US bans Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on all flights
In the wake of Samsung’s global recall of the Galaxy Note 7, the US has now banned the device on all aircraft, even if they’re turned off. Previously, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) only issued a warning to have passengers keep the phones powered down during flights. But now, Bloomberg reports, you can’t bring it on the plane at all. This follows recent news that Samsung has ended the production and sales of the Note 7 entirely due to smoke and fire incidents, which happened even to replacement handsets. It’s not entirely clear when the phone would be taken away from you — whether it’d be during the security screening or when you’re onboard the plane — but if you haven’t already returned it, you should at least do so before your next flight.
Update: The Department of Transportation has issued a statement regarding the ban, clarifying that the ban is effective this Saturday, October 15, 2016, at noon ET. As reported, the Galaxy Note 7 is not allowed on their person, in carry-on or in checked baggage, or even shipped as air cargo.
“We recognize that banning these phones from airlines will inconvenience some passengers, but the safety of all those aboard an aircraft must take priority,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in the statement. “We are taking this additional step because even one fire incident inflight poses a high risk of severe personal injury and puts many lives at risk.”
Update 2: Samsung has released a statement of its own:
“Samsung, together with carriers, is working to communicate the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new order to ban all Galaxy Note7 devices in carry-on and checked baggage on flights. We have encouraged airlines to issue similar communications directly to their passengers. Any Galaxy Note7 owner should visit their carrier and retail store to participate in the U.S. Note7 Refund and Exchange Program now. We realize this is an inconvenience but your safety has to remain our top priority.”
Source: Bloomberg
‘Secure’ apps in Google’s Play Store are a crapshoot
Infosec Apple fanboys are not known for their empathy — either for those who can’t afford their holy high fetish of phone security (iPhone) or for those who simply can’t stomach the ecosystem’s mounting hypocrisies.
But there’s one thing on their side. Apple’s App Store at least tries to curate product security, while Google’s Play Store is like playing appsec Russian roulette.
Nowhere has that been made more clear than in a post by researcher Jon Sawyer, called Password Storage in Sensitive Apps. Sawyer does freelance contract work “breaking and/or fixing Android phones and related software” — he hacks everything Android. For a recent gig, he was contacted by a forensic specialist for a law enforcement agency.
The law enforcement contact told Sawyer they had a phone with information on it “that could make or break a very sensitive case.” They had been trying to access the phone’s files and get data off the device with commercial mobile forensic tools but weren’t having any luck.
Sawyer verified their identity and purpose and got to the task at hand. “Using a backdoor … and some trickery we were able to fully extract all data off the device,” he explained. “This had me thinking, what next? What if this criminal was using another layer of security? What if they had a “secure storage” app, what if their photos, videos and whatnot were encrypted in an additional layer of security?”
Sawyer searched Google’s app store for “Secure Photo” and grabbed the first result. He doesn’t say which app this is. But in my search, the top result was Hide Pictures Keep Safe Vault, listed as a Play Store “Editors’ Choice” by a “Top Developer,” with 4.6 stars and between 10 million and 50 million downloads.
When he started hacking the app and looking at the supposedly safe and secure files, Sawyer found that “sure enough the files stored were encrypted.” But then he discovered that “the PIN was stored in plaintext as a shared preference” — making the app neither safe nor secure should you want to keep your files from the prying eyes of hackers or law enforcement.
Apparently, for Sawyer, this was so easy it was no fun. He moved on to installing and hacking the next result in his search, Private Photo Vault. That one had a 4.1-star rating, 17,000 starred reviews, and over one million downloads.
“The #1 iOS Private Photo App is now available on Android! Private Photo Vault is a photo safe that keeps all of your private pictures and videos hidden behind a password.”
The researcher was hopeful. “The initial results were more promising than the first app, no plaintext PIN stored in the shared preferences.” But, he wrote, “the promise didn’t last long.” When Sawyer found (by testing it on himself) that unmasking any Vault user’s PIN code was easy, he “stopped analysis at this point, the app was already beyond broken.
“These companies are selling products that claim to securely store your most intimate pieces of data, yet are at most snake oil. You would have near equal protection just by changing the file extension and renaming the photos.”
