We saw our first leaked images of the Le 2S from LeEco back in June of this year, and now the company has received certification for it in China. The documentation reveals it will have a 5.5″ 1080p IPS LCD display, MediaTek Helio X25 SoC, two 13MP rear cameras, an 8MP front camera, Android 6.0 Marshmallow and a 3,900mAh capacity battery.
Thursday, September 1, 2016
Pebble Announces Their Big 4.0 Update
The developers at Pebble said their goal with the 4.0 update was to maximize your ability to “glance and go.” With the update, they make Pebble Health quicker and easier to access, improves the handling of your personal Timeline, adds a new Launcher menu, improved overall performance, and they have increased system animations.
Waze’s Carpool Pilot to Reportedly Go Beta This Fall
Google launched a carpool pilot program with Waze in the San Francisco area back in May of this year. It was only open to select businesses, but now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will take it into open beta this fall. It will still only be accessible in San Francisco for now, but should be cheaper than Uber and Lyft rides.
Qualcomm Announces Details of the Snapdragon 821
Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 821 back in July, but they didn’t reveal many details about their latest SoC at that time. Now we know the low-power clusters will be a dual-core Kryo CPU clocked at 2.19 GHz, and the GPU will be the Adreno 530 that’s clocked at 653 MHz. We also learn it has support for Snapdragon VR SDK (for Daydream), as well as dual phase detection.
Google Announces In Apps, a New Way to Search for Information
We had previously seen the first hint of this “In Apps” feature in the recent LG V20 leak, but now we know what it is. The feature is baked into the Google application, and will allow you to search for content within the applications you have installed. It only supports apps like Gmail, Spotify and YouTube right now, but they’ll add more in the future.
HTC One A9s is Now Official: 5″ 720p Display, Helio P10 in Tow
When the HTC One A9 came out, HTC stressed that it was not the one “copying” others around. Metallic builds and plastic antenna bands were its gift to the mobile world, and so the A9 was not to be misinterpreted as an iPhone clone, despite its similarities. And with the One A9s, the device is far from the iPhone on the inside as it could ever be.
Sure, design wise, the HTC One A9s looks just like its actual and spiritual predecessor. There’s the flat metallic back with side curves, there’s the signature antenna bands and the fingerprint sensor on the front. The front and back camera see some repositioning, and the HTC branding below the display is no longer to be found. The display is a downgrade actually, with the One A9s sporting a 5″ 720p Super LCD display, a noticeable step down from the 5″ 1080p AMOLED display.
The downgrade does not stop there. Inside, the HTC One A9s comes with a MediaTek MT6755 Helio P10 SoC with 2x four-core clusters of Cortex-A53’s. While the HTC One A9 was not a flagship with its mediocre-at-best Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 with 2x four-core clusters of Cortex-A53, the Helio P10 on the One A9s is very far behind in the current competition against the Snapdragon 650 and 652. The GPU on the One A9s is the Mali-T860MP2, while the RAM and storage situation remains unchanged with options of 16GB internal storage with 2GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage with 3GB RAM. You still get microSD expandability, and the battery gets a slight bump in capacity up to 2,300 mAh now. But if you got too happy with all of this, Quick Charge 3.0 is being replaced with quick charging limited to 5V at 1.5A only.
The camera on the One A9s is a 13MP shooter with f/2.2 aperture, but it loses out on OIS from its predecessor. The front 4MP Ultra Pixel shooter found on One A9 is now replaced with a regular 5MP camera with a f/2.8 aperture and 1080p video recording.
HTC made a 15-day promise of rolling out a new Android version update when the One A9 was launched. But it is unlikely to keep the promise this time around, so they aren’t making any new promises either. The One A9s comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box (like last year’s A9) but no time solid commitment has been offered for Android 7.0 Nougat.
Pricing and availability of the HTC One A9s has not been released, though the phone is likely to be made available in October. The One A9 was not known for its cheap price and bang-for-buck, so the One A9s will have to do better if it wants to succeed as a successor. Even optimistically, the One A9s feels like another variant of the One A9, one that should have been launched in 2015.
What are your thoughts on the HTC One A9s? Let us know in the comments below!