ASUS ZenFone 5Z with Snapdragon 845 launched in India

At an event in Delhi on Wednesday, ASUS has officially launched the ASUS ZenFone 5Z in India. The ZenFone 5Z is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845-powered affordable flagship, and it will be available exclusively via Flipkart.

It's been a long time since ASUS has launched a flagship smartphone in India. The company experienced success with the first-generation budget ZenFone series launched in 2014, consisting of the ZenFone 4, ZenFone 5, and the ZenFone 6. The Intel Atom-powered ASUS ZenFone 2 series, launched in 2015, also went on to be quite popular. However, ASUS exited the value smartphone price segment with the Snapdragon-powered ASUS ZenFone 3 series, which were priced in flagship smartphone territory.

In 2017, the company did not launch the ASUS ZenFone 4 or the ASUS ZenFone 4 Pro in India. In April, it launched the ASUS ZenFone Max Pro M1, a phone which has become one of the most popular phones in its price segment. Now, two years after the ZenFone 3, ASUS has launched the Snapdragon 845-powered ZenFone 5Z flagship in India.

The ZenFone 5Z was announced back at Mobile World Congress. Even though four months have passed since its announcement, its specifications are still current. Let's take an in-depth look at the device:

ASUS ZenFone 5Z – Specifications at a glance

ASUS ZenFone 5Z	Specifications
Dimensions and weight	153 x 75.65 x 7.7 mm, 165g
Software	ZenUI on top of Android 8.0 Oreo
SoC	Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 (4x Kryo 385 Gold cores clocked at 2.8GHz and 4x Kryo 385 Silver cores clocked at 1.8GHz)
GPU	Adreno 630
RAM and storage	6GB of RAM with 64GB of storage / 8GB of RAM with 128GB of storage / 8GB of RAM with 256GB of storage; hybrid microSD card slot
Battery	3300mAh, USB Power Delivery charging (9V/2A)
Display	6.2-inch Full HD+ (2246×1080) Super IPS+ with an 18.7:9 aspect ratio, 550 nits brightness, 96% NTSC gamut, supports DCI-P3, Auto Color Temperature, 403 PPI
Audio	Hi-Res audio 192kHz/24-bit standard DTS Headphone:X 7.1 virtual surround sound for headphone support
Wi-Fi	802.11ac
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 5.0
Ports	USB Type-C port, dual nano SIM slots (nano SIM + nano SIM/microSD), 3.5mm headphone jack
Bands	GSM: 850/900/1800/1900MHz WCDMA: Bands 1/2/3/4/5/6/8/19 FDD-LTE: Bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/17/18/19/20/26/28/29/30/32 TDD-LTE: Bands 34/38/39/40/41 LTE Cat13 UL up to 150Mbps / Cat18 DL 5CA 4×4 MIMO up to 1.2Gbps
Rear camera	12MP camera with Sony IMX363 sensor, 1/2.55″ sensor size, 1.4μm pixels, f/1.8 aperture, 24mm focal length, 83-degree field-of-view, four-axis OIS 8MP wide-angle camera with 1/4″ sensor size, 1.12μm pixels, 120-degree field-of-view, 12mm focal length Video recording up to 4K at 60fps, three-axis electronic image stabilization (EIS)
Front-facing camera	8MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture, 24mm focal length, 84-degree field-of-view

The ZenFone 5Z is a standard 2018 flagship phone in terms of the design. On the front we have the 6.2-inch notched display, and a small chin at the bottom. The phone has a metal frame, and a glass back with ASUS' signature design pattern that is used in the company's range of laptops. The dual rear cameras are placed on the top left of the back, while the fingerprint sensor is placed in a centered layout below.

Display

The ASUS ZenFone 5Z has a 6.2-inch Full HD+ (2246×1080) Super IPS+ display with an 18.7:9 aspect ratio. It has a 96 percent NTSC coverage and it supports the DCI-P3 color gamut. It is rated for a brightness rating of 550 nits. It has an Auto Color Temperature feature that is similar to Apple's True Tone feature in the iPhone X. It dynamically adjusts the color temperature of the display on the basis of ambient light.

Camera

The ZenFone 5Z's primary 12MP rear camera has a Sony IMX363 sensor, 1/2.55″ sensor size, 1.4μm pixel size. It has a f/1.8 aperture, 24mm focal length, phase detection autofocus, and four-axis OIS. It's augmented by an 8MP wide-angle camera with a 120-degree field-of-view and 12mm focal length. The phone can record video at up to 4K resolution at 60fps, and it has three-axis electronic image stabilization (EIS).

