Android: Page 28

Lenovo, the company that now owns Motorola, just announced two new entries in their wildly successful midrange Moto G series. The Moto G5, and its bigger brother, the Moto G5 Plus, were both shown off in detail at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain.

LineageOS, the successor to the wildly popular CyanogenMod custom ROM, is adding an interesting new feature that could potentially save lots of juice when your battery is running low. When enabling "Extreme power saver" mode, which can be set to kick in automatically at 15%, you'll soon have the option of changing your kernel's performance profile as well.

LG announced their latest high-end device on September 6 and its specs are pretty amazing: The new V20 sports three cameras, two displays, three microphones, four DACs for high-end sound, and it's all powered by a removable battery.

Each generation of smartphones ushers in a new set of top-of-the-line specs, with processing power, battery size, and display resolution growing by the year. These headlining features get the most press, but there's one unsung hero that has the potential to make the biggest difference when it comes to real-world performance: RAM, or random-access memory.

LG, like many other OEMs, usually locks down their bootloaders with an airtight seal. There are a few good reasons for this, the big one being that an unlocked bootloader technically compromises some device security measures. LG would also argue that unlocking your bootloader is absolutely pointless, as having it locked will not hinder normal device usage, which is kinda true.

The beauty of Android is that nearly everything can be customized. But sometimes, we get so caught up in tweaking functionality and other minutiae that one of the most important interfaces gets neglected—the home screen wallpaper.

When you're sitting at your desk trying to get some work done, your Android device can be a big distraction. If a text comes in, you have to pick up your phone, unlock it, then respond with the clumsy touch screen keyboard—and by then, you've probably forgotten what you were doing on your computer.

Whatever your reason for it is, multitasking on Android phones is cool. Here are three ways how to achieve it.

When Android Multi window was introduced in the developer options section of Android Marshmallow, I was thrilled to use it, as much as everybody else was. Then I found out it was not that much of a buff, got disappointed and expected an upgrade in the next version. Now with Nougat, it's not hidden in the deepest of settings anymore, yet I think it still fails to provide too much usefulness.

Selecting text on a touchscreen device has always been a major pain point. Those tiny little arrows that let you adjust the selection area are always too hard to actually adjust, making precision all but impossible. Then there's the issue of some apps not even allowing text selection in the first place, so the entire experience is basically a big mess.

As a former repair tech, I've heard the same reasons over and over as to why people opt not to purchase phone insurance. Some cite the cost—why pay extra every month for insurance when you're careful with your phone? Deductibles are expensive, so why not just spend that money on a repair instead of getting a refurbished phone as a replacement?

Now that Android Nougat lets you add your own custom Quick Settings tiles, your pull-down menu is probably getting a lot more crowded than it used to be, with all sorts of new and useful toggles. But the trouble is, you can only add up to nine entries before your Quick Settings tiles spill over into a second pane that you have to access by swiping, and that's not exactly "quick."

Android is a highly customizable operating system. Sometimes, we use these capabilities to add core functionality or streamline the user experience, but there are other times when customization is just about having fun and making your smartphone's interface more enjoyable.

Almost every Android device comes with a Google search bar embedded directly into its stock home screen app. But Google search is available in so many different places on Android that having this bar in your launcher is almost overkill. On top of that, Google recently changed the logo overlay to a more colorful one that may clash with your home screen theme, so there's plenty of reasons to dislike this feature.

Different times call for different ringtone volumes. When you're at work or school, you need your phone to be quiet so it doesn't make a disturbance—but when you're at home or out and about, the volume should be turned back up so you don't miss any important notifications.

The Note7 fireworks bonanza was unprecedented in scope. A recent report suggests that Samsung could lose upwards of $20 billion in lost profit due to this fiasco.

If you've ever wondered why the pictures and videos you share with Snapchat on your Android device seem to look grainy with low resolution, you're not alone. We all know it, and we've come to accept it as a plain fact: Snapchat image quality sucks on Android.

Starting with iOS 7, the iPhone has had a cool feature that lets you see upcoming calendar events right on your lock screen, and it only got better with iOS 10. Android used to have this feature with its lock screen widget system, but that was removed back in the Lollipop days, so there's nothing quite like iOS 10's "Today View" feature anymore.

Android has separate volume levels for various system sounds like incoming calls, notifications, alarms, and media. This means that when you want to adjust volume levels for just one of these categories, you usually have to press the physical volume rocker, tap a button to expand the volume menu, find the category that you want to adjust, then finally raise or lower the volume.

Facebook released a new app in November 2016 that aimed to compete directly with Snapchat, but it was only officially available in Brazil—and still is. The app, called "Flash," is so much like Snapchat that it's not even the slightest bit of a stretch to call it a clone.

I'm often reluctant to use a home screen launcher other than the stock one on my Android. Once you're well acclimated with something, complacency sets in, welcoming change with much resistance. Well, my friends, I have seen the error of my ways...

