Android 5.0 LRX02E build for Galaxy S5 has been leaked.(Source: Sammobile)
A new Android 5.0 Lollipop build has leaked for
Samsung's latest fifth-generation Galaxysmartphone.
The new build – LRX02E – marks a significant
change over the previous version LRW58J, whichleaked earlier last
month. It also suggests that Samsung is working hard to bring the most recent
features to the Galaxy S5.
The test build's details have been shared by Sammobile,
which reports that Samsung is using an updated source code. But LRX02E is still
missing the Lollipop branding, which means the company is not using
Google's latest version of Android.
Screenshot of leaked Android 5.0 LRX02E on Galaxy S5.(Source: Sammobile)
What is noteworthy
is LRX02E changes the Android version from L to "5.0" and adds new
Android Bird games as an Easter
egg, but instead of Lollipop blockades this build uses black-and-yellow
stripped rectangles.
Another leaked screenshot of Android 5.0 LRX02E running Galaxy S5.(Source: Sammobile)Here are the changes and new features seen in LRX02E, most of
which are for the user interface.
New Note 4 fingerprint lock screen.
New system-wide font – similar to the original one, but slightly thinner.
New animations, much smoother than before and there is a screen off animation present as well.
Google Search bar in Recents menu.
Brightness slider in the notification centre has a new yellow colour. While changing the brightness, the notification centre disappears and allows the user to view the content beneath it.
Removed Interruptions from Sound settings.
Gallery: Media can be sorted using new filters including Pets, Events, Scenery, Documents, Food, Vehicles and Flowers.
Music: Improved UI.
Clock: Navigation bar icons are now accompanied by text.
Calculator: Removed square grids which surrounded the numbers and symbols.
Contacts: New search box.
Stock Material Design inspired applications receive colored status bar.
Android Lollipop theme's core green elements replaced with Samsung's blue colour.
Settings: Improved UI, new icon colours.
New UI for setting wallpaper from the home screen.
Better spacing between options in power off dialog.
It’s time for our latest roundup of the latest, greatest Android apps and games, this time from the last two weeks’ worth of releases on the Google Play store.
As ever, the prices provided in brackets are for the initial download only: when an app uses in-app purchases, this will be listed as (Free + IAP). Something to look for: a new section of each app’s Google Play store listing, which explains the full range of IAP.
More interested in iOS apps? They’re covered in a separate weekly Best iPhone and iPad Apps roundup, with the latest instalment due to be published later today.
APPS
djay 2 (£1.99)
iPad has tended to get the lion’s share of DJing apps, with the honourable exception of edjing. Now developer Algoriddim has brought the second version of its djay app to Android, with the ability to mix songs from your own collection or – if you’re a subscriber – from Spotify’s wider catalogue. The app is fun for novices and more experienced DJs alike.
Google Fit (Free)
Announced earlier in the year, Google Fit is now here as an activity and fitness-tracking app, tying in to the wider Google Fit platform. It’ll measure your walking, running and cycling and show you the data in clear graphs, while also linking up to a growing number of other fitness and health apps. More on Google’s plans here.
Microsoft Health (Free)
You wait ages for one technology giant to launch a fitness-tracking app for Android, and then two jog along at once. This Microsoft app ties in to its Microsoft Band wearable device, but will also work with other apps. Expect a similar mix of measurement and graphs, with heart rate and sleep quality part of the mix too, with the necessary hardware.
Makies Fashion (£1.99)
British startup MakieLab started off as a way to customise then order 3D-printed dolls, but has since diversified into mobile games and apps. Makies Fashion is a well-crafted dress-up app for children, getting them to create outfits for their own virtual doll, then send them down the catwalk. Creative and fun.
Hype Machine (£2.50)
The second music app in this week’s roundup comes from what’s still one of the best sites for discovering new music: Hype Machine. Its official Android app has been a long time coming, but is worth the wait: it lets you quickly browse trending tracks from the music blogosphere, as well as seeing what friends are listening to.
Tidal (Free + subscription)
And more music: Tidal is a streaming music service with a couple of differences to the likes of Spotify and Deezer. First, audio quality: its streams (which can be cached for offline listening) are lossless FLAC-quality. Second, the way it mixes videos and articles – interviews and features – with the basic music. For now, it’s US and UK only, costing $19.99 / £19.99 a month.
Bitmoji - Emoji by Bitstrips (Free)
Remember Bitstrips? The personalised cartoons were all over Facebook last year, but then the mania died down. Could Bitmoji spark another craze? It’s a collection of emoji based on your own avatar, which can be pasted into your chats, text messages and social networking updates.
Movie Edit Touch (Free + IAP)
I remember Magix for its range of music-editing software back in the day, but in 2014 it’s also handling video editing. This new app aims to make it quick and easy to turn your clips into shareable videos, complete with background music and transition effects. Premium features, including the ability to export at HD quality, are sold in-app.
