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This Week in News:
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OnePlus 2 Feature: Fingerprint Sensor: “Flagship phones should have flagship features”, the official announcement stated. Touted as “faster than TouchID”, the latest featured revealed for the 2 makes it seem increasingly appealing. OnePlus argues that it could have been tacked on for the “One”, but felt that they could not implement it well enough and opted to wait. The question of pricing still remains uncertain however; affordability was, after all, one of the major selling points of last year’s version. You can read more here.
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Blackberry Venice?: The rumors of a Blackberry running Android were nudged further along with a tweet from EvLeaks this week, showing a Blackberry with a curved screen and Lollipop icons, including Google apps. The significance here is that if Google apps are included, it would mean an official Android release, rather than an in-house Android version hacked together. Launch is believed to be scheduled for November this year, so we should soon be getting more solid information to go on, if rumors are true. Read slightly more and check out the render here.
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Xiaomi Sells 34.7M Phones in 6 Months: Increasing their sales by a staggering 33% compared to the same period last year, the Chinese company hit 34.7 million units sold in the first half of 2015. Considering its recent expansion into Brazil, we may see further Xiaomi presence in North American and European markets in 2016. Read more here!
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Samsung, Oppo Sued Over Bloatware: A consumer protection group based in Shanghai are suing Samsung and Oppo over unremovable pre-installed apps, citing that litigation was the next step “after other methods failed” to safeguard consumers’ rights. A grand total of 44 unremovable apps were found on the Note 3 examined by the group. Maybe legal action will send a message to OEM’s and carriers, but “bloat” is unlikely to go away as soon as we’d like. Read the full article here.
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Samsung Galaxy S2 Gets CM12.1: Just as news are making the rounds that UK versions of the S3 won’t be updated to Lollipop, the international version of the 4 year old S2 can now be updated to 5.1 through the CyanogenMod 12.1 release. Currently, there’s only a nightly version out, but considering that the last official update was a Jelly Bean release in 2013, the CM devs have already gone above and beyond any expectations. Read slightly more here.
This Week in Apps:
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Pushbullet’s “Biggest Update Ever:” The most obvious feature of this week’s Pushbullet overhaul is the restructuring of its facade. Now, your pushes will be organized in the tabs “Friends”, “Me”, and “Following” for an easier time finding pushes by sources. In the “friends” tab, for better or worse, chat has been further integrated into the thread, meaning pushes and messages between you are merged in app. The browser extensions and desktop client have been updated to reflect the design changes of the app as well. You can read the full run-down on the official blog here!
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Fallout Shelter Coming to Android in August: According to Bethesda employee Pete Heines, Fallout Shelter is set to hit Google Play sometime in August. For those of you itching for a new Fallout fix, this means you won’t have to wait until November to have it scratched. The initial release on iOS was very successful, quickly rising to the top of the charts. You can read the tweet here.
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Solid Explorer File Manager Material Redesign: After a rather lenghty beta, Solid Explorer finally hit 2.0 with a gorgeous Material Redesign. Dual-pane drag and drop, root functionality, integration with cloud storage, chromecast support, extraction and encryption .zip files; it really is a solid file explorer, and it no longer looks like it was designed for a refrigerator LCD screen. Read more here or grab a 14 day free trial here.
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Chrome for Android Joins The Billion Club: A dozen apps have now crossed the Billion downloads boundary, and the latest one to join the party is Google Chrome. You can read a bit more here.
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Google Photos Hiccup: Last week there were several reports of users uploading large amounts of photos in bulk and hitting a limit on the unlimited storage option. Just as pitchforks were being sharpened and torches lit, a Google representative reached out to androidpolice.com to inform them that the problem had been fixed - it appeared to be showing some growing pains, rather than an actual hidden data cap being hit. Even absurdly large uploads should now be working again. Read more here!
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Google Translate More Conversational: Tired of trying to use Google Translate and having it seems like you’ve eaten a box of magnetic fridge poetry and vomited out a handful? You’re in luck. With a recent update, Translate will now be much better at understanding conversations and, rather than translating each word individually, is now better at understanding context and translating into the appropriate phrases. Read more here.
Brief Introduction
Hi, I am /u/deu5ex, one of the writers for the /r/android content creation team. I will be providing you with periodic content your reading pleasure.
That’s it for this week. In these features, we cover news from Saturday to Saturday. In case you missed last week’s summary, you can find it here. As you guys know, there are a lot of Android news every week - and more than we can fit here - but we hope this roundup was useful for many of you!
Submitted by deu5ex Samsung Galaxy Note 5 Gsmarena
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