Category: Cell Phone

Google’s Pixel phones could soon begin screening robocalls automatically

One of the most useful software features available on the latest Pixel phones is Call Screen, which basically protects you from those annoying robocalls. While the feature in its current form isn’t truly “smart”, an APK teardown of the latest Google Phone v4.2 by the folks at XDA Developers has revealed that Google is currently working on making Call Screen much more useful by enabling it to screen robocalls automatically.

As can be seen in the screenshots below, Pixel users will be able to choose from three options for automatic call screening: automatically screen to decline robocalls, ring the phone, or automatically decline the incoming call silently.

One of the screenshots also describes how the automatic call screening feature will work. Google Assistant will automatically answer unknown calls. When the Assistant detects a robocall, it will be silently declined, without interrupting the user. In case of other unknown calls, the phone will ring a few moments later, with a transcript of the call. Calls from your contacts, however, will never be screened automatically by the Assistant.

Another new addition will be the ability to save the audio from screen calls. Currently, the feature only lets users save the transcript for screened calls. The automatic call screening feature will also offer improved spam detection to fight robocalls. In addition to numbers that match Google’s spam database, the Google Phone app will also detect unknown numbers, private or hidden numbers, as well as faked numbers.

HONOR V30 SURFACES IN GEEKBENCH WHILE THE COMPANY ADVERTISES 5G CAPABILITIES

The Honor V30 will go official in the next week November 26, as well as its sibling V30 Pro. Both devices have been a target of multiple leaks in the past weeks. Honor itself doesn’t seem very concerned with these leaks, as the company is putting great effort to advertise the 5G capabilities of the new smartphone duo. Today we’ve got new material from the promo campaign as well as a leaked photo that shows the handset downloading 1.6GB game update over 5G connectivity.

Huawei’s subsidiary also posted a couple of teaser images for the upcoming phones, which once again focus on the 5G powers. The Honor V30 5G will be fully compatible with China Telecom. But there are two other telecom firms in the country with support to the next-gen connectivity. Since it’s a new technology that will have grown in popularity over the next years, it’s natural to see Honor giving so much importance to it. Early adopters of the 5G technology can find in the Honor V30 Duo a great opportunity to dive in the new internet speeds.

Meanwhile, the Honor V30 was spotted in the GeekBench database. The rumored specs are confirmed as the phone will run Kirin 990 5G and this particular unit runs with 8GB of RAM. It runs MagicUI (The Honor’s branch of Huawei software) which is based on Google’s latest Android 10. The results are very comparable to the Huawei Mate 30 Pro since both smartphones boast the same chipset. For that reason, we can expect a flagship performance on the Honor handset.

Besides the Honor V30 and V30 Pro, Honor will also unveil the Honor Magic Watch 2 on November 26. So set a reminder for the date, if you’re an Honor enthusiast.

Honor V30 renders leak with dual selfie hole-punch and no headphone jack

Honor is going to announce its next flagship smartphone. The Honor V20 (“View 20” in Western markets) was the first Honor phone with a hole-punch selfie camera and among the first smartphones to have one.

We’ve seen an alleged case render of the V30 just last week and today’s leak from 91Mobiles shows the Honor V30 in official-looking renders. They also corroborate Honor’s recent teasers of the V30.

The V30 will bring dual-selfie cameras through a cutout in the display (presumably LCD). As seen in the renders, which offer the V30 from all angles, there is no longer a headphone jack – something rare for devices with the Honor brand.

There is a triple camera around the back which appears to protrude from the back of the phone quite a bit and the main module is rumored to be a 60MP camera. A rear-mounted fingerprint scanner is seemingly replaced by one mounted on the right side of the phone and the phone is said to launch with 5G support for the Chinese market. We can expect to see the Kirin 990 power the Honor flagship.

Honor is going to officially announce the V30 in China on November 26. Availability for Western markets is not yet known, but the handset may be called “Vera 30” outside of China.