PCMark for Android Benchmark (Free)
One for anyone who likes to boast about exactly how nippy their Android device is: a benchmarking tool that promises to give you an accurate guide to the performance of your device as you’d actually use it, rather than the maximum stats in its tech specs. Also useful when mulling an upgrade, to compare to newer models.
CityMatchday (Free)
Finally, an interesting app for Manchester City fans, promising to be “the ultimate companion” for matches this season. No, that doesn’t mean it’ll buy you a pie at half-time. Instead, it offers a mix of video interviews; a live “tactical cam” and highlights videos (these two only if you’re at the match); and audio and text commentary for everyone else.
The Wolf Among Us for Android.
GAMES
The Wolf Among Us (Free + IAP)
For its The Walking Dead adventure games alone, Telltale Games is a developer to cherish. The Wolf Among Us is just as good though: a no-holds-barred adventure based on the Fables comic books (which I’d thoroughly recommend too). The storyline unfolds over five episodes, with all bar the first bought through in-app purchases.
Angry Birds Transformers (Free + IAP)
The latest branded Angry Birds game is actually one of the most innovative in terms of its gameplay: bird-slinging is out, and stompy robots shooting and transforming into cars is very much in. It’s freemium, so expect timers and energy bars, but the game itself is fun.Read our full review for more details on that.
Rival Stars Basketball (Free + IAP)
Developer PikPok’s Flick Kick Football Legends was a marvellous blend of flicky football and card-collecting. Now it’s trying a similar blend for basketball. Your job is to build a team by collecting cards and plotting your strategy, before getting your fingers involved to shoot the hoops.
Football Chairman (£2.99 + IAP)
I lost dozens of hours to the free version of Football Chairman when it first came out: an addictive game that sees you playing chairman rather than manager, developing your club from minnow to might. This is the full version, with more features, tournaments and in-game achievements to track your progress.
Star Wars: Galactic Defense (Free + IAP)
Disney’s recent Star Wars: Commander was a Clash of Clans-style take on the galactic battle. This new game from DeNA takes a more traditional tower defence approach, as you marshall the likes of Luke Skywalker and Yoda to fend off the hordes. Although as with Disney’s game, you can choose to play as the Dark or Light side, according to your mood.
Battleheart Legacy (£3.12)
Developer Mika Mobile’s Battleheart Legacy was a polished roleplaying game when it came out for iOS earlier in the year, and it’s made the leap to Android well. Expect questing, looting and lots of character customisation: the latter being the element most likely to keep you playing.
Haunt the House: Terrortown (£0.59)
Originally a PC game, Haunt the House: Terrortown has made its way to mobile devices just in time for Halloween. It’s really good fun: a game where you have to haunt a variety of locations, scaring the willies out of anyone you meet. The illustration and animation style mean it’s full of character.
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition (£6.99)
It’s a strong week on Android if you like your RPGs. This is another remake – this time of a PC game released back in 2000 – using the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system. It’s an engrossing tale well worth sinking your teeth (well, touchscreen fingers) into.
Secret of Mana (£6)
2000? Pfft. Secret of Mana is an even more venerable game, having first been released by Square Enix in 1993. This action RPG sees you exploring a colourful world, and while the graphics date it, the gameplay remains very moreish – whether you have fond memories of the original or not.
NHL 2K (£5.89 + IAP)
NHL 2K is 2K Games’ ice hockey simulation, converted with aplomb from console for touchscreen devices. It’s hard to make these kinds of sports games work well without buttons, but so far this one seems to have navigated the change well, with a choice of career, shootout and mini rink modes for variety.
When Google showed off Android 5.0 Lollipop’s new Material Design aesthetic during this year’s Google I/O, the first thing we thought about was how this would translate to the custom skins offered by OEMs like HTC and Samsung. Just before we kick off the weekend, the boys at SamMobile are quenching a little bit of this curiosity with an early look at Android 5.0 Lollipop running on the Samsung Galaxy S5.
This is actually the second time they’re showing off Samsung’s version of Lollipop, although this one is much more recent build. Although it’s still an early version of the software Samsung will eventually roll out to their Galaxy line, it clues us in on exactly what the OEM has in mind for their version of Google’s Material Design UI and really, it’s not half bad.
The current version of the TouchWiz running on the Galaxy S5 we found was actually much easier on the eyes and in some respects, not too far — at least in color scheme — to what Google introduced in Lollipop. The newly leaked version of Lollipopped TouchWiz shows a similar TouchWiz interface, only with small design tweaks to the Settings, Calculator, Dialer and more. Here’s what SamMobile noticed was changed from the previous leaked Lollipop build:
New Note 4 fingerprint lock screen
New system-wide font — similar to the original one, but a tad thinner.
New animations, much smoother than before — there’s a screen off animation present as well.
Google Search bar in recents menu
Brightness slider in notification center has a new yellow color — while changing the brightness, the notification centre disappears and allows the user to view the content beneath it.
Removed “Interruptions” from Sound settings
Gallery: Media can be sorted using new filters including Pets, Events, Scenery, Documents, Food, Vehicles and Flowers.
