android phone

There have been several reports over the last year mentioning Google’s interest in building a smartphone. Although the company does have its own Nexus program to showcase the best the Android platform has to offer (and, at least as was true at first, provide some baseline devices for developers), it still needs to somewhat compromise on hardware here and there by much less directly impacting the engineering process.

However, it looks like this may not remain the case for much longer, with a new report — once again — suggesting that Google plans to launch something much more home-grown than in years previous…

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Factory Reset Protection was introduced with Android Lollipop, and, like Apple’s iCloud Activation Lock, it’s supposed to make it really hard to resell a stolen Android phone. The gist is that when you use Android recovery menu to reset a phone to factory settings, the phone will require upon reboot that you sign in using a Google account you previously used on the device before resetting it. If someone steals your phone and wipes it, they need your Google account for it to be anything but a brick.

Well, it appears that a flaw in Samsung’s phones lets potential thieves around this security measure, and it looks like the workaround (via RootJunky) takes just about five minutes to pull off…
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