveaway. Aukey is providing XDA-Developers with 5 of each product (meaning, 20 products in total) to giveaway. If you aren't one of the lucky few to win one of these products or you've entered to win one product but are also in the market for one of the other products listed, then you'll be happy to know that Aukey has also provided some discount coupons that you can apply towards the purchase of one of their products. But first, here is my review of some of Aukey's Qualcomm Quick Charge line-up.

Testing Parameters

To test the charging abilities on each of these devices, I used a custom Tasker script to retrieve the estimated amperage, voltage, and battery temperature as reported by Android every 10 minutes and recorded a representative range of charging values that I could then use to extrapolate the estimated time to fully charge. Android's battery reporting is known to be a bit inaccurate at the highs and lows of the battery range, so I wanted to stick to values between 20-80% whenever possible. In addition, during each 10 minute interval I polled the amperage, voltage, and temperature 50 times to make an average for each measurement to avoid outliers.

I wanted to pull as much information as I could about the battery to test whether or not a device's battery stays within safe operating parameters. Of course, since these values are pulled from Android's estimates and not from actual electrical measuring hardware such as an ammeter or voltmeter, they won't be 100% accurate but for our general testing purposes it works out just fine.

My testing device this time is the Nextbit Robin (2680mAh battery capacity) which uses Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 over a USB Type-C connection. I stuck with the original OEM Nextbit Robin cable to ensure that there were no issues with QC compatibility. Although the Nextbit Robin does not support QC 3.0, the technology is fully backwards compatible with Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 and does not offer charging speed improvements over QC 2.0 (rather, it offers variable voltage adjustment) so it should not significantly change the data. All of the data collected below was from each individual product's Quick Charge port as it is the performance of that port that most of our readers would be most interested in.

Aukey 16,000mAh PowerAll QC 2.0 Power Bank

First up, we have the 16,000 mAh power bank with two ports: one Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 charging port (the orange-colored port) and the other a regular DC 5V output. The device uses a micro-USB input for charging and also comes with an LED that switches colors based on the status of the power bank and can act as a flashlight when long-pressing on the power button located on the back. I haven't been able to accurately test the actual battery capacity of this power bank, but during my testing of this device I was able to fully charge a dead Nextbit Robin 5 times, with some juice left to spare. It's not fair to estimate the mAh capacity of this external battery pack using the methods I'm using to test the power output, since I do not truly know the battery capacity of the Robin itself. Nevertheless, you should at least be getting a power bank with a capacity somewhere in the ballpark of 16,000 mAh.

Above, I have plotted the battery capacity, current, voltage, and the temperature of the Nextbit Robin versus time. From the data, I can extrapolate that it should take 78 minutes for the Power Bank to fully charge my Nextbit Robin (2,680 mAh) from 0 to 100%.

Aukey QC 3.0 Dual Port USB Car Charger

Extrapolating from this data, it would take 85 minutes to fully charge a Nextbit Robin. Not significantly slower than the power bank, but still plenty fast anyways. The speed of this charger should be more than capable of keeping up with the battery drainage from running a music stream + GPS navigation, which it did for me.

Aukey USB Turbo Wall Charger

With an estimated time of 77 minutes to fully charge the Nextbit Robin from 0 to 100%, you shouldn't have any issues using this stand-alone wall charger to replace your OEM power brick in case you lose it.

Aukey 6 Port USB Charging Station

Finally, here are the results for the 6 Port USB Dock. It should take an estimated 82 minutes to fully charge a Nextbit Robin using one of the QC ports. Thankfully, you have multiple other ports you can use to charge multiple other devices at the same time. I've tested the charging speed with multiple other ports being occupied by different devices, and it doesn't really affect each individual port in my experience.

Giveaway

Remember in the beginning when we said we had 20 products to giveaway? I know you're probably salivating at the chance to win one of these four Qualcomm Quick Charge charging products that I reviewed today. As mentioned previously, we have 5 of each product reviewed above to giveaway. All you need to do is meet the following criteria, and then fill out a quick survey on Google Forms to mark your entry.