LG G8X ThinQ review: Double your pleasure, double your fun

On its own, LG’s G8X ThinQ isn’t that exciting of a smartphone; well, to be fair, let’s say it’s not anymore exciting than the G8 ThinQ that came out earlier this year. What’s more exciting is the LG Dual Screen, an accessory for the G8X that in most cases, comes with the device, and gives you a dual-screen experience.

The accessory plugs into the G8X and adds a second 6.4-inch FHD OLED display; in fact, it’s the exact same panel, providing a complete dual-screen experience. LG added some additional software support as well, such as allowing you to use one screen entirely as a keyboard.

It’s cool to experience something that’s a little different from the rest. With the age of foldable smartphones here, it’s worth noting that dual-screen smartphones are here as well, so we’ll all have a variety of form factors to choose from.

Design

From the back, this device looks almost exactly like the G8 ThinQ that I reviewed earlier this year. It’s a black glass sandwich, and it doesn’t have a camera bump. Yes, you read that correctly, and it’s something that I really appreciate from LG. It’s something that the industry has really gotten away from, but the camera doesn’t protrude from the device at all. It’s completely smooth.

The camera has only two lenses though, with a tragic omission of a zoom lens in a world of triple-lens premium smartphones. We’ll talk more about the camera later. One thing that’s different from the G8 ThinQ though is that there’s no fingerprint sensor on the back, as LG finally put it in the screen.

As usual, the bottom of the device sports a USB Type-C port for charging, although it does support Qi wireless charging. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack, making LG one of the last to support the legacy port. But not only does LG support it, but it excels at it. LG uses a 32-bit Hi-Fi Quad DAC, so the headphone experience with the G8X is much better than you’ll find on non-LG phones. You can turn it on and off too if you want to hear the difference, and the difference is noticeable with any analog headphones, not just premium ones.

On the left side of the device, there’s a volume rocker and the Google Assistant button, a button that LG insists on including in its phones. Get ready to mix it up with the power button, which is on the right side. One thing that the Assistant button is useful for though, is doing certain things with the Dual Screen accessory, such as answering calls with the phone folded shut.

Dual Screen and display

The display of the device itself is 6.3 inches with a 1080p resolution. The OLED screen has a small notch for the front camera, and it’s much smaller than the notch on the G8 since it doesn’t include all of those nonsensical Air Motion sensors. As usual, LG made a great OLED display.

But wait, there are two of them. With the Dual Screen accessory, LG used the exact same panel that’s included on the phone. And when I say it’s the exact panel, I mean it, right down to the notch. LG told me that there’s a reason for having a notch on the second screen without a camera, and it has to do with using the exact same panel. It allows for the color calibration to be exactly the same between the two displays.

But it’s all pretty awesome. The most natural use case is to have two apps side-by-side. If you’re feeling lazy, that could be Twitter and Facebook. Or, it could be email and Microsoft Word, if you’re feeling a bit more productive.

As I noted earlier, you can use an entire display as a keyboard, which makes for a great typing experience. You can swap the app between displays by swiping with three fingers. The reason that I mention this now is because you probably want the display with the actual phone – the side that’s heavier – to be the part that you’re holding, so if you’re using that display, you can swipe it to the other screen and then the keyboard will appear on the bottom.

Another use case is just to prop up your phone. In the PC world, we call this tent mode. The Dual Screen accessory has a 360-degree hinge, and when you fold it all the way back, the second screen shuts off. That means that you can indeed use this as a normal phone if you want, albeit a much thicker phone.

While I absolutely loved using a phone with two screens for the last few weeks, my biggest issue was software. I installed Microsoft Launcher and was really disappointed that I couldn’t get it to work on the second screen. It seems that the dual-screen affect works by showing two instances of LG’s launcher, so you can replace it on the main one, but not on the other.

The Dual Screen accessory does have its own settings. When you first insert the phone into the case, you’ll get a pop-up to ask if you want to turn on the second screen. There will also be a small icon on the side that you can open with additional options. And then, the green icon that you can see on the second screen opens a full settings menu, which allows you to do things like turn the app drawer icon on and off, but not switch the launcher.