If you want to know what happens when a hacker visits the Google Play Store trying to find an app that can’t be cracked … well, it’s not pretty. And that’s where Apple’s App Store has some advantage, even though iOS apps aren’t as secure as users want to believe. Yet while the App Store is hypocritically censored to hell and back, treats developers like crap and has its share of garbage on offer, app security has always been its strong suit.
Although there was that one time scientists at Georgia Tech got an app named Jekyll into the App Store in 2013. Jekyll bypassed every security measure put in place by Apple to protect its users and could stealthily tweet, take photos, steal device identity information, send email and SMS and much more. “Our method allows attackers to reliably hide malicious behavior that would otherwise get their app rejected by the Apple review process,” the researchers wrote in their paper, Jekyll on iOS: When Benign Apps Become Evil.
The app was pulled before anyone downloaded it, but the point was made: Nothing is as secure as any company promises. And in typical Apple PR fashion, it still remains unclear whether the vulnerabilities exploited by Jekyll were completely fixed.
With Google’s new Pixel phone, an attack like this is at least less likely. Similar to its Nexus phones on Google’s Project Fi program, the Pixel will mainline operating system updates and security refreshes (one of many reasons I’ll be excited to get my hands on one, app store sketchiness notwithstanding). But, as Jon Sawyer found out after his recent law enforcement project, there’s a lot of false advertising in the Play Store under the guise of “secure” apps.
As I mentioned, I’m an Android phone user and fan, so I obviously don’t believe it’s all snake oil in the Google Play Store. I just think it’s wise to make our downloading decisions with the scrutiny afforded by the death of security-by-way-of-wishful-thinking.
Lawmakers demand answers from White House over Yahoo emails
Four dozen members of the US House of Representatives, acting as a bipartisan bloc, have requested that the Obama Administration brief them on allegations that Yahoo improperly scanned user emails at the behest of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Those scans were reportedly looking for a single piece of digital ID linked to a foreign government labeled as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” Reuters reports. That means they were hunting for emails from Iran, Syria or Sudan.
“As legislators, it is our responsibility to have accurate information about the intelligence activities conducted by the federal government,” according to the congressional letter. “Accordingly, we request information and a briefing as soon as possible for all members of Congress to resolve the issues raised by these reports.”
This letter comes amid increasing scrutiny for Yahoo and the US Intelligence community regarding the practice. Legal experts have expressed concerns about whether these scans constitute a violation of the 4th Amendment (the one protecting against unreasonable search and seizure). The debacle has also caused Verizon to slash a billion dollars off of its offer for the company, if it doesn’t sink the deal altogether.
Don’t panic: Spotify is having problems, but it’s looking into it
As if this long, dark week couldn’t get any worse, Spotify is dealing with some stability issues. Some people are still able to stream music, but plenty of people on Twitter are saying the service is totally down for them. On my end, I can get songs to play, but a lot of the desktop app’s navigation and interface is totally blank, which makes it hard to actually find songs to play.
We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted.
— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) October 14, 2016
Fortunately, Spotify’s support Twitter account says they’re aware of the problem and working on a fix. Hopefully that’ll be pushed out before your evening dance party starts, but that doesn’t do the tail end of your workday any good. Let us know in the comments if you’re having trouble and to what degree — are you one of the lucky ones who can still browse and play things from your saved albums and songs, or are you totally shut out right now?
MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Sena Snap-On Wallet for iPhone 7 or 7 Plus
For this week’s giveaway, we’ve teamed up with Sena to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win one of the company’s Snap-On Wallet cases for the iPhone 7 or the iPhone 7 Plus.
Priced at $49.95, the Snap-On Wallet is a thin high-quality leather case that’s wrapped around a flexible DuroFlex frame to protect the iPhone while also offering two slots that can house credit cards or a driver’s license. It’s Sena’s thinnest, most minimal wallet case.
The Snap-On Wallet is made from full-grain leather and comes in five rich colors: Gray, Toffee, Cognac, Black and Denim. It includes precision cutouts that leave all ports accessible, plus button covers for the volume and power buttons.