The giveaway period will last between now and midnight (CST), September 18th, 2016. We do not have a set date/time that we will announce winners on, as it may take several attempts at contacting users before we get a final batch of 4 users we can forward to Aukey (we learned this the hard-way during the CHOETECH giveaway). However, we will update this article announcing the winners once we have them all.
Must have an account on the XDA-Developers forums that is in good-standing and has existed prior to September 10th, 2016. Accounts made after this date will not be in consideration. Winners will be sent a private message and must respond within 48 hours. If you do not respond, we will move on and message another winner. Check your messages, don't rely on receiving an e-mail or push notification!
Must be a resident of, or have a valid shipping address within, the United States of America. We apologize to all of our international readers, but stay on the lookout for future giveaways from us!
Must have a valid e-mail address that you can submit to Aukey to receive your shipping confirmation (don't worry, we will only solicit these after we have determined if you are a winner).

If you meet all of the above criteria, then click the button below to enter!

Aukey Giveaway Entry Form

Discount Codes

Aukey has graciously provided us with some discount coupon codes that you can use to save a few bucks on the products reviewed above. So even if you don't win one of the products from the giveaway, or are otherwise ineligible for entry, you can still snag one of these charging products.

Aukey QC2.0 16000mAh Portable Charger $22.99 with code XDAUKEY6
Aukey QC3.0 Car Charger $12.99 with code XDAUKEY3
Aukey 6 Ports USB Charger $29.99 with code XDAUKEY4
Aukey QC3.0 USB Wall Charger $8.49 with code XDAUKEY5

These codes can be used until 11:59 PM PDT on September 16th, 2016. Happy charging!

Follow Aukey on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

Follow XDA-Developers on Twitter, Google+, YouTube, or Facebook.

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EXCLUSIVE: Pixel Software Updates, Partition Changes, Dual Booting & Seamless Custom ROM Updates

During this year's Google I/O, Google officially introduced Android Nougat which has brought several much-needed usability enhancements to those of us lucky enough to own a modern Nexus device. There were some features Google outlined during Google I/O that didn't find their way into final Nougat production builds for current Nexus devices, most notably seamless updates.

Many users were disappointed by the revelation that seamless updates would only be present on devices that ship with Android Nougat, but for those of us planning on upgrading to the next ~~Nexus~~ Pixel devices we have an awesome new feature to look forward to. However, since Google I/O we haven't really seen any additional details about this new feature.

That hasn't stopped some of the more inquisitive among us from figuring out how exactly Google plans on making seamless updates work, though. Ethan Yonker, who goes by the screenname Dees_Troy and is best known for his work as the lead developer on the Team Win Recovery Project, dove right into the Nougat source code released by Google in order to understand what he's dealing with when the Pixel devices are inevitably released. Google has made some interesting changes to the partition layout of the upcoming Pixel devices – and with some crafty work by the developers on our forums, Dees_Troy surmises that dual-boot may be possible.

Google's Pixel Phones and their Partitions

Nexus 6P Partition Table

In case you aren't aware, your phone's storage is divided into several standard internal memory partitions. The partitions you're probably most familiar with are /boot, /system, /data, /recovery, and /cache, though if you're interested you can look up the actual partition table on your device. The amount of storage space available to you, the user, is determined by the size allocated to the /data partition. On the other hand, /system is where most of the Android operating system files reside. Resizing these two partitions to appropriate space for more user apps or perhaps a new version of Android is definitely possible, but the process can be risky and in general isn't something you should ever expect out of your device.

I'm greatly simplifying how updates work, but generally when you update only files within /system are modified and updates are applied at the block level, so that dm-verity is left unbroken. What you know as a "dirty flash" involves flashing a new ROM's system files on top of your current ROM's system files, without performing a factory reset. On the other hand, a "clean flash" involves updating both your /system and your /data partition (without touching /data/media, which is where your pictures, music, documents, and other personal files reside).

Whenever you are updating your device, you generally aren't able to actively use it at all. Instead, you have to wait for the recovery to modify all of the necessary files within each partition. This is to prevent any potential issues from the Android operating system attempting to access a file that is currently being updated, but on the flip side means that users have to sit through several minutes of watching the Android recovery logo apply an update.

Before Android Nougat, each device would only ever ship with one copy of each partition. This makes sense for most Android smartphones – storage space is at a premium (or so we're led to believe), so why bother with the redundancy of multiple backup partitions? The answer to that is seamless updates. Google's other foray into operating systems – Chrome OS – has proven to be wildly successful. Android actually borrows the concept of seamless updates from Chrome OS. Chrome OS achieves seamless updates by updating a set of redundant, inactive partitions in the background and then immediately swapping these partitions with the currently active ones before booting.

