ASUS Begins Rolling Out ZenUI 4.0 to the Zenfone 4 Max

After rolling out version 4.0 of its ZenUI Android skin to the Zenfone 3 Zoom back in September, ASUS gave the same treatment to its popular mid-range smartphone: The Zenfone 4 Max. On Monday, the company announced that that it’s finalized a software update to the Zenfone 4 Max with bug fixes, performance improvements, and an upgrade to ZenUI 4.o.

The ASUS Zenfone 4, which was announced back in September of this year, shipped with Android 7.1.1 out of the box. However, unlike its premium siblings such as the Zenfone 4 Pro and Zenfone 4, it ran an older version of ZenUI. Asus promised to rectify that wrong with a software upgrade, and the smartphone maker’s finally made good on its promise.

The new update enables support for VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and VoWiFi (Voice over WiFi), along with enhanced double-tap gesture settings. But the highlight is ZenUI 4.o, which addresses one of the custom skin’s longtime issues: Poor user interface (UI) performance. ASUS says the latest version is smarter and smoother than ever and that it cuts down on bloatware, trimming the number of pre-installed applications from a whopping 35 to 16.

If you’re carrying a Zenfone 4 Max, you can look forward to receiving the update in the coming days. As is often the case with staged rollouts, though, it might take some time for the over-the-air update to reach all devices, so don’t worry if you haven’t received an update notification yet.

In addition to this week’s ZenUI 4.o update, the Zenfone 4 Max — along with other Zenfone 4 and Zenfone 3 series devices — is confirmed to receive an update to Android Oreo by the second half of 2018.

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Source: ASUS

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Prizes Announced for October Community Incentive Program with Honor

Tomorrow Honor has a huge announcement, which you can watch live on Dec 5 at 9:20am New York time.

As part of our work with Honor, we have the ongoing Community Incentive Program where XDA members are rewarded for posting quality content in any of our Honor forums. At any time, participants can see their ranking relative to other members in the Honor Hub, towards the bottom of the page. But let’s see who won prizes in October!

Honor 8:

itisiryan

Honor 6X:

shashank1320
hassanjavaid8181

Honor Band Z1:

HassanMirza01
surdu_petru
TheOTO
crayonicle

Honor Earphones:

gopinaidu77
RedSkull23
Rommco05
felix-development

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Report: Samsung Galaxy S9 May Launch in Black, Blue, Gold and Purple Colors

Only eight months after the launch of the Galaxy S8 and the S8+, we’re already starting to hear rumors about Samsung’s next flagship phones: The Galaxy S9 and the S9+. We know they won’t have an in-display fingerprint sensor, and that they could have a screen-to-body ratio as high as 89-90%. And now, thanks to a report by SamMobile, we have a pretty good idea of the Galaxy S9 and S9+’s color configurations.

The Galaxy S9 and the S9+ might launch in black, gold, blue and purple (violet), according to SamMobile’s sources. Purple’s a first for Samsung’s Galaxy series (the Galaxy S8 and the S8+are available in black, gold, and blue), and SamMobile speculates that it’ll look similar to the Galaxy Note 8’s Deep Blue variant. That’s no coincidence — rumors this past summer suggested that Samsung would release a purple Galaxy Note 8, but they never came to pass.

SamMobile wasn’t able to glean the product name of each color, but says that there’s a chance additional colors such as gray and silver will make an appearance. There’s also a chance that not all colors will be available in every territory, at least at launch — Samsung has a history of limiting color variants by market.

There’s way to verify SamMobile‘s report, but it seems plausible that the Galaxy S9 and the S9+will come in at least four different shades. We’ll no doubt hear more about Samsung’s 2018 flagship phones in the time leading up to the unveiling, which could be as soon as the company’s keynote at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in January.

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Source: SamMobile

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Canadians No Longer Have to Pay a Fee to Unlock Cell Phones

A few months back, we covered the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) putting an end to locked cellphones and unlocking fees, a momentous decision which was to come into effect starting December 1st, 2017. That day has now passed and thus as of last Friday, the 1st of December, no longer can carriers charge to unlock any phones sold in Canada.

This makes Canada one of the first nations in the world to effectively ban carrier locked phones, as any user can simply request to unlock their device for free. What’s more, all phones sold from now on must already be unlocked and so users will no longer have to request an unlock code themselves. This is a huge step forward, especially for those who may wish to change networks at will. What’s more, with the addition of this change, legally new purchasers of a device can request to send back their device and receive a full refund within 15 days—so long as the device is sent back in a like-new condition.

Oftentimes, these official unlocks could have cost as high as $50, which means this has the potential to deal a blow to the major telecommunication companies in Canada. However, it may also have the adverse effect of raising prices for all new contracts to account for the loss of revenue from granting an unlock service.

Another change included (though this came into effect immediately back in June) is the fact that only the account holder of a shared or family plan could authorize a data overage beyond an established cap. Previously, telecommunication companies used to allow anyone to authorize this, meaning those with younger children who do not understand the increased costs could accidentally cause a data overage. This was seen as exploitative behavior by the CRTC, hence why it has since been blocked.

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PPSSPP Now Supports Vulkan Graphics API for Smoother PSP Emulation

PPSSPP, a Sony PlayStation Portable emulator for Android devices, is one of the most robust around. Not only does it let you play your favorite PSP games on any Android-based smartphone or tablet, but it supports the Vulkan Graphics API, which means it performs well on older system-on-chips.