The phone has an 8MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture, 24mm focal length, and 83-degree field-of-view.

ASUS ZenFone 5Z – Pricing and availability

The ASUS ZenFone 5Z will be available in Midnight Blue and Meteor Silver colors. The 6GB RAM/64GB storage variant costs ₹29,999, while the 8GB RAM/128GB storage variant costs ₹32,999. The top-end 8GB RAM/256GB storage variant will be available for ₹36,999. This makes the ZenFone 5Z the cheapest Snapdragon 845-powered phone on the market, undercutting even the OnePlus 6.

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Source: FlipkartXDA Forum for the ASUS Zenfone 5Z

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WhatsApp sends Cease & Desists for apps that use native Android APIs

WhatsApp is one of the most popular applications available on smartphones to date with over a billion active users per day. Bought by Facebook back in 2014 for $19 billion, skeptics feared how the application would be managed from there on out. Fortunately for users, it seems that little has changed despite some concerning developments behind the scenes. Unfortunately for developers, there's been one area where we wish the company had changed: their stance towards third-party developers. The company is sending out a new round of Cease and Desist letters to independent Android app developers, but this time their claims have a lot less merit.

WhatsApp Messenger (Free, Google Play) →

What's up with WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is one of the largest services on the planet so it's no surprise to see them aggressively protect their brand by preventing abuse of their platform. That's perfectly fine and why we can understand why the company previously went after third-party clients even if we don't agree with the decision. Applications that use a service's APIs are walking a tightrope because the service can change their API's Terms of Service whenever they want to kill third-party clients (so long as they inform users of any changes). Developers of third-party Twitter clients know this all too well.

But that's not what's happening this time. A legal firm representing WhatsApp has sent Cease and Desist letters to at least two independent Android app developers – the developers behind Can't Talk and DirectChat – demanding that they remove functionality from their app or face litigation. Neither of these applications uses any code from or interfacing with the WhatsApp service. Rather, these applications utilize standard Android APIs, Notification Listener and Direct Reply, to function. Thus, the demands to strip these apps of any functionality related to WhatsApp is dubious at best, and malicious at worst.

You can view a redacted version of the Cease and Desist letter below that the developers received from the legal firm representing WhatsApp. XDA-Developers can confirm the authenticity of the original letter. We have reached out to WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook, for comment.

Source: Reddit

Breaking down the Cease and Desist letter

There are a number of claims made by the letter which does not accurately reflect the functionality of each application with respect to their WhatsApp integrations. Let's break down some of these claims:

• "You agreed to these Terms of Service by installing, accessing, or using the WhatsApp Services."
  • Neither of these applications uses any APIs from the service. Further, the developers never agreed to the Terms of Service in the first place because they aren't using any of their APIs.
• "Reverse engineer, alter, modify, create derivative works from, decompile, or extract code from the WhatsApp Services."
  • Neither of these applications is WhatsApp specific and make use of native Android APIs rather than any code from WhatsApp itself.
• "Gain or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the WhatsApp Services or systems."
  • By that logic, Android itself violates the ToS as it processes each notification and keeps a log of notifications.
• "Collect the information of or about WhatsApp's users in any impermissible or unauthorized manner"
  • The users explicitly download and install this app on their own.
• "Sell, resell, rent, or charge for the WhatsApp Services"
  • The apps do not rent or sell access to the service. Both apps can't function unless the original WhatsApp application is installed.

Nearly every claim in the letter is faulty or is too vague to address how the apps violate these terms. Nevermind the fact that none of the developers behind these apps agreed to any ToS in the first place, making these agreements moot anyway. The letter does state that the list of alleged violations is non-exhaustive, though. Unless there is a term not covered here that these applications violated, then we fail to see how these apps violate the ToS. Even the use of the WhatsApp brand name in the Play Store description for each app would violate copyright and not the ToS.

The developers have seven days to comply or they will presumably face a lawsuit. Can't Talk has already been removed from the Play Store while the developer evaluates their options, while the DirectChat app is still available but may be altered to remove access to the WhatsApp integration. Removal of the integration would deal a major blow to each app since the majority of their users are likely using these apps for that specific integration – WhatsApp has over a billion active users each day after all.

