HTC Will Only Release 6 or 7 Phones in 2017

At the recent launch of the HTC U Ultra and U Play in Taipei, Engadget's Richard Lai interviewed Chialin Chang, HTC's President of Smartphone and Connected Devices business. During the interview, Mr. Chang confirmed that HTC is only planning to release 6 to 7 smartphones during 2017.

The move will be a significant drop in the number of phones launched by the company compared to recent years. Chang reports that the idea behind this is to allow HTC to focus on the core features of their phones, and therefore release higher quality products to contend with other manufacturers. Chang went on to say that the main selling point of these devices would be their machine learning integration, which several OEMs are currently experimenting with. No other major Android device manufacturer produces so few phones each year, as Samsung for example released over 30 phones in 2016.

According to Phandroid, the number of devices that HTC has released in previous years are as follows:

• 2016: 15 Phones
• 2015: 25 Phones
• 2014: 34 Phones

It is no secret that HTC has been struggling financially and this move could help assuage the problem. Q3 for 2016 saw the Taiwanese company make operating losses of NT$2 Billion ($63.3 million USD) and net losses after tax of NT$1.8 billion ($57 million USD).

It will be interesting to see how this works for HTC and hopefully they can release a few great phones rather than a large number of average ones. The U Ultra and U Play look to be a good start for HTC though and if you are interested in either device be sure to visit the HTC U Ultra and U Play forums!

Source: Engadget

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Over 100,000 People Pre-Ordered the Nokia 6 in China

In case you missed it, HMD Global recently launched a phone with the Nokia branding. We covered the release last weekend, but the most important news at the launch was the Nokia 6 will only officially be sold in the Chinese market. The new Nokia phone will be made available sometime in "early 2017," for a price of 1699 CNY (which is around $250 right now).

We'll have to wait and see when HMD Global will be ready to start selling the phone to the general public.

In China, smartphone companies like to ask potential customers to pre-register for a device that they're interested in buying. This is different than an actual pre-order, as the person is generally not expected to pay any money to register their interest in the phone. It just gives the OEM an idea as to how many people are interested in a certain product of theirs. It was reported that over 250,000 people pre-registered for the Nokia 6 within the first 24 hours.

Some companies in China also do pre-orders though, and that does generally require that the person pay in full to reserve their own device. So early this morning, we started to see reports that HMD Global had been able to get over 100,000 full pre-orders for the Nokia 6 within the first 4 days. While not record breaking numbers, it's definitely impressive for a company to achieve this when they were founded in May of last year, and when this is their first notable release.

The device definitely has some decent specs for the price it is available at, and the design isn't anything to scoff at either. The type of software made available in the Nokia 6 will surely make or break this device though. That, and we'll have to see if they actually have plans to support the device (with both software patches and major version updates) once the device has actually been made available.

What do you think of the Nokia 6's specs, design and price? Will this be something you try to pick up from a reseller, or will you wait and for the flagship Nokia 8?

Source: DigiTimes

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Google Adds Private Channel Apps to the Managed Play Store

Towards the end of last year, Google rebranded their Google Apps for Work platform into G Suite. They've been doing this to a few of their technologies lately, for whatever reason, but things have been business as usual for the Mountain View tech giant.

They recently announced App Maker for their G Suite customers, acquired a company to help improve the audio quality of their Hangouts users, and this week they've announced a change to the managed Play Store.

Google allows companies who pay for G Suite services to develop unique applications for their employees. This is where the App Maker came into play as it helped these businesses deploy an application much faster than before. These applications were considered private, but were still available in the Play Store application. They were just hidden in a secret tab that was labeled the same name as the company.

Google wanted to make these applications easier to access, so they have moved them into a category called Work Apps. Instead of being the last category within the Play Store, this category has moved into the 3rd position (which is right after Top Charts and Games). They want to use this Work Apps category as a place to store all the applications your employee may need in order to get their job done.

So instead of only listing private applications here, the G Suite admins will be able to add in a list of public applications as well. Google has also made it so that there is no longer a need to manage different access controls for employees. The controls for the private and public applications within this Work Apps category will be consolidated in the managed Play Store and there will be a simplified whitelisting process for mobile applications.

Source: G Suite

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Galaxy S7 & S7 Edge are Finally Receiving their Android 7.0 Nougat Update (Currently for Beta Testers)

Samsung has been doing a beta test for their Nougat update for a couple of months now. Many people hoped that they would have started this beta test earlier (since Android 7.0 officially released in August of last year, after all), but they didn't announce their first beta test of the update until around November.