Chrome OS Update Workflow – Presumably Android will follow something similar

Initially, we believed that phones shipping with Nougat pre-installed would only come with a secondary /system partition. According to Dees_Troy, the Pixel phones will ship with two copies of most, if not all partitions on the device.

The new Pixel phones will have 2 system partitions, 2 boot partitions, 2 vendor partitions, 2 modem partitions, etc. One set of partitions will be active — the set of partitions that are currently used to boot the device. When an update is published, the update will be applied to the second set in the background. Once the update has been applied, a prompt will appear asking to reboot. The reboot will not include booting to recovery. Instead, the device will switch which set of partitions are used to the second set and you will quickly, perhaps nearly instantly, boot an updated device. – Dees_Troy

Dual-Booting Pixel Phones and Seamless Custom ROM Updates?

With two copies of every partition, Dees_Troy predicts that we may be able to hijack the second set of partitions to dual-boot. If you are on one of the very few devices that supports the MultiROM project, you may be familiar with the prospect of dual-booting ROMs. If you've messed with MultiROM before, then you're definitely aware that the methods that they use are basically one giant set of hacks to get it working on Android. In every XDA thread providing MultiROM on a device, there is a large disclaimer near the top warning users that "none of these systems are made with multibooting in mind" which that "it is possible that something goes wrong and you will have to flash factory images again." But with Google graciously providing us with a second set of partitions to work with, Dees_Troy expects that we may be able to get dual-boot running on the Pixel phones with some cooperation between various members of the ROM community.

If we can hijack the second partition set to dual-boot, then we could also potentially use these secondary partitions to implement seamless updates for custom ROMs as well. So if you're one of the many dedicated Cyanogenmod nightly users, then you may be able to update to the latest nightly without having to reboot your phone into recovery every night. Even though TWRP's Open Recovery Scripting and the various delta updating tools have greatly reduced the time and effort required to perform a nightly update, seamlessly updating your ROM in the background definitely beats out all other options.

Do note that we can't be sure these features will work until we actually have working devices in hand, but given Dees_Troy's extensive work on TWRP and his research into Nougat's source code, we believe that this speculation is highly credible.

While all of these upcoming and probable features sound positive, we also uncovered a lot of changes that complicate development on upcoming Pixel devices. We'll be detailing these in another article scheduled for tomorrow, but in the mean time please keep your hype in check!

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vendredi 16 septembre 2016

Intel’s Recent Radio Activity Could Lead to a Rematch for x86 on Android

Earlier this year, Intel drastically cut their mobile product line, dropping SoFIA and Broxton from their roadmap completely. At the same time, Intel also reduced their work on porting new versions of Android to x86 processors, leading many to suspect that Intel was pulling out of the Android phone space completely, with their attempts to catch up in the mobile sector being called a $10 billion waste.

Intel quickly commented that they would continue to focus on their Core M line for 2-in-1's and on developing network technologies in preparation for 5G systems, however they refused to comment on the future of the Atom line, beyond saying that they will continue to ship their currently in-production SoCs.

While Intel struggled in many regards with their Atom chips (having to pay OEMs to use them), one issue that stood out was cellular radio power usage. Intel has spent substantial amounts of money buying companies and investing in R&D over the past six years trying to improve their performance, and to some extent it has paid off. Intel has shown extensive improvement in that timeframe, but they're still playing catch up. This year's XMM 7480 is the first Intel modem to have an integrated envelope tracking IC, which is fantastic technology that makes a huge difference for cellular power consumption, but it is technology that we've seen from Qualcomm since 2013. More pressingly, Intel has been having substantial difficulty leveraging their technological advantages, with even their latest modems like the 7480 and last year's 7360 still being built on the TSMC 28 nm process node, the same node that is used by Qualcomm for their X5 LTE modem found in entry level 41x series processors.

The process node issues have been especially problematic, as they have prevented Intel from shipping a SoC with an integrated cellular radio to this date. Their SoFIA Atom x3 chip was meant to be the first, a collaboration with Rockchip and Spreadtrum on the TSMC 28 nm node, but the cancellation of SoFIA has left Intel's efforts towards an integrated LTE modem up in the air.