Music: Improved UI
Clock: Navigation bar icons are now accompanied by text
Calculator: Removed square grids which surrounded the numbers and symbols
Contacts: New search box
Stock Material Design inspired applications receive colored status bar
Android Lollipop theme’s core green elements replaced with Samsung’s blue color
Settings: Improved UI, new icon color
New UI for setting wallpaper from home screen
Better spacing between options in power off dialog
For more image comparisons, make sure to check out the post on SamMobile but in the meantime, check out their hands-on video below.
It’s 2014. The market for smartphones has matured to a point where specs do not really matter. Instead, it’s the software on devices that decides what kind of experience users get and just how useful the device is in complementing their lives. Android has reached a point where even $100 devices run fast enough and do most of the things that a flagship device can do, so why is it that the software on Samsung smartphones is still so slow and laggy?
I’m not one to limit myself to devices from a single company. Ever since I lost my Galaxy Note 3 earlier this year, I’ve been on a rollercoaster ride of sorts, going through no less than three flagship smartphones from other companies. I started with the Sony Xperia Z1, followed it up with the HTC One M8, and finally settled on the OnePlus One for a month or so before buying the Galaxy Note 4 as soon as it launched in my country.
Using those devices from Sony, HTC, and OnePlus and then switching to the Galaxy Note 4 was an eye-opening experience. What I noticed on the Note 4 from the moment I started using it was the insane amount of lags, stutters, and waiting times for things to happen. The Galaxy Note 3 was a fast device, but it had a camera and gallery app that were utterly slow. Many have pointed out that the gallery and camera apps on their Samsung devices run absolutely fine, but I’m not sure those who say that have used smartphones from other manufacturers in the last year or so.
On the Note 4, things are worse. While the camera app is a bit faster, the gallery app is still painfully slow at loading images. But that’s not the worst part. The Note 4 even takes a second or two to wake up when I press the home or power button when the screen is off, often making me wonder if I pressed said button properly or not (S Voice is turned off and disabled, so that isn’t the reason for the delay.)
Once past the lockscreen, there are a few stutters and lags in general usage as well. For example, the recent apps menu takes up to two seconds to show up, and scrolling through the apps in the recent apps screen is very jittery. Then there’s the settings menu. Every time you open the settings menu, you can expect to be met with stutter when scrolling through it, though it becomes smooth after a few seconds.
Software optimization was never Samsung’s strong suit, and on the Galaxy Note 4 it’s far worse than what it was on the Galaxy Note 3. Sure, I understand the higher screen resolution puts more load on the processor and GPU, but maybe Samsung should have stayed on Full HD and instead focused on bringing its software up to the mark first? A flagship device, in 2014, should be extremely fast, fluid and lag-free, but it seems Samsung just doesn’t seem to care about how fast its software is, as long as it can cram a lot of features and functionality and parade them as bullet points for their marketing campaign.
In terms of functionality, the Note 4 is a killer device and the best phablet in the market today, but using it as my main device hasn’t given me the flagship feel that I got from even the year-old Xperia Z1, or the HTC One M8, which remained extremely fast and smooth even after six months of use. I have written before thatSamsung needs to optimize TouchWiz if it intends to go after the low-end market, but if its flagship devices can’t match what the competition is now offering, I wonder if the budget market will see Samsung as a dominant player ever again.
It’s 2014, Samsung, and maybe its time you stopped running after mind-blowing hardware like a Quad HD display and instead focused on making your software as fast, smooth and jitter-free as it should be in this day and age. Apple does it, Google does it, even a small company like HTC did it (Sense 6 is the fastest manufacturer UI out there), and with the resources at your disposal, maybe you can to
The Galaxy Tab S Broadband LTE-A (SM-T805K), a variant of the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 with faster cellular connectivity and an updated processor, is now up for pre-order in South Korea for 824,000 Won ($767.95 or €613.91). This Android 4.4 KitKat running tablet features a 10.5-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600 pixels) Super AMOLED display, an octa-core Exynos Octa 5433 processor with ARM Mali-T760 GPU, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of ROM, and a 7,900 mAh battery. Connectivity wise, Samsung is acclaiming the Galaxy Tab S Broadband LTE-A as the world’s first LTE-A (FDD-LTE) tablet with download speeds of up to 225Mbps. There’s a 8-megapixel camera at the back, which can shoot 1080p videos and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera. Finger-print sensor, Accelerometer, Geomagnetic Sensor, Gyro Sensor, Hall Sensor, and RGB Sensor are also present on the device.
Other connectivity features include a microSIM card slot, dual-band Wi-Fi ac/b/g/n with MIMO, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth v4.1, A-GPS with GLONASS and Beidou, microUSB v2.0 port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It is also compatible with Gear Fit Manager and Gear Manager for connecting Samsung’s wearable devices and smartwatches. The tablet is available in Titanium Bronze and Dazzling White colors. Source
