Tag: Android Oreo

While the attention on Nokia this weekend and this week will be their activities at Mobile World Congress, it doesn’t mean that things are standing still back home.  HMD Global’s Chief Product Officer Juho Sarvikas took to Twitter in the wee hours of the morning here in the US to let people know that the Android Oreo beta program for the Nokia 3 has now kicked off.

You can now get #AndroidOreo for #Nokia3 in #Nokiamobile #Betalabs. Please help us test and perfect for commercial release! Thank you 🙏

— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) February 26, 2018

It is great news and follows up on Nokia’s promise last year to bring Oreo to all of their current devices, including the budget friendly Nokia 3.

As expect, Samsung has announced the all new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ at Mobile World Congress today.  The two flagship devices are solid upgrades to last year’s S8 series with the S9+ having some unique features over the standard S9.

The S9 and the S9+ are both powered by the Snapdragon 845 here in the US, with the S9 having 4GB of RAM and starting with 64GB of storage.  You can go up to 256GB on that built-in storage on both devices but, the S9+ will have 6GB of RAM on board.

The Galaxy S9 has a 12MP rear facing camera while the S9+ has a dual camera configuration with an adjustable aperture.  The S9 is powered by a 3000mAh battery behind the 5.8″ QHD Super AMOLED display while the 6.2″ S9+ will have a slight bigger 3500mAh battery.

If there was ever a proof point that LG’s mobile division is in trouble or at the very least in disarray, look no further than the LG V30S ThinQ.  The company announced this enhanced version of the LG V30 at Mobile World Congress and I use enhanced very liberally.  Basically it is a V30 with 6GB of RAM (instead of 4GB) and has a base storage of 128GB (up from 64GB).  Throw in a little Artificial Intelligence for improved photos and Android Oreo and badabing!  You have a LG V30S.

Spec wise, the V30S is identical to the V30 so you aren’t going to get any improvements as far as the SoC is concerned.  It is still running the Snapdragon 835.  It has the same display, same chassis design… same everything.  You get the idea.

The LineageOS team has announced that starting tomorrow, their new 15.1 build will be released to select devices.  This build is an important milestone as it brings the Android variant up to Oreo 8.1 as the base.

We’ve been working hard these months to get this new version available; the changes that were done in upstream (AOSP) are huge: Project Treble changed the way hardware is managed in Android, so all the OEM-abandoned platforms that are supported by Lineage had to be adapted for the new platform. Moreover, we’ve taken the time to make the code future-proof by converting a lot of our hardware-related code to make use of the new Treble capabilities: things such as LiveDisplay and lights (leds) control are now up to date with the new Android standards, so we’re going to have an easier time forward-porting stuff whenever a new Android version comes out.

Along with the update to Oreo 8.1, there are also some new features that have come along in this build.  Styles allows you to change the accent color that will also change from a light to dark theme based on the time of day (if enabled).

Mobile World Congress, or MWC, kicks off next week in Barcelona, Spain and even though there won’t be as many phone announcements, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be an exciting show.  For their part, Google is going to be going strong at the event with a lot of announcements and products on display.

The company updated their blog earlier today outlining their plans for MWC which includes the first set of Android Oreo Go Edition phones.  By now you are likely familiar with the Android Go apps that are available like Gmail Go, YouTube Go, Maps Go and other.  These lightweight apps are aimed to work on low cost, low memory devices.  We will get our first glimpse of them next week.

After halting the rollout last week due to some boot looping issues, Samsung has re-released the Android Oreo update for the Samsung Galaxy S8.  The new build is version G950FXXU1CRB7 for the S8 and the S8+ is getting build G955XXU1CRB7.  Both builds are just over 500MB in size and it is currently rolling out in Europe.

The South Korean company ended up stopping the update rollout last week due to some users reporting that their phones were boot looping or randomly rebooting.  The company quickly reworked the build which early reports suggest that the issues have been resolved.