Inside the Snap-On Wallet is a herringbone lining that keeps the iPhone safe from scratches and there’s a lip around the front that protects the display when it’s placed face down on a surface.
Sena is providing 10 Snap-On Wallet cases to MacRumors readers, for either the iPhone 7 or the iPhone 7 Plus. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winners and send the prizes. You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.
a Rafflecopter giveawayDue to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.
The contest will run from today (October 14) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on October 21. The winners will be chosen randomly on October 21 and will be contacted by email. The winners will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.
Tags: giveaway, Sena
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iPhone 7 Plus in Jet Black Now Widely Available at U.S. Apple Stores
Since launching nearly one month ago, the iPhone 7 Plus in Jet Black has been challenging to find at Apple Stores in the United States — until today, that is. A spot check of iStockNow reveals the popular model is now at least temporarily available at a number of Apple’s retail locations nationwide.
Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus stock as of October 14 at 11:45 a.m. Pacific Time
Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus models are currently in stock at a number of Apple Stores in several states, including major cities such as Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco, at the time of publication. Availability varies based on carrier, color, and storage capacity.
iStockNow uses Google Maps to visualize the real-time status of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus availability at Apple Stores in the United States and other countries, likely based on Apple’s reservation system backend. Nevertheless, placing an online reservation or calling your local store ahead of time is highly recommended.
Apple Stores with Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus availability will display a green marker upon setting search filters for that model. Clicking on an individual marker opens a window with an expanded model-by-model breakdown of availability, and the time that stock was last updated at that location.
Jet Black iPhones have faced a global shortage as the new high-gloss finish has proven challenging to manufacture. The models suffer from a low casing production yield rate of 60-70%, meaning that 30-40% of units do not pass Apple’s quality standards and must be reworked, according to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Apple says the high-gloss Jet Black finish is achieved through a precision nine-step anodization and polishing process.
When pre-orders began on September 9, shipping estimates for Jet Black models quickly slipped to November, but some iPhone 7 Plus models in the new color shipped sooner than expected. Apple’s current shipping estimate for Jet Black models is 6-8 weeks for both carrier-locked and newly released SIM-free models.
While in-store stock is available in the U.S. at the time this article was published, supplies will likely be depleted very quickly.
Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tag: Apple retail
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Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 Smartphone Banned From All U.S. Flights
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 was today banned from all airplanes and flights in the United States by the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. It is now labeled as a “forbidden hazardous material” under the Federal Hazardous Material Regulations.
Individuals who own or possess a Samsung Galaxy Note7 device may not transport the device on their person, in carry-on baggage, or in checked baggage on flights to, from, or within the United States. This prohibition includes all Samsung Galaxy Note7 devices.
The Department of Transportation has issued an emergency order that will prevent the devices from being taken on a flight even when powered down as of Saturday, October 15 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Galaxy Note 7 smartphones are no longer allowed in checked or carry-on luggage and cannot be shipped as air cargo.
“We recognize that banning these phones from airlines will inconvenience some passengers, but the safety of all those aboard an aircraft must take priority,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “We are taking this additional step because even one fire incident inflight poses a high risk of severe personal injury and puts many lives at risk.”
Customers who attempt to bring a Galaxy Note 7 on a flight could have their devices confiscated and could face fines. Those who attempt to evade the ban by putting their smartphone in their checked luggage could be subject to criminal prosecution in addition to fines.
The official flight ban comes just days after Samsung permanently discontinued production of the Galaxy Note 7 and asked its carrier partners around the world to cease selling the device following reports that “safe” replacement Galaxy Note 7 devices were also catching on fire.
Samsung has not yet discovered the defect affecting the new devices and has not been able to reproduce the issue in house, but it has been forced to scrap the Galaxy Note 7 due to consumer outcry and regulatory investigations.
Samsung has asked Galaxy Note 7 owners, both with original and replacement devices, to power them down immediately and return them for a full refund. All four of the major carriers in the United States are allowing customers to return their Galaxy Note 7 smartphones for other smartphones, such as the iPhone 7.
Ending production and sales of the Galaxy Note 7 is expected to cost Samsung upwards of $2.3 billion, on top of negative public perception.
