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Samsung has had a lukewarm year so far, with its flagship phone of 2018 — the Galaxy S9 — failing to meet sales expectations. The S9 was a modest upgrade over the Galaxy S8 which is understandable why it failed to arouse interest in consumers. Six months later, Samsung is back with the Galaxy Note 9 — its largest and most powerful Note till date. The Galaxy Note 9 follows the same formula as the Galaxy S9 though. It is an iterative upgrade over the Galaxy Note 8 and shares plenty of features with the Galaxy S9. Our sister site,  Android Beat,  has put the Galaxy Note 9 through its paces and came away impressed with it. You can check out the full review through  this link . Here’s a quick rundown of the major bullet points: Design If you have seen or used the Galaxy Note 8, you have used the Galaxy Note 9. Both handsets sport the exact same design language barring a few differences. The biggest one is at the rear where Samsung has moved the fingerprint sensor below th...

Google Home Sales Top 6 Million, Over 400 Million Google Assistant-Enabled Devices Shipped Amazon’s Echo may be the smart speaker market’s top dog , but Google Home is nipping at its tail. Lifetime sales of Google’s AI-powered speakers — which include the Google Home , Home Mini , Home Max — topped six million this holiday, according to the search giant. “All told, Google Home usage increased 9X this holiday season over last year’s,” Google wrote in a blog post. “And in fact, we sold more than one […] device every second since Google Home Mini started shipping in October.” Google’s accomplishments don’t stop there. It also shipped tens of millions of “Google devices for the home” in 2017, a category that comprises speakers, appliances, and peripherals with the Google Assistant , Google’s voice assistant, built in. And it’s enabled the Assistant support on more than 400 million devices, including App...

New Website for Google Assistant Shows Off All Available Actions and Services Just what the Google Assistant can and can’t do isn’t necessarily clear to folks who haven’t used it before — and even to folks who have. It’s great for basic tasks like checking the weather and setting alarms, of course, but did you know that it had a magic 8 ball minigame, and that you can ask it what position you should play in Quidditch ? To make Google Assistant skills easier to find, the search giant on Tuesday launched a new website with every action, service, and integration available. They’re organized by categories such as “Games and fun”, “Music and audio”, and “Arts and lifestyle”, and the homepage shows a list of new and trending Assistant apps — each with users ratings, instructions on how to use it, and the list of devices that support it. There are hundreds of applications to choose from, and Google’s directo...

Systemless Xposed for Android Oreo Now Available This week started off with a bang: XDA Senior Recognized Developer  rovo89  announced and released  Xposed Framework for Android Oreo 8.0 and Android 8.1 in beta. It came as something as a surprise, considering how long it took it took Xposed to hit Android Nougat , and it’s not perfect — some Xposed Modules won’t work properly until they’re updated with support for Oreo. But thanks to the hard work of XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor  topjohnwu , Xposed Framework for Oreo is now available in a  Magisk  module that installs in a systemless manner. It’s live now guys, grab it from Magisk Manager > Downloads Enjoy 🙂 pic.twitter.com/exCr2tgOH8 — John Wu (@topjohnwu) January 9, 2018 topjohnwu has been making a systemless version of Xposed for quite a while now, and the installation process for his systemless Xposed Framework for Android 8.0 and 8.1 Oreo is pretty much unchanged from last time arou...

Google Camera Mod Updated with Portrait Mode/Lens Blur Toggle and 4K Video Support for Some Devices For those on the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T , you cannot use portrait mode on the front-facing camera, due to lack of RAW camera support. When we first reported on the Google Camera HDR+ port , it had very few options and ran on only a handful of devices. It was unstable in many environments, which led to device-specific variants being released . Since then, it has flourished with a wide range of options for users to avail of and tweak their photos to their liking, providing the option to emulate the processing of certain other Google devices to get the best possible quality from your device. Since then, we’ve seen other advancements take place in the form of the Google Pixel 2- exclusive portrait mode being ported to other devices , meaning anyone can now take a  bokeh style shot from your own phone. Now, a new update to that very same mod includes the addition of 4K video reco...

Here’s an Official List of 120Hz Games for the Razer Phone When Razer unveiled the Razer Phone , it made headlines for a number of reasons. It was a big move for a company known for its PCs, keyboards, and video game peripherals. Then there’s the fact that the Razer Phone is one of the first Android smartphones to feature a 120Hz display. But while that spec’s impressive in its own right, it doesn’t mean much if there isn’t software to support it. So this week, Razer published an official list of Android games that have been optimized to run at 120Hz. Android takes advantage of the 120Hz display on the Razer Phone, and it makes a noticeable difference in the UX’s scrolling and overall responsiveness. But games are a different story — some of them are hard-coded to run at a fixed framerate. And in the severest cases, Android developers have to go in and make changes in order to get a game to reach 120Hz. Since it hasn’t been easy to find g...

Pixel 2’s Portrait Mode Ported to some Non-Google Devices running Android Oreo There are a few contenders for best smartphone camera of 2017, and many would argue that the Google Pixel 2 & 2 XL were the best mobile shooters. That’s thanks in large part to the phone’s exceptional combination of camera hardware with Google’s prowess in image processing software as seen by their famous HDR+ technology . Ports of Google Camera with the HDR+ technology have been shown to dramatically improve the picture quality of budget phones like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and flagship phones like the Essential Phone . The Pixel 2 camera experience is largely an iterative improvement over the first generation Pixel, though it adds some polish with features such as Motion Photos, Face Retouching, and lastly Portrait Mode. The Pixel 2’s Portrait Mode is perhaps its best new feature due to how the algorithm can produce beautiful photos that focus on one or more persons. ...

Google Adds Brotli Compression to Deliver Faster OTA Android Updates The size of an OTA update isn’t something that most people really think about, since updates generally automatically download in the background over WiFi, but it’s actually a big deal on the server back end. Saving even a few megabytes of data can make a huge difference since the gains are multiplied by potentially hundreds of thousands of users. To that end, Google has been working to bring its Brotli compression algorithm to Android for faster OTA updates. What is the Brotli Compression Algorithm? Brotli is a compression algorithm developed by a few Google employees that significantly improves the compression ratio over other algorithms such as GZIP while also demonstrating an impressive decompression speed. The downside is that compressing files with the Brotli algorithm is rather slow, so it’s generally avoided when compressing dynamic content. Compression Ratio Comparison Decompression Speed...

[Update: Deal Over] Celebrate Christmas with a Few Temporarily Free Substratum Themes Update : the deal is over. Hope those of you who grabbed the themes while they were available enjoy them! Merry Christmas and happy holidays to our readers at XDA! I hope you’re enjoying the time spent with your family today. Christmas is a great time for gift-giving, and to that end, a few Substratum themers have come together to offer their themes for free, at least temporarily. You can grab the following Substratum themes for free until the end of the day (midnight GMT). That’s only a few hours away, so hurry and claim them if you’re interested! Download QR-Code Substratum Theme Black aospUI +Pie,Samsung,One UI Developer: Piereligio Price: $1.59 Download QR-Code Substratum Theme Dark aospUI BlueGray +Pie,Samsung Developer: Piereligio Price: $1.59 Download QR-Code Substratum Theme Dark aospUI Gray +Pie,Samsung,One Developer: Piereligio Price: $1.59 Download QR-Code aTheme Subst...