When we think of gaming phones, our minds turn to the Sony Xperia Play of yesteryear. Since then, there hasn’t really been a true gaming flagship smartphone, though the Razer Phone is close to being it. Razer will say that the phone is marketed at gamers rather than being a gaming phone, but its specifications should appeal to any Android enthusiast: a 5.7″ 1440p 120Hz LCD panel, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, 8GBs of RAM, 64GBs of internal storage with microSD slot, and a 4,000 mAh battery. The phone initially launched with Android 7.1 Nougat on board with a promised update to Android Oreo by the end of Q1 2018, and as we approach the last days of Q1 Razer has announced that the first Android 8.1 Oreo Developer Preview update is now available for the Razer Phone.
This announcement was made on the company’s official Facebook page. The official stable release of Android 8.1 Oreo will be made available in mid- to late April 2018. Users interested in flashing the release should head on over to this page to grab the Android 8.1 Oreo factory image for the device. Instructions on how to flash the release can be found here. If you’re looking for a USB 3 Type-A to Type-C spec-compliant cable, Razer recommends you check out Benson Leung’s post on Google+. Razer will not be providing release notes for the build nor will they provide an official upgrade path from the Developer Preview to the official release, so you should be comfortable with flashing factory images by the time the official release is available.
We predicted that the phone would skip Android 8.0 Oreo and jump straight to Android 8.1 Oreo. The one thing we couldn’t predict is whether or not the update would bring Project Treble compatibility, but we can now confirm that it does. We checked the build.prop file of the release and found ro.treble.enabled was set to true. We haven’t been able to flash a Generic System Image (GSI) to truly test it, but we don’t think that the company would set this property to true if the device isn’t Treble compatible.
Some other minor tidbits about the release are that it comes with the February security patches but not the most recent March patches. We presume that the March patches or maybe even the April patches will arrive in the stable update. This Developer Preview will also not support any carrier-specific modifications which can include VoLTE, Wi-Fi calling, and other modifications to improve signal strength or network connectivity on certain carriers.
If you flash the update, do let us know if you come across any new interesting features. Also, let us know your thoughts on the Razer Phone’s Android Oreo update in general!
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