Android apps check your system locale settings to determine which language they should display. For the most part, it's a seamless experience—except for those times when an app has not been translated into your language of choice, in which case the app will usually default to English.

The Pixel XL reportedly uses the same exact display panel as the Galaxy S7 Edge, but according to third-party testing, Samsung's flagship gets at least ten percent brighter than Google's. The same can be said of the regular Pixel, which tops out just shy of its bigger brother's brightness rating.

According to multiple users on Reddit, the Pixel and Pixel XL's camera can have some serious auto-focus issues if you're using a certain type of case with Google's new flagships. When the problem occurs, your camera app will refuse to settle on a focus point, making almost everything in the frame blurry. Redditor HeshoMike uploaded a video of the phenomenon, and you can see it in action here:

Regardless of what they call them—be it Pixel or Nexus—Google's line of smartphones have a cool feature called "Ambient Display" that wakes your screen in a low-power black and white state when you receive a notification. This feature was added back when Google owned Motorola, as Moto's phones had a similar lock screen effect called "Active Display."

The Google Pixel and Pixel XL have an exclusive set of navigation buttons that you can't get on any other device without some tinkering. But aside from just being solid, filled-in shapes, the real treat in the Pixel's nav bar is the Google Assistant animation that gets activated by long-pressing the home button. The four colored dots that animate outward give you some visual feedback for triggering the Assistant, but really, it's just a nice little touch.

Creative thoughts are fleeting, so when an idea strikes, you have to jot it down as quickly as possible or risk forgetting it altogether. Let's say you randomly think of a perfect tweet while you're using your phone. You exit whatever app you were using, head to the home screen, dig through your app drawer, open Twitter—and by the time you make it to the "What's happening?" screen, you totally forgot what you were going to say.

One of the only downsides to the Pixel XL is that Google's flagship phone does not have stereo speakers. But if Android's awesome development community has taught us anything over the years, it's that limitations like these can be bypassed with some creative software tinkering.

Copying files from a computer to your Android device has always been pretty straightforward—just connect the two devices with a USB cable, open your desktop file explorer, then move the files over. But what if you didn't need any wires at all?

Many Android users woke up on January 10 to discover that their phone's performance took a nosedive overnight. Battery life is draining fast, overall performance has been sluggish, and devices seem to be overheating for no apparent reason. Not to worry, this isn't happening because of something you did.

Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL flagships are some very powerful smartphones, but as with any high-tech gadget, they're only as capable as the user allows them to be. So if you're a proud new Pixel owner, it's time to bone up on a few new features to help get the most out of your device.

Anyone who's ever flashed factory images to manually update an Android phone knows how tedious the process can be. Unlocking the bootloader and flashing Android firmware requires the use of ADB and Fastboot—but, like getting a whole pizza pie when all you wanted was a slice, users in the past had to download the entire Android Studio development package or SDK in order to get the two utilities.

Hello I want to root my galaxy a5. I have searched every result on google and still nothing...one try even brick my phone and I needed to install the firmware again...does anyone know how to really root my phone?

The Huawei Nexus 6P was released a little over a year ago, but despite doing moderately well in sales, the device has had more than its fair share of issues. When first released, there were numerous reception and memory management difficulties that left users extremely frustrated, though, those problems were solved with updates pushed by Google.

Google's got quite a few tricks up its sleeve with their Pixel and Pixel XL flagships, including functionality we've never seen before on Android. One awesome feature is called "App Shortcuts," and the basic premise is strikingly similar to Apple's 3D Touch—just long-press an app icon, then you'll get a pop-up that lets you perform quick actions.

Blue light (like that from our smartphone) tricks the human brain into thinking it's still daytime, even if it's coming from something as small as a screen. So while you're playing around with your new Pixel or Pixel XL after dark, subconscious signals to be awake are preventing you from getting to sleep as early as you should.

As we first reported here on Gadget Hacks, Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones come with an unlockable bootloader, with the exception of models sold by Verizon.

If you have a mobility impairment that affects your hands, arms, or manual dexterity, a smartphone's touch-based interface can almost be a barrier between you and the mobile internet. Eye-tracking software requires too much computing power for today's smartphones to handle, so it might seem as though there's no good way to interact with an Android device.

Cyanogen, Inc., the for-profit company that spun off from its CyanogenMod roots several years ago, has announced that they're shutting down all of their services. The company's impending demise shouldn't directly impact many Android users, but the announcement does have one major repercussion: The servers that used to host the popular CyanogenMod custom ROM have now been shut down.

If you were a particularly good little girl or boy this year, Santa might have finally brought you that cool new smartphone you've been wanting. Or perhaps you just took advantage of a great sale and treated yourself to a new gadget this holiday season—totally justifiable, and surely a well-deserved gift.