Applications that received Cease and Desist letters

Can't Talk

Can't Talk's premise is simple. All it does is automatically reply to people when you aren't around, making use of the quick reply (RemoteInput) API native to Android. If you're driving a car, watching a movie, or simply don't want to talk at the time, then the application can reply for you with a preset message. It can also send a text to somebody who tried to call you as well. It's a paid application if you want to support more than SMS and calls, such as WhatsApp, Slack, and a lot more. Basically, any messaging service that allows you to send a quick reply via the notification you can use Can't Talk with.

DirectChat

DirectChat is another useful application. It works just like Facebook Messenger's chat bubbles but it supports a lot of different applications too. It feeds your chats into another window where you can then reply back as well. Its most popular usage was probably with WhatsApp.

DirectChat (ChatHeads for All) (Free, Google Play) →

What happens next?

The takedown of these applications for use of native Android APIs sets a dangerous precedent for future takedowns by large companies. If this continues, what's stopping WhatsApp from demanding the takedown of any notification manager application, regardless of its specific use for WhatsApp. Independent app developers don't have the resources to combat these claims so most just give in. We'll be following the situation closely and will update you if we hear back from either Facebook/WhatsApp, the affected developers, or another party involved in this situation.

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Multi-device support in Google Duo is now rolling out

Back in February, an APK Teardown we performed showed that Google Duo would support multiple devices on an account for making and receiving voice and video calls. This feature has now started to roll out to some users.

Multi-device support allows you to connect your Google Account to your phone number in Google Duo and receive calls through either your phone number or your email address. This was most likely added for supporting the Google Assistant-enabled smart displays so they can make and receive Google Duo video calls.

Earlier today, my friend called me on Google Duo and I noticed that both of Essential Phone and my Samsung Galaxy S9+ were ringing. This was despite the fact that I had just installed Android P beta 2 on my Essential Phone yesterday and hadn't set up Google Duo yet. I had it signed into my Google account and it automatically connected to the same phone number and email address.

To make sure this wasn't a one-off occurrence, I tested it myself with an iPad and called my number. Both of my devices rang again. It seems like Google is slowly rolling out this multi-device feature as my editor doesn't have the feature yet on version 36.1 of the application while I do.

The feature is really useful for people with more than one device, such as a personal and a work device. Once official support for tablets is available, multi-device support on Duo will be really useful for many people. We'll update you when tablet support starts rolling out. You can download the latest version of the application from the Google Play Store link below.

Google Duo (Free, Google Play) →

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OnePlus 5 & OnePlus 5T now support Project Treble on the latest OxygenOS Beta

OnePlus along with a few other smartphone vendors such as Google, Xiaomi, and Nokia offer a public beta program. OnePlus' OxygenOS Open Beta program lets you receive updates with new features and security patches long before the stable release reaches most other users. The OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T is getting a new OxygenOS Open Beta 13 and Open Beta 11 respectively, and they bring something quite surprising to the mix: Project Treble compatibility.

Project Treble was announced ahead of Google I/O 2017 before we even knew most of the new platform features in Android Oreo. The idea behind Treble is to modularize the Android operating system so it's easier for manufacturers to push updates to the software. By separating the vendor HALs from the Android framework and providing a standard interface between the framework and HALs, Google has made it faster for device makers to bring up new versions of Android. This, in turn, gives device makers more time to work on software features to make the user experience more enjoyable, and Google directly credits Project Treble behind the reason Android P is introducing so many new software features compared to Android Oreo. Lastly, Treble support played a big part in the reason non-Google devices like the OnePlus 6, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Sony Xperia XZ2, Nokia 7 Plus, and more have early access to an Android P beta.

Treble support is mandatory for any device manufacturer launching a device with Android 8.0 Oreo and above but is not a requirement for any device that upgrades to Android Oreo. We've seen several devices from the likes of Huawei receive Treble support, where OnePlus and Nokia previously stated that bringing support for Treble wasn't on the table. The reason that OnePlus gave us was that they felt it would be risky to repartition the OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T via an OTA update. However, as demonstrated by an independent ROM developer, there's plenty of unused space available on each device which can be repurposed into a vendor partition suitable for moving the HALs. We haven't examined the partition table of the OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T running the latest OxygenOS Open Betas yet to confirm how they handled the process, but at the very least this is still exciting news for owners of these devices.

We've talked in great depth about the benefits that Treble brings to custom AOSP-based development, but given that the OnePlus 5/5T already have a strong development community behind them the benefit of Treble won't be felt in this area. Instead, Treble compatibility will make it easier for OnePlus to push security patch updates to better support the devices in the long-term as they have recently promised. We'll have to wait and see if bringing Project Treble support to the OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T will yield real benefits for the devices, but we're confident that it'll help.