The front of the accessory is mirrored, making it really hard to photograph, but there’s also a small display at the top that will show you the time and notification badges. It can also tell you who’s calling, as there is a cutout for the speaker, so you can talk on the phone without opening the case.

Ultimately, I really loved the LG Dual Screen. Having a second screen is something that I never knew I wanted, and now I don’t want to live without it. But I also think that this is a somewhat early implementation of it. It could use more software support, as Android users are used to being able to customize launchers and keyboards.

Don’t get me wrong though. LG did a great job with its own software on this. For example, not only can the keyboard go full screen, but you can use the second screen for a game controller as well, or you can create your own gaming controller.

Camera

The camera on this device is not exciting, and it’s not as good as the one on the LG G8 ThinQ. The two sensors on the back are 12MP and 13MP for standard and ultrawide lenses, respectively, and the apertures are f/1.8 and f/2.4. For comparison, the G8 had 12MP and 16MP lenses with f/1.5 and f/1.9 apertures, so low-light performance would be better.

It does have the features that you’d expect though, such as 4K 60fps video capture, at least from the main lens. The front camera supports 4K 30fps video capture too, something that we didn’t see in the G8.

It has features like night mode, and the AI camera that is meant to see what you’re taking pictures of and adjust settings accordingly. The front camera is 32MP with Quad Bayer technology, meaning that it can combine four pixels into one for better low-light performance.

​​​​​​Again, the camera really wasn’t the focus of this product. The big focus is clearly on the Dual Screen accessory, and productivity.

Performance and battery life

Going into this, I was a bit worried about performance. For example, with gaming focus behind allowing you to use a screen as a game controller, I was worried about the screen having to push the extra pixels of a second display. As it turns out, my worries were for nothing. It makes sense too, since these are both FHD+ displays, so two of them adds up to just over five million pixels, which isn’t more than your average QHD+ screen.

Overall, the performance is exactly what you’d expect with a Snapdragon 855 and 6GB RAM, which is fine. It does use UFS 2.1 storage, rather than the faster UFS 3.0 storage that’s being used in some newer phones.

Battery life depends on how you use it. Two displays means that you’re burning through battery life, although the G8X does have a 4,000mAh battery, which is pretty good. Using the Dual Screen accessory, I was able to stretch it across the day on most days, and without it, it wasn’t a problem at all to get through the day.

For benchmarks, I used Geekbench 4, Geekbench 5, AnTuTu, and GFXBench. I did run them all with and without the Dual Screen accessory attached, but the results were so similar that it’s not even worth showing both.

First up is Geekbench 4, which tests the CPU.

You can compare this to the G8 ThinQ, which has similar hardware and got 3,513 on single-core and 10,989 on multi-core. Next up is Geekbench 5, a newer version of the same product.

We can compare this one to the OnePlus 7T, which scored 785 on single-core and 2,816, as that device uses the more gaming-focused Snapdragon 855+ chipset. Next up is AnTuTu, which has an all-in-one test.

The G8X outperforms the G8 on AnTuTu, as the G8 got 356,631. The big boost was in the RAM department. Finally, GFXBench tests the GPU.

Conclusion

If you like to try out new experiences, than the LG G8X is for you. This is absolutely a great experience too, and the possibilities of having aa second display are endless. It’s great for productivity, gaming, entertainment, mindlessly scrolling through social networks, and more.

My biggest issue with it is the lack of support for third-party software, and LG’s native software doesn’t help, as I’m just not a fan of it. The other issue is that the camera is decidedly mid-range, so if you’re looking for a camera-centric device, this is not it.

What’s cool though, is that this phone isn’t very expensive in terms of today’s market. Right now, it looks like AT&T has it for $779 and Sprint has it for $749, and either of them are giving away the Dual Screen accessory for free. On a side note, I really wouldn’t recommend this device without the Dual Screen accessory.

I loved it though, possibly because I’m just a nerd that likes things that stand apart from the pack a bit, or possibly because I think new form factors are fun. If it sounds appealing to you though, I definitely recommend at least checking it out.

