Tag: Android Oreo

If you have been wanting to get your hands on a Samsung Galaxy Note8, today is your day.  Amazon has dropped the price of the 6.3″ phablet by a whopping $200.  Now you can get it with 64GB of storage for $749 in either the Midnight Black or Orchid Gray colors.  This is by far the lowest price so far on the Note8.

For those that don’t recall, the Galaxy Note8 is a  6.3″ device that renders at 1440 x 2560 resolution with an 18.5:9 aspect ratio.  Physically it is 162.5 x 74.6 x 8.6mm and weighs 195g.  In old money, that’s 6.39 x 2.9 x .34 inches and a weight of 6.87 ounces.   It is powered by the Snapdragon 835 SocC and has an eye watering 6GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage.  That storage can be expanded up to 2TB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

Nearly 10 months after the release of Android Oreo, it has finally made its way to the popular Samsung Galaxy Tab S3.  It’s about time.  The 9.7″ tablet, which was announced at Mobile World Congress back in February 2017, has to this point been running on Android Marshmallow here in the United States.  The UK variant of the tablet was updated to Oreo earlier this month.

The update itself is just over 1.2GB in size and will bring you Oreo and the new Samsung Experience 9.0 user interface.  You can expect about a 15 minute install time once you download the update to your Galaxy Tab S3 and a reboot is required.

After making their debut earlier this year at Mobile World Congress, the redesigned Sony Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact are now available to order from Sony’s Amazon storefront.  The 5.7″ XZ2 is priced starting at $736 for the Ash Pink color while the XZ2 Compact is priced at $649 for any color variant of the 5″ phone.

For those that don’t remember, the Sony Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 compact are virtually identical from an internals perspective.  They are powered by the Snapdragon 845 SoC, have 4GB of RAM and have 64GB of storage built-in.  That storage can be expanded up to 400GB thanks to the MicroSD card slot.  Both have a 19MP f/2.0 rear camera that can shoot an incredible 960 fps slow motion video, and a 5MP f/2.2 selfie camera on the front.

HTC has pulled back the covers on their latest flagship device, the HTC U12+.  The first phone from the Taiwanese company for 2018 has all the specs you would expect from a flagship phone and has the price to go along with it.

Powering the U12+ is the 2.8GHz Snapdragon 845 SoC which is a 64-bit, octa-core architecture.  This is coupled with 6GB of RAM and either 64GB or 128GB of onboard storage.  That storage can be expanded thanks to the MicroSD slot.  Display wise, you have a 6″ QHD LCD display which renders at 2880×1440.  It provides an eye-popping 537ppi on the 18:9 ratio display.  All this comes in a phone that is 156.6 x 73.9 x 8.7-9.7mm and weighs 188g.

It has taken a bit longer than the company expected but if you have a Mobvoi Ticwatch E or S model, you should have your Wear OS update that brings Android Oreo available.  The company, in a recent post in their forums, indicates that 100% of devices should have the update now available and installed (or ready to install).

Originally the company had indicated that the update would roll out in March of this year but “Due to unexpected circumstances” the updates were delayed.  The company then began rolling out the update early last week with the 100% mark for all devices hit on May 16th.

I can confirm that my Mobvoi Ticwatch E has been updated.

The latest Android Distribution Report has been made available and the numbers for Android Oreo are still anemic.  After being available for 8 months, the latest version of Android is on only 5.7% of devices that came to the Google Play Store for the 7-day period ending May 7, 2018.  That is an improvement of 1.1% over the April report but still shows the significant upgrade challenge Android faces.

If there is good news it is that the last two version of Android, Nougat and Oreo, are the only two in this month’s report that gained any usage.  Nougat was up .3% and remains the most widely used version of Android at 31.1%.