But enough about Treble support. The latest OxygenOS Open Betas bring more to the table than Treble. Here's the full changelog:

OxygenOS Open Beta 13/11 for the OnePlus 5/OnePlus 5T

• System
  • A brand new user interface
  • Supported accent color (Settings – Display – Customization)
  • Supported for Project Treble
• Launcher
  • Improved search tags in the app drawer
  • Added "New installs" category tag in the app drawer
  • Improved app list for hidden space and toolbox
• Phone
  • Optimized logic for the contacts page
• Weather
  • Brand new design with improved user experience
  • All forecasts integrated under a single interface leading to a fully immersive experience

We can see from the changelog that OnePlus is still improving the launcher experience by adding search tags in the app drawer, a "new installs" category, and an improved app list. The weather application also has a new look as does the system. We're not yet sure what "a brand new user interface" means as the update hasn't been pushed out to users yet. The changelog also mentions new accent colors, though it's unclear if this means full accent color customization just like the latest Android P beta on the OnePlus 6.

OnePlus warns users to flash earlier OxygenOS Open Beta (12 for OnePlus 5T and 10 for OnePlus 5) build first before the new update to avoid data loss. If you fail to do so and decide to update from the stable version of the system, you have to do a clean flash beforehand. That means clearing cache as well as data from the recovery (using TWRP is always recommended).

As I already mentioned, the update hasn't been pushed to the server yet. You can download the Open Beta builds once they're available from the link here. Those who are already on the Open Beta build will receive an OTA update and won't have to flash the zip file manually. You can also skip the line and get the update by using the Oxygen Updater app as mentioned in our tutorial here.

We'll update the article with more details and screenshots as soon as the update will be available on the server. Stay tuned for more details.

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Cheaper and lighter Microsoft Surface tablet passes through the FCC

Microsoft is currently working on a couple of interesting entries in the Surface line. Last week, there was an exciting report about a foldable, pocketable Microsoft Surface device. That device looks really promising, but it likely will be very expensive. Microsoft is also working on a more affordable Surface tablet and it appears to have passed through the FCC.

The FCC filing only mentions a low-powered charger, which would go with a smaller device. Unfortunately, that's the only detail we have to go on right now. The previous report stated the device would have a 10-inch display, more rounded design, USB Type-C charging, and a nice $400 price tag. They may also have an LTE model and affordable keyboard covers to go with it.

An affordable Microsoft Surface tablet could do very well for Microsoft. The current batch of Surface devices is quite pricey. You could spend over $3,000 if you wanted. With the onslaught of Chrome OS 2-in-1 devices just beginning, Microsoft knows they will need to compete at every price point. $400 is a great price, but performance will be key. Chromebooks in the same price range can run well on Intel Core m3 processors. Windows 10 is not as adept at running on low-powered devices.

Microsoft has not acknowledged this device or their plans. The fact that it is already going through the FCC would suggest that it's close to release.

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Source: WinFuture

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LG G5 Android Oreo update is imminent in Korea as kernel sources are posted

The LG G5 was launched in early 2016 with a gimmicky modular concept and Android Marshmallow. It was updated to Android Nougat later that year and since then users have been waiting for Android Oreo. Back in May, the LG G6 started getting Oreo and the LG V20 and G5 were said to be close behind. That update looks to be imminent in Korea.

Thanks to XDA Member cheeze.keyk, we can see that LG has posted Oreo kernel sources for the F700K, F700L, and F700S, which are Korean model names for the G5. This means the Oreo update should be rolling out soon to those devices and hopefully more variants soon after. This would mark the second major Android version update for the device, which is what is usually promised to owners.

If you're interested in the kernel sources, you can download the 189 MB file from the link below. This update will include all of the usual Android Oreo goodies, such as battery improvements, picture-in-picture mode, Autofill API, and more. LG has tried to put more emphasis on updates with their Software Update Center, and so far it seems to be paying off. They still have a lot of work to do to change their reputation in the Android community.

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Source: LG Code Distribution

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Become a Certified Ethical Hacker with This Bundle

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There are also modules that cover wireless and mobile network security (an increasingly important field), and when you've finished the course, you'll have all the skills you need to ace the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker v9 exam.

Open the door to an exciting and important career in ethical hacking and cyber security with the Certified Ethical Hacker Bootcamp Bundle for just $39—over 95% off.

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