If you haven’t heard of the Khronos Group’s Vulkan Graphics API, think of it as a low-overhead alternative to graphics APIs like OpenGL or OpenGL ES. It’s backed by companies like Nvidia and Intel, and it’s intended to give developers more options when they’re programming cross-platform games. (In theory, Vulkan graphics development on Android should pretty much work on a Vulkan-supported PC hardware.) It’s relatively new, but it’s already been implemented in games such as Codemasters’s GRID and EA’s Need for Speed.

Vulkan requires a “hands-on” approach to graphics development; there’s generally more work involved in the development of things. But the result is a lower CPU overhead, which generally increases overall performance. That’s hugely beneficial for platforms like PPSSPP, where every freed-up processing cycle can result in speedups on difficult-to-emulate games.

The full changelog is below.

• Full Vulkan support, also for Android now. Very fast on supported devices. (#10033, #10049)
• Smarter graphics state management, reduced CPU consumption on all backends (#9899)
• Android: Support for Arabic and other scripts we couldn’t support before
• Fix Android widgets, screen scaling (#10145)
• Fixes to video dumping
• Geometry problems fixed in Medal of Honor
• Implement immediate draws, fixing Thrillville (#7459)
• Software rendering improvements, speed and accuracy
• Hardware tesselation of PSP Beziers and Splines (used by a few games)
• Partial sceUsbGps and sceUsbCam support (Android)
• Android “Sustained performance mode” to avoid thermal throttling (#9901)
• Linux controller mapping fixes (#9997)
• Assorted bugfixes and compatibility improvements

Since the update last week, a subsequent patch — PPSSPP 1.5.2 — fixed some instability and crashes caused by Vulkan. If you tried PPSSPP in the past but were disappointed by the performance, it’s worth giving it another go. You might be impressed.

PPSSPP - PSP emulator (Free, Google Play) →

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Apollo Lake Powered Chromebook Discovered, Possibly Made by Acer

An Apollo Lake powered Chromebook has been discovered in the Chromium Repository, thanks to Chrome Unboxed. Complete with the ability to fold over and convert to a tablet along with a backlit keyboard, the Apollo Lake powered Chromebook known as “Bruce” looks to be a somewhat one-of-a-kind Chromebook. Apollo Lake is Intel’s successor to Braswell and is aimed at lower cost devices while offering performance gains of up to 30% over its predecessor.

For those unfamiliar with Chromebooks, they are Linux based computers which focus on using the Google Chrome browser for nearly all work done on the machine, placing a greater emphasis on using cloud-based applications for productivity work. Many newer models have also started to support running Android apps from the Google Play Store, and a new model is looking to join that list of devices.

The folks over at Chrome Unboxed also discovered that the device may be made by Acer based on information in the commits they found. One of the primary indicators of the manufacturer is the fact that one of the commits was made by an account with an email address at Quanta, a device manufacturer. Quanta has manufactured devices for lots of different companies including the Google Pixelbook according to FCC documents. Though, Quanta, when producing Chrome OS devices, have also nearly exclusively meant they are for Acer. What’s more, the email address behind all of the Quanta commits has only ever made commits for Acer devices. This further suggests the device is made by Acer.

The device may be a refresh of the ever popular Acer Chromebook R11 or it may be an entirely new device from Acer. It may even be an entirely different brand of Chromebook! We’ll likely see the device announced in a few months time, and when it is we’ll let you know.

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Via: Chrome Unboxed

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Windows Phone Internals 2.2 Unlocks the Bootloader on all Windows 8 & 10 Lumia Smartphones

Those of you who are familiar with Windows Mobile phones may be aware of the Windows Phone Internals application. It allowed for the Android equivalent of unlocking the bootloader and rooting a Windows Mobile device as it allows for the ability to install a custom software on Windows Mobile phones. 2 years after the last update, a new update for the tool has been announced. Windows Phone Internals 2.2 is the latest version and can unlock the bootloader of all Windows 8 or Windows 10 Lumia smartphones.

Bypassing SecureBoot, the application allows users to upgrade their devices to an unofficial version of Windows 10 (as not many devices even received an official upgrade) and make many modifications and hacks to the operating system on the device. It may be possible for some devices to gain access to the Project Astoria system which allows for some Android apps to be run on Windows Mobile, or even for devices to flash ported versions of Android. This is all provided developers pick up support for any devices which become unlocked as a result of this, however. We’ll see the update to Windows Phone Internals released in a few days time.

This comes at a time where Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 is now being placed into maintenance mode on Windows Mobile devices, meaning no more new features will be developed, due to the somewhat dying nature of the platform. Only security fixes and stability fixes will be made. Relatively few users used the platform as a daily driver, and even fewer developed applications for the platform, which is why it had such little public attraction.

It’s possible to see a revival of the platform in a few years time, but for now, it’s officially dead and likely won’t be coming back. That doesn’t mean a group of dedicated and passionate developers can’t keep existing Windows Mobile devices usable for as long as possible, though. If you’re interested in unlocking the bootloader of your Windows 8 or Windows 10 Lumia device, check out the link to the announcement on our forums down below.

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Visit the Windows Phone Internals 2.2 Announcement Thread

Thanks to XDA Member r3pwn for the tip!

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