HUAWEI MATE X 5G FOLDABLE PHONE TO HIT THE MARKET TOMORROW

According to Huawei’s official mall information, Huawei Mate X 5G foldable phone will commence sales at 10:08 am on November 15 (Tomorrow). However, Huawei Mall limits the sale to the 8GB + 512GB version and the price is 16999 yuan ($2421).

Huawei Mate X uses a foldable display that uses an eagle-wing folding scheme. It can be expanded up to 8 inches. It also has the option of becoming a 6.6-inch or a 6.38-inch display. The 6-inch+ display can be handed with one hand and the body thickness is only 5.4mm. In the core configuration, Huawei Mate X comes with Huawei’s first 7nm 5G multimode chip Balong 5000 + Kirin 980. However, subsequent batches upgrade the chip to Kirin 990 5G. This smartphone also uses a 4500 mAh in-built battery which supports 55W super fast charge. It can deliver up to 85% in 30 minutes. Furthermore, this 5G smartphone also supports the 4G network.

In the camera configuration, this device comes with a triple camera setup. It uses a 40MP super-sensing camera (27mm) f/1.8, an 8MP telephoto lens (80mm) f/2.4 which supports OIS optical anti-shake and a 16MP super wide-angle lens (17mm) f/2.2. Its 3D depth sensor supports professional-grade blur effects. Mate X’s lens supports ISO 204800 ultra-high sensitivity, 45x zoom range (ultra wide-angle -3x optical – 30x digital), 2.5cm super macro shooting, and OIS + AIS super anti-shake.

Motorola’s folding Razr leaks again just hours before official launch event

Images of Motorola’s unannounced foldable Razr phone have surfaced once again, this time via the device’s Federal Communications Commission certification. MySmartPrice was first to spot the listing, which shows photographs of the phone from every angle, giving us another look at its notched folding display as well as a second display on the exterior of the phone.

There’s not a whole lot of new information here, thanks to the deluge of images of the device that leaked out last month. However, these are the first shots to give us a good look at the bottom of the phone, revealing a USB-C charging port and no headphone jack. Slightly more surprising is how much the phone’s hinges seem to protrude from the sides of the device, although, as MySmartPrice notes, this could be because the photographs are of a pre-production sample.

Unfortunately, the images don’t appear to offer any more clues about what that small button below the phone’s screen is able to do. It seems likely that it’s a combination home button / fingerprint sensor, but we’ve got our fingers crossed for a spring-loaded mechanism that flips open with a button press. It’s also unclear whether the phone’s external screen is touch-enabled or a more simple notification display.

If we had to guess, we’d say these images just appeared because Motorola will officially announce the device later today. Stay tuned.

From the Editor’s Desk: Wait, did my Pixel 4 XL battery life get better?

We’re now a few weeks into using the Pixel 4 (XL, in my case), and among the seemingly endless complaints people have with the phones there’s a constant undercurrent of chatter about battery life. Yes there’s Motion Sense, face unlock and the 90Hz display … but it all seems secondary to battery. It was the main focus of both our Pixel 4 review and to a lesser extent 4 XL review, and the debate is still going. Both a debate about whether the battery life is good enough to deal with in order to enjoy so many great parts of the phones, and also about just how bad the battery life actually is.

I think it’s fair to say a majority of people feel the battery life isn’t good enough. Even those who are okay with the battery for their usage can recognize that it isn’t as good as other competitive phones. I’m still fully in the camp that believes Google should’ve put more emphasis on battery life in the Pixel 4 XL, and should never have released the smaller Pixel 4 as it stood considering its woeful longevity.

A couple weeks after my review, though, I was given a ray of hope: my Pixel 4 XL’s battery life … started to get better. Whether it’s Google’s Adaptive Battery finally doing something, my limiting of notifications and background location access using Android 10’s new settings, or something else entirely, I was notably less worried about battery life the past week. Look, it was still not great — I was ending each day with about 15% battery — but I was getting to bedtime without charging, and that was a notable improvement. Curiously, when I talked to our own Hayato Huseman, who’s using the Pixel 4, he felt like he was experiencing the same thing — the phone was getting through a day; scraping by to do so, but making it.

