I’ve been spending a lot of time with the LG G4 lately, which is a wonderful phone. It seemed natural that the first comparison should be with the LG G Flex 2.
After all, both phones are flagships in their own right. In fact, it really appears that the LG G Flex 2 should be the flagship. It has a better processor, a better camera, and, well, it’s more expensive.
I also did a written comparison if you want to check it out, but for the meantime, here’s the video.
You may or may not have noticed that I write a lot of sponsored posts from Gearbest. I even partnered with them to give away a Lenovo K3 Note. A couple weeks, they asked me to write about the Teclast X98 Air.
After writing my sponsored post about the Teclast X98 Air, I wrote back about how cool it looked and I’ve always dreamed about having a tablet that dual boots Android and Windows. Being the great people that they are, they offered to send me one to review.
The Teclast X98 Air is being sold by Gearbest for just $201.39. It’s essentially an iPad Air clone, so you get a sweet 9.7″ 4:3 tablet with an Intel Atom processor that runs full Windows 8.1 and full Android, and oh yea, it also supports 3G.
Continue reading Teclast X98 Air Unboxing: Dual Booting Android and Windows
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Rich! You already did a comparison with the LG G Flex 2? Why the hell are you showing us the unboxing now?”
I’m glad you asked. When I received the LG G4 last week, I made an unboxing video, as I always do; however, I didn’t post it here, so here it is.
The LG G4 came out a couple months ago now, but I finally got my hands on a review unit. The fact is that when given the choice between the G4 and the LG Lancet, I chose the Lancet since I know that a good portion of my loyal and fantastic readers are Windows Phone fans.
So now I’ve got my hands on the G4 and it seemed like the logical place to start was with the LG G Flex 2. After all, the G Flex 2 is, by all rights, a flagship phone. It uses a better processor than the G4, it uses a 1080p AMOLED rather than the 1440p IPS LCD in the G4, and it has that awesome curved screen. It would appear that the only thing better about the G4 is the camera, and boy, is the camera on the LG G4 pretty great.
Motorola had a very exciting announcement today. They announced two new Moto X phones - the Moto X Style and the Moto X Play - and they announced a new Moto G.
They made the promise that the Moto X Style will cost $200 less than an iPhone 6 or a Samsung Galaxy S6. They made the promise that the Moto X Play will cost $300-$400 less than the iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6.
Continue reading Introducing the New Moto X and the New Moto G
Today, OnePlus finally announced the OnePlus 2. If you didn’t watch the first ever virtual reality product launch, well, here’s a recap.
Funny story though. OnePlus has been leaking specs of the OnePlus 2 for the last month or so. As far as I can recall, they officially announced that it would be $449. The only problem with that is that at the end of the launch, they made jokes about how much it would cost and then cut the lights before they said the price. Are they trying to leave something to the imagination? Who knows?
Continue reading Introducing the OnePlus 2: the 2016 Flagship Killer
Researchers have found a major security flaw in Android devices. It’s a bit of an interesting case because no one seems to know much about it. Typically, in a case like this, a researcher finds the flaw, gives the company a predetermined amount of time to fix it, and if it’s not fixed, he informs the public everything there is to know about it so they can take the proper precautions.
I’ve seen multiple sources about this. Some have said that it only affects pre-Jelly Bean devices while some are saying that the flaw affects Android 2.2 all the way to Android 5.1. Interestingly enough, nothing has been said about Android 5.1.1 or the Android M Developer Preview.
Continue reading So, Maybe Turn Off MMS on your Android Phone?
Do you use Google AdSense on your web site? Of course you do. Everyone does. We do. Well, Google has a new policy in place that requires web sites that get visitors from any country in the European Union to implement a user consent form.
That’s right. Google needs consent to use the data of citizens of the EU. Well, anyone in the EU. So guess what? That responsibility passes on to you, the simple web site owner that’s just looking to earn a couple dollars for his very hard work.
You might be asking if this policy corresponds to the mobile version of your site. It sure as hell does.
Continue reading Google AdSense is Implementing a User Consent Policy
Being a developer, it is important to continue to learn about new languages as you are being asked to create solutions for multiple platforms. The reason why we have so many languages is because on a hardware level each CPU uses a different assembly language to run their instructions. Due to this fact not every language is able to run on every platform. For this to work you would need to have multiple companies that are able to understand these CPU differences to write compilers for the same language.
For a time, the language Java (which as owned by Sun Microsystems for a time until Oracle purchased the company) was set out to solve this problem. From 1995 through the mid 2000’s it seemed like Java was supported on almost every computer and device. That was until the iPhone come along with its first version of iOS in 2007. It wasn’t unusual that a new device didn’t have support for Java on the initial release but then Apple announced that they will never support languages like Java (http://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/9731).
The reason is because their terms of use do not allow developers to create apps that were written from interpreted code. So that means you are only able to create apps that are written in a low level language like Objective-C which create compiled programs. This was bad news for developers as there was one more language that we needed to learn.
The folks over at Google decided on using Java (although you can also use C++) to write your mobile apps for their Android operating system. Meanwhile Microsoft relies on their .NET Framework to create Windows Mobile apps which includes the Visual Basic .NET and C# languages.
By now you see the problem. If you wanted to write a mobile app for each of these platforms, you would need to learn three different language on three different frameworks. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone created a new language and would allow programmers to create apps for all of these types of devices? Well the short answer is no.
The solution to this problem has been solved for us already by the Mono group (http://www.mono-project.com/). The Mono project was started back in 2004 as an open source project to port the .NET Framework to run on Linux and Mac. This project was original independent from Microsoft but now it is being included in the latest version of its developer environment: Visual Studio 2015.
This is all possible because of Xamarin (http://xamarin.com/) which takes the ported version of the .NET Framework and uses it build apps that run on both Android and iOS devices. However it isn’t perfect. For instance, in order to create iOS apps in Visual Studio 2015 you are going to need to purchase a business account from Xamarin ($89/month) plus have access to a Mac. This will then create the compiled programs that iOS will allow to run on its devices.
Also the version of the ADK (Android Development Kit) that is included with Visual Studio 2015 isn’t the latest version so you will need to manually go out and download and configure the latest version on your machine before you are able to create Android apps. At any rate you will be prompted to log into Xamarin. You can find more information about this here: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/xamarin-vs.aspx.
Not exactly plug in play, but it is still early days. Hopefully, future versions of Visual Studio will allow developers access to a more “turn key” solution for creating mobile apps in a single programming language.
For the second time, I am reviewing the Nexus 9. I reviewed the LTE model when it first came out. It was pretty bad. I had heard that the Wi-Fi only model was better. Now, I’ve finally got my hands on a Wi-Fi only Nexus 9.
Of course, I installed Android M Developer Preview on it. That was pretty bad. The actual review of the Nexus 9 running Android M will be at the bottom. First, I’ll add three walk through videos of Android M, which all used a Nexus 9. The first was about new features. The second was about performance improvements where I actually had two Nexus 9s, one with Lollipop and one with Android M. The third video is with Android M Developer Preview 2.
And finally, the fourth video will be the Nexus 9 with Android M review. The first three videos are there for a bit of backstory, but this is really about the actual Nexus 9 with Android M review. The final video is a little long, but I think it’s totally worth your time.
