Google Home Max is coming to Australia. The largest of the Google Home family devices will be coming on August 9th to a variety of retailers at a price of $549 AU, roughly $406 US. That’s a bit more than the $399 here in the US but not by much.
The news came from the Official Google Australia blog today and it makes Australia the third country where Google Home Max is available after the United States and Canada.
Despite significant challenges in getting into the US market, Huawei has become the second largest phone manufacture, measured in phone shipments, in the latest report from IDC. The shipping of 54.2 million devices in the second quarter of 2018 means that the Chinese manufacture has moved well past Apple, who was number two behind Samsung until this report. Apple shipped 41.3 million devices in the same quarter.
Overall, Samsung remains the number one phone manufacture in the world, capturing some 20.9% of the global market with 71.5 million units shipping in Q2 of this year. Huawei has approximately 15.8% of the market share.
Yesterday, Hauwei’s sub-brand Honor released the new Honor Note 10. The 6.95″ phone is packed with performance and while it is only available in China currently, it is expected that a global variant of the phone will be available later this year or early next. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get the wallpapers from the new phone today.
The Honor Note 10 has ten stock wallpapers that come on the phone and as these things tend to go, it didn’t take long for them to leak online. I’ve got all of them now and I’ve linked to them after the break so those who aren’t interested don’t have to wade through them.
LineageOS has rolled out support for the 2016 Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL in their latest firmware build of Android Oreo 8.1. In LineageOS terms, that build 15.1. The addition of the two Google phones adds to an ever increasing number of devices that the independent Android development group, which rose from the ashes of CyanogenMod, supports.
Like other phones, in order to use LineageOS on your Pixel or Pixel XL, you will need to have the bootloader unlocked and be comfortable with manually installing a software build. It isn’t an overly difficult process but if you aren’t familiar with the process or comfortable with it, its best to stay away.
Regardless of if you like, don’t like, or vehemently hate sensor notches on smartphones, the reality is that they are coming into vogue. Google themselves are expected to have a notched device in the Pixel 3 XL and there are already notched devices out there from the likes of Essential and Huawei. That said, Android Oreo has never fully supported notches but that changes under Android P.
The Android team over at Google took to the Android Development blog yesterday to outline some key code elements that developers need to use in order to make sure their apps work with a notched device in Android P. They also laid down the law for manufactures too. No device will have more that two notches.