But in the last couple days, I was really brought back down to reality. Taking multiple flights hopping between coasts, and also spending time in the troubling network environment that is New York City, the 4 XL didn’t come anywhere near holding up to tougher days. But I have started to figure out what I was experiencing that made me so optimistic: I feel like my Pixel 4 XL has reached a weird point where its standby battery life (aka when you’re not really using it) has much improved, but actually using the phone any amount still tanks it.

Keeping things light, spending lots of time on Wi-Fi, and never having the screen on for more than a few minutes at a time for messages, some photos, and short app usage, it’s totally fine. I recognize for a lot of people, that’s the extent of their phone usage — and seeing complaints about battery life would seem odd. But that’s not how I use my phone every day. Sure I have times when my phone goes hours at a time face-down on a table or on silent in my pocket; but others I’m streaming music, dealing with messages and emails, running with Bluetooth headphones and GPS, piling up notifications and making phone calls. When I use the phone lightly, I’m oddly impressed by the battery life. But as soon as I intensely hit the phone for even an hour or two in a day, I have to charge in the early evening. To say nothing of a proper travel day, when it’s dead in nine hours.

Myself and several friends are in San Diego this weekend meeting with MediaTek (disclosure: MediaTek paid for our flights and accommodations), and as is so often the case when a bunch of technology enthusiasts get together we started talking about our Pixel’s battery. The afternoon that we all arrived, we were enjoying drinks on the beach … and every single person with a Pixel 4 (or XL) had charged earlier in the day or was on a battery pack at the table. It turned into a Pixel 4 battery life support group — exchanging stories about just how bad the battery is, and the frustration over it considering how many parts of the phone we love.

I’m still using my Pixel 4 XL. On the whole, I’m very happy with it. I’m just extra bothered by the weak battery life because this is otherwise a fantastic phone. Yes the battery life is good enough for many people (at least, on the 4 XL), but it’s not at all a strength of this phone, and nobody complaining about the battery life is wrong to do so.

Google Pixel 4 goes up against a full-frame Canon DSLR in low-light test

Smartphone cameras are getting ridiculously good and, for the vast majority of people, they’ve replaced traditional cameras. This week, a blind test to see if the Pixel 4 could beat an expensive Canon camera in low light was run and the Pixel came out on top.

A YouTube channel (via PetaPixel) shot several handheld stills to compare the full-frame Canon EOS RP to the Pixel 4, a device with a much smaller sensor size. Traditionally, a larger sensor would mean better low light photography, but computational photography has changed the game.

In every comparison, the Pixel 4 produces brighter shots in the low-light setting with much less noise than the shots taken by Canon. That’s largely thanks to Google’s behind-the-scenes magic which stacks multiple images at different exposures to capture more detail and eliminate noise. A traditional DSLR just can’t do that on the fly, so comparing the low-light shots side-by-side will almost always give the Pixel the advantage.

Of course, there are ways for trained photographers to close the gap. They can copy Google’s HDR technique by stacking shots in post-production for better results. Taking the photos with a tripod or even using a more expensive camera could improve the shots, but that’s not really the point.

Google’s Pixel 4, thanks to its computational photography, makes taking excellent pictures easy for everyone.

One UI 2.0 Beta 3 update is rolling out for the Galaxy S10

Samsung kicked off the Android 10 beta program for the Galaxy S10 family last month, and it’s already released a couple of updates. Today, there is a new OTA rolling out for the S10s in South Korea and the UK — this will be the third update for Korea, but only the second for the UK and other regions that follow the same cadence. As for the US, there are still no signs of the third update.

The third One UI 2.0 beta update (build ZSK3) for the Galaxy S10 brings along a slew of bug fixes and performance enhancements.

In addition to these welcome optimizations, Samsung has also begun the rollout of Samsung Daily, a replacement for Bixby Home the company mentioned during its annual developer conference in San Jose last month. According to our tipster from the UK, Samsung Daily became available on his Galaxy S10 after updating to the ZSK3 beta build and performing app updates inside Samsung ‘s Galaxy Store. For all intents and purposes, Samsung Daily still looks very similar to the older Bixby Home’s card interface, which may be a disappointment to some.

