Android

Huawei is set to unveil its new Ascend Mate 7 next week during IFA in Berlin, however the unreleased phone appears to have been spotted in the wild prior to its big showing. A device referred to as the Chinese phone maker’s next handset recently made a cameo appearance on the Asian microblogging site Weibo, revealing a phone that is somewhat reminiscent of the HTC One Max.

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kajjMuZx8nY]

It’s no great surprise that Sony is now teasing three new Xperia 3 devices in a short video on its YouTube channel, pointing to their official announcement at the IFA next week … 
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Just a little more than a week ahead of Motorola’s press event for the Moto 360, LG tonight has officially unveiled the G Watch R. The company has been teasing the circular Android Wear device heavily for the past week, but only tonight has it become official.

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Let’s be clear off the top: there is no Instagram for Android Wear. At least, not yet. But if you are curious what it might look like, interaction designer Aleksandar Nikcevic has created a beautiful mockup of what could be Instagram for Android Wear on a Moto 360 smartwatch. 
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Motorola is expected to finally unveil its circular Moto 360 smartwatch at a press event on September 4th. We already know a lot about the device, but two key details that are missing are the price and release date. This afternoon, however, the company announced that it is giving 20 people an early chance at winning a Moto 360.

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HTC is mostly known for its high-end devices that are built with premium materials, however the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer is starting to make a splash in the mid-range smartphone space. Today, the company announced the launch of the Desire 510, a new budget-friendly LTE-capable phone that’s coming to Sprint, Cricket, Virgin and Boost Mobile in the coming months.

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Pandora Internet Radio is the latest service to bring its product over to the Google Glass world. The music streaming service’s Glassware app came out of their Hack-a-thon from earlier in the spring, Pandora says, and was good enough to share with Google and ship.

The Pandora Radio app for Google Glass gives users access to stations with the ability to control them with voice commands or the touchpad. Pandora says the voice commands allow you to select existing stations or even create new stations. Actions including music controls like play and pause require using the touchpad; favoriting and dismissing a track also requires using the touchpad for now.

Users can find the Pandora Internet Radio app on the Google’s Glassware section, and Pandora has more instructions below:
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After announcing earlier this summer that its developers conference would return for a second year in November, Samsung announced today that registration for the event is now open.
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Dropbox has today slashed its pricing and doubled the maximum storage space from 500GB to 1TB. Up until yesterday, you’d have been paying $500/year for 500GB; today you can pay just $120/year (or $99/year when paying annually) for a terabyte.

The new deal finally brings Dropbox into line with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, with Apple’s new iCloud pricing – which includes iCloud Drive – also looking to be broadly similar … 
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_I4Ab_LdxQ]

Samsung has put together a blog post extolling the virtues of the metal frame, curved corners and finish of the handset it created to go head-to-head with Apple’s iPhone, the Galaxy Alpha. It follows an earlier post on the making of the phone.

The prose is best described as stilted, but the general idea is that every element of the design has a reason behind it. Metal, we are told, offers “thinness, style and a comfortable grip.” And just in case anyone should accuse them of copying the iPhone in switching from plastic to metal, Samsung is quick to point out it started making metal phones back in 2006 – a year before the first iPhone … 
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“Know your competition, but don’t copy it.” Those words of wisdom come from the image above accompanying a message put on the entirely original – not a copy of Facebook – Google+ by Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt is promoting his new book with Jonathan Rosenberg called How Google Works due out next month where the billionaire lays out the principles that made Google what it is today.

Included with the lemonade stand image and ‘don’t copy’ caption is another Schmidt line on originality and competition. “Playing catch-up with the competition will never help you get ahead by creating something new,” Schmidt says. Google would be the “hard” boozy lemonade to the competitions’ fresh lemonade. In the case of Google Plus, the booze could be the hangouts or perhaps the photo editing features or integration with other Google products.

Now picture this tidbit from Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs:

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

It’s hard to deny that Android started looking a lot more like iOS after the iPhone’s introduction, and iOS has clearly borrowed its fair share of features from Google’s mobile operating system, but there’s no denying that Schmidt’s message could be challenged. File this one with the rest under Talking Schmidt.

At Google I/O in June, Google announced a new line of Android One smartphones that it said would be affordable and marketed at emerging markets, such as India. The Economic Times is now reporting that Google is planning to launch its first smartphones of the Android One program as early as next week in India. The report also claims, however, that the devices will be more expensive than the initial $100 price point Google announced at I/O.

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Sony has yet to officially announce an Xperia Z3 smartphone, however that hasn’t stopped the leaks from coming. Expected to debut next week during IFA, alleged teardown pictures of the device have surfaced, giving a closer look at what we might be seeing in a few short days. Rumor has it that Sony’s next premium smartphone will feature a 5.3-inch 1080p HD display, a Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and a 20.7-megapixel rear-facing camera.

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According to numbers crunched by The Guardian‘s Charles Arthur and based on data from Chitika and comScore, it appears as if the Amazon Fire Phone isn’t exactly setting hardly anything on fire. In fact, if this report is to be believed, Amazon hasn’t sold more than 35,000 total Fire Phone units since the much-hyped unveiling of the device in June.

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A couple notable mobile apps for both Android and iOS are receiving updates today that bring Chromecast support including NPR One and the WatchABC apps.
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Verizon announced today that it plans to roll out support for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) in the coming weeks following the early stages of roll outs from both AT&T and T-Mobile. The news will enable the higher quality voice calling on Android handsets with support chipsets, but the news comes just ahead of Apple’s expected introduction of the feature alongside iOS 8 and iPhone 6. Our sister site 9to5Mac first reported back in April that Apple is targeting voice-over-LTE support for iOS 8 and future iPhone models:
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