This seemed a big strange since Google began doing developer tests of the update all the way back in March of last year.

Google did this to let Android developers test out the new software and get their apps ready for the update, but they also did it so that OEMs could get their hands on the update faster. Their attempt to help OEMs push out the major update wasn't as successful as they had hoped, though. Samsung waited a little over 2 months after the official release to even publicly beta test their update, and it took them an additional 2 months to start the official roll out.

But thankfully that time has come. We're starting to see screenshots circulate around the community that show the new OTA update is being pushed to them. The screenshots SamMobile has published showcase an update from the Nougat beta to the final version (which is just under 215MB in size). We haven't seen any screenshots showing that they are pushing out the Nougat update to current Marshmallow users though. If you were on Marshmallow and received the Nougat OTA update, we would love to hear from you.

So even though Samsung delivered the update later than some were hoping for, they actually beat their own schedule. The beta software team over at Samsung said they were planning on rolling out the update sometime around the 17th of this month. This could be when Marshmallow Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge owners start getting their OTA update, but either way it looks like they were done a week early.

Source: SamMobile

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Galaxy S8 Expectedly Coming with IP68 Rating for Dust and Water Resistance

The Korean news outlet The Investor has reported multiple sources as saying that the much-awaited successor to the Galaxy S7 and the iPhone 8 are both going to have IP68 rating for dust and water resistance.

Applying an IP68-level of dust and water resistance to the Galaxy S8 and iPhone 8 means that they are both dust sealed (not just resistant to external damage), and will also be able to face sustained submersion under water. The Galaxy S7 also has an IP68 rating, so this news is something we've been expecting — however, the article also states that Samsung is looking to bring water and dust resistance to other, cheaper smartphone lines it offers.

The Investor doesn't specify the submersion depth or duration that the S8 will be rated for either; however, the current generation S7 is rated for 1.5m and a duration of 30 mins with a IP rating of 68, so we can similar or better protection than that.

The actual depth and duration are specified by the manufacturer so it will be interesting to see how far of both these companies are willing to push their devices. Managing to waterproof a smartphone while also keeping a thin and attractive is no easy feat, and some of Samsung's products may have just failed under such pressure — here's hoping the Galaxy S8 does just fine!

The Investor

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What Do You Look Forward to in 2017?

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has just recently wrapped up, and at the event we caught a glimpse of what many key players in the industry are planning for this year.

Besides many new smartphones coming soon we'll inevitably see new versions of Android for smartphones, smartwatches, televisions, and even automobiles. Plus, we're seeing growing interest in home automation thanks to the competition between Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant ramping up.

So, our question to you is,

What do you look forward to in 2017?

Let us know in the comments below!

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OnePlus Assures Fix for OnePlus 3/3T Bootloader Vulnerability in Next OTA

Just yesterday, we highlighted a bootloader vulnerability that affected the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. This vulnerability made use of the fastboot mode on the device to toggle SELinux status from Enforcing to Permissive.

This state toggle can be done on both bootloader locked and bootloader unlocked devices. The issue was further complicated by the absence of an SELinux entry in the 'About Phone' screen, thus giving us no easy way to figure out if a device had been manipulated.

We had reached out to XDA Recognized Developer Sultanxda to shed some light on the issue:

The way that the "fastboot oem selinux <state>" command works is that it adds an extra argument onto the kernel command line when booting Linux. The extra argument comes in the form of "androidboot.selinux=<state>", where <state> can be "permissive". There's where things get funny: "androidboot.<something>" arguments on the kernel command line are parsed by Android's init. In a normal Android production build (a "user" build), the "androidboot.selinux" argument is totally ignored and selinux is always forced to enforcing.

So this bug is composed of two issues: One, users can make the bootloader pass a flag that would normally make selinux permissive on an engineering/debugging ROM build. And two, OnePlus modified Android's init in order to honor the "androidboot.selinux" flag even for production ROM builds.

Sultanxda suggested a few ways to fix the issue. You can read up on the suggestions and more on the vulnerability in our original post.

OnePlus has responded to the existence of the vulnerability. The company has assured that the vulnerability will be patched for the OnePlus 3 and the OnePlus 3T. Both the devices will be receiving this patch as part of their next OTA update.

We value the quick response received from OnePlus. Here's hoping that the next round of OTA arrives soon for both the devices!

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