In Korea, the rollout of the third beta update has already commenced for the S10e, S10, and S10+. The update has also been spotted in the UK. The US models, however, have yet to receive the update.

CameraX: Google’s New Weapon in the Photography Wars

Ever since it introduced Android, Google has struggled to provide a camera framework for developers that allows them to both build camera-enabled apps quickly and take advantage of the advanced capabilities being offered by phone makers. Its first Camera API was limited, and the second version is complicated. Neither has a vendor-independent way to activate some of the advanced modes that have been added to phones for improving image quality and adding stylistic effects. Now, Google is launching CameraX, a library that provides not just a simplified way for developers to access Android’s Camera2 functionality, but provides extensions for additional capabilities.

CameraX Is a Simpler Way to Harness the Power of Camera2

CameraX is provided as a Jetpack support library, and the basic portion of its capability is usable on Android OS versions back to Android 5.0 (API level 21). Its wrappers provide a use-case-centric set of interfaces to Camera2, and add lifecycle awareness to help reduce programming overhead. Google also says it reduces device dependencies, so CameraX code should run across all types of hardware (there are also calls to ask whether a device has a particular capability like a front camera).

To work with CameraX a developer specifies a desired use case with configuration options. Listeners are then added to handle the data output by the CameraX library — which can be either in the form of a data stream or written directly to a file. Finally, the use cases are bound to Android Architecture Lifecycles, so that CameraX can handle some of the housekeeping associated with setup and teardown of resources for the application. One nice feature of CameraX is that multiple use cases can be run simultaneously, so a preview can remain live while images or video are analyzed and perhaps captured, for example.

CameraX supports several use cases: Preview, to get an image on the display; Image analysis, to get direct access to the image buffer; and Image capture, to save a fully-processed image or video. Google provides several sample applications for various use cases. As is the recent trend, the ones I looked at are written in Kotlin with alternate Java versions.

After a few lines of setup, CameraX commands are fairly straightforward. For example, to simply capture an image from the camera, there is a takePicture() method. Prior to calling it, another simple call lets an application select which camera to use, or to set other parameters. As you’d expect, CameraX requires the app to have CAMERA permissions, and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission on versions of Android prior to Q if you want to capture directly to the file system.

Extending RAW Image Capture to Multi-frame Scenarios

It was a big advance in capability when Android phones started offering the option to save RAW images for later post-processing, instead of only allowing access to their pre-processed JPEG versions. But with smartphones increasingly relying on the sophisticated merging of multiple frames to create a single output, post-processing a single RAW frame isn’t always the best option. With CameraX, app developers can directly read the stream of frames coming from the camera. That’s important for applications like machine learning and artificial reality (AR). However, it is also a potential boon for those wanting to provide their own image processing pipelines — either on the device or later on a desktop computer or in the cloud.

CameraX Offers Extensions for HDR, Night, Portrait, and Beauty

One area that has made third-party camera apps less attractive is the difficulty they have harnessing the advanced computational imaging capabilities of newer-model smartphones. For devices that support CameraX extensions, applications can access their advanced modes including HDR, Night photography, Portrait mode, and Beauty enhancements with the simple addition of a few lines of code to an existing Camera2 application.

For an app to have access to an extension, the phone maker needs to add a hook to the CameraX library to the vendor’s own API. If a vendor doesn’t provide an implementation of a capability, CameraX just reports it as being unavailable. Currently, developers using the alpha version of CameraX can make use of extensions on the following phones:

Samsung (HDR, Night, Beauty, Auto): Galaxy Note 10 series (pictured, top)
(demonstrated at Samsung’s SDC19)

Huawei (HDR, Portrait): Mate 20 series, P30 series, Honor Magic 2, Honor View 20

CameraX Rollout

CameraX is currently in alpha, but it’s expected to get to beta status — meaning final APIs according to Google — in December. Samsung showcased its support for CameraX this week at its Software Developer Conference, and it co-hosted a session with Google on how developers can take advantage of both CameraX and its extensions on the latest Samsung phones.