Some of the questions surrounding Intel's future have now been answered with Intel's 7360 being picked for use in the GSM-only iPhone 7 models (the first time Apple has used a non-Qualcomm modem since 2010, back when they used Infineon modems). Intel is ramping up production of their discrete modems, and trying to find a dedicated customer base for the former Infineon business unit, the likes of which it hasn't seen since before Intel bought them. Back in 2010 at the time of the purchase, Steve Jobs was supposedly "very happy" with Intel's purchase of Infineon and Intel was viewed as a lock for being the modem supplier for Apple for years to come, before Apple promptly dropped them in favor of Qualcomm and CDMA support.

Intel's plans seem to be to continue to build for a future entrance into the smartphone market, by avoiding directly entering the smartphone market.

Intel is building their low-power processor portfolio by treating the tablet and 2-in-1 markets as an extension of their laptop market, allowing them to continue to focus their R&D spending in a way that benefits them in both the short and long term, without having to spend billions to push for market share on a platform where their chips currently aren't quite as competitive.

They're also continuing to develop their baseband portfolio by avoiding integration just yet. By focusing on the basebands themselves, Intel is hoping to build a product that can compete with Qualcomm directly before attempting to put it all together and integrate it with their in-house chips.

The question then becomes one of "where does Intel go from here?" Hardware is only a small part of the picture if Intel wants to re-enter the Android market. Reviews of phones with Intel chipsets, like the Asus ZenFone 2, have shown that Intel's binary translation makes any apps coded for the NDK take a hit in performance and in battery usage if they aren't compiled for x86 (not to mention the heavy battery drain that the phone saw when using LTE, reminiscent of early LTE devices like the HTC ThunderBolt). If Intel wants to be competitive, they need to provide incentives for developers to compile their NDK apps for x86 as well as for ARM.

They need to work with Google to make sure that Android updates are ready for the x86 platform from day one, too. They need to work with OEMs to ensure that there are proper drivers available for all the devices they end up shipping. They need software support.

They also need to find ways to minimize the problems that they currently have. While providing a compelling platform and helping developers compile for x86 is the ideal end-game, Intel has to realize that even if they hold substantial market share, there will still be NDK apps that are only compiled for ARM. Even if some of them are older apps that are no longer supported by their developers, if people still use them, then they are important. Backwards compatibility is a key factor in device choice, and is a major reason for Intel's dominance in the desktop space. As Linus Torvalds says, "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"; from the perspective of the users, there should be no difference between what software their current device and their previous device were capable of running (unless absolutely necessary). If Intel wants to deal with that issue, they need to see some improvements to their binary translation.

That in turn leads to further questions about the design of Intel's binary translation, and whether the issues are inherent to x86, or a code issue. Nvidia's binary translation largely originates from the same company, Transmeta, but they seem to see substantially fewer issues with it. Platform independant tests seem to show x86 and ARM performing at relatively the same level in terms of efficiency currently, so where does the larger drain for Intel's binary translation come from? Is it because Nvidia's binary translation isn't doing quite as much translation thanks to Denver being compatible with the ARM ISA? If so, then that will be a hard gap for Intel to bridge. Is it because Nvidia designed Denver with binary translation in mind, and was able to maximize performance for both? If that is the case, then Intel will be able to make changes in the future to better utilize their own form of binary translation, and we could see the gap shrink significantly. Those aren't easy questions to find the answer to, but those are the questions that Intel will need to figure out if they want to be successful in the Android market.

Do you think Intel can rally around their Core M designs to produce a viable smartphone chip in the future? How could Intel go about building the dev support that they need? Sound off below!

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Latest Google Play Services Update Fixes Firebase Bug

With the version 9.6.80 of Google Play Services developers who were using Firebase Crash Reporting, were noticing their apps constantly crashing. There was a conflict with this specific version of Google Play Services, but Google is already rolling out a fix. It seems the newer, Google Play Services 9.6.83 has resolved this issue, and it's rolling out to users right now.

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The CPSC is Reportedly Investigating Other Samsung Phone Fires

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 isn't the only device that has had battery issues as of late. We recently talked about a Galaxy S7 that caught fire in a cafe, and there was reports of a Samsung Galaxy Core malfunctioning and almost injuring a 6-year-old. ABC News is reporting that the CPSC is currently investigating all of these incidents.

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Cyanogen OS 13.0 is Rolling out to the Wileyfox Spark and Spark+

If you own the Wileyfox Spar, or the Wileyfox Spark+, then you can look forward to a big update being pushed to your device soon. The folks over at Cyanogen Inc. have just announced these two devices are starting to get Cyanogen OS 13. So be sure to check the software update page on your device to see if you are eligible.

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