Rumor Suggests Samsung is Integrating Bixby in the Galaxy S8’s Native Apps

Back in October, Samsung announced they were acquiring Viv Labs and their entire AI platform. For those who are unaware, the founders of Viv Labs were the same group of people who worked on Siri (before Apple acquired them back in 2010). The big product from Viv Labs is an AI-powered voice assistant known as Viv. This voice assistant AI excels in natural language processing and is said to be more powerful than Siri is today.

It's no surprise that Viv Labs was on Samsung's radar, as we've been seeing a lot of companies wanting to get into this market. Amazon's Alexa personal assistant has found success in the company's Echo products, Google dove into the market with Google Home, and even Apple has started focusing on expanding the capabilities of Siri lately. Since the original announcement, it's been rumored that Samsung will replace S Voice with this new tech from Viv Labs, and it will debut with the launch of the Galaxy S8.

It's believed that Samsung will call their new personal assistant Bixby, thanks to a trademark that was filed in their home country of South Korea. As we've seen with the success of Amazon's Alexa assistant, the more things it can do the better experience the user will have with the service. Google Home has been struggling in this area, but Google has launched Actions on Google that open up the platform to 3rd-party developers.

Yesterday, SamMobile's sources have told them that Samsung is working hard to make sure most of their native applications will support this Bixby personal assistant feature. The article didn't go into much detail about how powerful it will be, but uses the Gallery application as an example, saying we can ask Bixby to show us photos or videos that match a particular criteria. We'll likely have to wait until Samsung's official launch event before we learn more details about Bixby, though.

Source: SamMobile

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2016 in Review: What did you think of the Tablets Released in 2016?

As we enter the final days of the year, it's time to get your opinion on all the events, news, releases and controversies that we witnessed so far in 2016.

While all price points of the smartphone market saw fierce competition, one segment which was once hotly contested barely saw any attention this year. We're talking about tablets, a segment that stayed out of the limelight for the most part. Few OEMs seem willing to dip their toes back into the tablet market, and stock-Android tablet enthusiasts have to contend with just rumors of an Huawei-made "Nexus" tablet coming in 2017.

Our question to you is,

What did you think of the tablets released this year? Why do you think tablets saw such little attention? Why are OEMs unwilling to release tablets? Have our use cases for tablets vanished, or have OEMs grown wary of investing into the tablet space? How big of a contribution did software have in their decline? Is there hope for tablets to make a comeback in 2017?

Let us know in the comments below!

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Unofficial CM14.1 ROM for Honor 8

In this video, TK takes us through an unofficial CM14.1 ROM for the Honor 8. This ROM is currently in the beta stages, so not everything is working yet.

Currently Working:

• Touchscreen * Charger ( not Off Mode )
• MTP & ADB * Internal/External Storage
• Screenrecorder
• WiFi
• Bluetooth
• Network & data connecting ( LTE/3G/2G )
• Audio
• All Sensors
• Lights
• NFC
• Power profiles
• Root already included like always into CM !

Currently Not Working:

• Camera
• GPS
• FPS
• Encryption

Follow the development of this ROM in the XDA thread here.

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Snapprefs Gets Updated to 2.1.0, Adds Support for 9.39.5.0

XDA Senior Member MaaarZ has just announced a new update to Snapprefs. This update adds support for Snapchat version 9.39.5.0, adds a Now Playing filter, a fling to save feature, a way to disable auto-advance, and more.

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Alleged LG G6 Render Shows a Similar Design to the LG G5

Details about the LG G6 have been pretty scarce this year. A rumor earlier this year claimed that LG would be ditching the metal build material next year for a glass one. Even though the LG G5 was built with metal, it received a lot of complaints in reviews for not feeling as premium as other devices on the market. We even just heard about the possibility of LG releasing the G6 earlier than usual so they won't have to deal with certain competitors at launch.

Other than that, we've heard the LG G6 would adopt MST technology for their mobile payments system and another rumor claiming they're ditching the modular design (even though they have come out and said otherwise). With a bunch of reports and rumors going around the community, the only thing that is clear is that LG wasn't happy with how the LG G5 sold. Oddly enough, a new rumor suggests the LG G6 will have a similar design to the LG G5.

This rumor comes to us thanks to a collaboration between Android Authority and @ShaiMizrachi. The leak suggests the LG G6 will be 149.4mm tall, 72.4mm wide, and then says that while they're unable to "confirm exact numbers," we can expect it to be a little thinner than the LG G5. We're not sure if the LG G6 will have the modular design, or even a removable battery (like we saw in the LG V20), but the wide camera cut out suggests it will have 2 rear cameras.

The cutouts also suggest they will likely stick with a metal build with the LG G6, unlike we heard with previous rumors. Technically, they could use a rear panel of glass with this design, but the cutouts being so close together would likely make the glass very brittle. As with all rumors, we should take this with a grain of salt, but we could be looking at the design of LG's upcoming flagship.

Source: Android Authority

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The Official Gerrit for LineageOS is Now Up

With the departure of Steve Kondik from Cyanogen Inc, we knew there would be a big shakeup with the way CyanogenMod was handled. An official blog post announced the servers and funds that were keeping CM up and running would be discontinued on December 31st. Then seemingly out of nowhere, CyanogenMod's website, wiki, forums, Gerrit, and download servers were all shut down thanks to a change in their DNS.

As mentioned, this was expected to happen on December 31st, but it actually came 6 days earlier as a surprising Christmas gift to the community. Thankfully, people didn't wait until the last minute to start archiving the stuff that was available. You can find an archive of CM's wiki here, and an archive of the latest snapshot build here. A the time, this left other resources like forums, Gerrit and website servers down.

While LineageOS is still trying to get on its feet, they have been able to bring up their own Gerrit server now. For those who are unaware, Gerrit enables a team of developers to announce changes they would like to make to a code base. These changes can be viewed by other members of the team, and they can all comment on it as well. So before a bug is fixed, or a new feature is implemented, other developers can look at it and decide whether or not they feel it would create a conflict. This also gives people who are outside of the development team a way to see which type of changes are happening (assuming it has been made public). So you or I can go through the latest changes that are happening with LineageOS right now. We can see which commits are still open, which ones have been merged, and which ones have been abandoned. So while CyanogenMod as a whole may have hit a snag over the holidays, there are still a number of people still working on the new code base for LineageOS.

Source: LineageOS

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December Prizes Awarded for Honor Incentive Program

It's time again to give out prizes to the most active members of our Honor forums through our community incentive program (as a result of a partnership we have with Honor). As a reminder, we have a special script running that looks at everyone that participates in any Honor forums and assigns points, each day, based on post and thread quality, plus other factors. Then, we apply a ranking to those with the top points, and give out prizes. The program applies to all Honor forums on XDA (that's the Honor Magic, Honor 8, Honor 5X, Honor 7, Honor 6/6X, Honor 5C, Honor 4X, Honor 4C, and Honor 3C).

Honor 8:

venom007

Honor 5X:

adriansticoid
gopinaidu77

Honor Band Z1:

PalakMi
krispy321

Engine Earphones:

vsriram92
DigiGoon

Selfie Stick:

muradulislam
zinko_pt
jkccl9
crpalmer
Romiui

These members will be contacted via XDA PM to arrange shipping for their prizes. And for everyone else: stay active in the Honor forums, because in another month, we'll be back with more prizes!

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