Tag: Samsung
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Macy’s Becomes First U.S. Department Store With Dedicated Apple Section
Macy’s today opened a new hub dedicated to Apple products at its flagship Herald Square store in Manhattan, becoming the first U.S. department store with a shopping area devoted to the brand, reports The Associated Press.
The store-within-a-store concept, similar to those found in Best Buy and Walmart stores, has four light wood tables featuring a wide range of Apple products, including the Apple Watch, iPhones, iPads, iMacs, and MacBooks.
“This is one of the most sought-after products,” Terry Lundgren, the outgoing CEO of Macy’s, told The Associated Press. “We really cater to women better than most retail stores do. I do think that we are going to end up creating a business that is more female-friendly.
Macy’s new Apple partnership, in the works for years, comes as the department store chain aims to reverse six straight quarters of declines for a key sales measure. Macy’s is collaborating with other brands to create a so-called mini-mall.
The dedicated Apple section, located near the main 34th Street entrance, will be densely staffed to accommodate the 35,000 to 40,000 customers, and up to 75,000 during the holidays, that visit Macy’s Herald Square location each week.
Tags: Apple retail, Macy’s
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Swype keyboard is a slick way to type on your phone (Review)
Overview:
Swype is a keyboard app that has a ton of features and input methods that make it stand out from the crowded keyboard scene.
Developer: Nuance Communications
Cost: $0.99 (Free trial available)
Impressions:
Swype has been around a while now, and has established itself as one of the more popular keyboard apps for Android. It offers a lot of value for it’s asking price and has only improved as the years have gone by. Cloud features for storing your personal dictionary, voice dictation and custom themes are just a few of the features it packs, but how is the typing experience?
The main way Swype expects you to type is by “swiping,” where you drag your finger from letter to letter in a fluid motion to spell out a word. This feature is offered on a lot of keyboards nowadays, and Swype’s version is implemented well. It generally did a good job of telling what word I was going for, and it offers a few suggestions as well in case the word in picked up wasn’t correct. Me being a “hunt and peck” typist on my phone, this feature took a lot of getting used to, as after I swiped out a word, I didn’t always get the result I wanted because I tend to move my finger too quickly over some letters and miss my target. Swiping is certainly fast and fluid when you get the hang of it, however, and I find myself using it a lot more than I thought I would. The standard typing method of Swype was a bit off for me, as I found myself somehow missing letters and mistyping when not using the swipe typing. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t use Swype as my daily driver keyboard even though it is an excellent keyboard overall. It just doesn’t gel with my preferred typing method as much as the Google keyboard.
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Swype also has built-in voice dictation from Nuance Communications other product, Dragon. The voice dictation typing works very well, and doesn’t require any voice training to accurately pick up my words as I speak them. As with any speech-to-text system, there were a few missed words or incorrect choices but on the whole it did a great job, and I used it more than I thought I would, especially when my hands were unavailable. Swype’s final unique input method is handwriting recognition, which I could take or leave. It does a fine job most of the time of picking up the letters I wrote with my finger, but the box is very small so writing out a whole word left to right is difficult if you have larger handwriting like I do. I think this feature is a bit unnecessary, and probably underused, but it is a nice option for those that like it and just another feature to add to the long list of things packed into this keyboard.
The biggest selling point of Swype, at least for me, is the custom theme system they have. There are a ton of options to customize your keyboard to fit your phone’s theme, or just to look awesome. My favorites are the Star Trek and color options, but there are a bunch more to get that will truly make your keyboard unique. The themes change the color, background and buttons of the keyboard in different ways, and none of them are really lazy, with some excellent details that remind me of rooted custom keyboards.
Swype has a laundry list of other neat features as well, including cloud backup for your personal dictionary so you can take it from device to device easily, a gesture-based “cut, copy, paste” that functions similarly to a PC keyboard shortcut, and a bunch of accessibility features for those who need them like talk-back and bilingual support.
Conclusion:
Swype is really overflowing with content for a cheap keyboard app. It packs in multiple input methods that all work well, along with a bevy of customization and usability features that really add some value. The Swype keyboard is certainly not perfect, and there are of course other options out there that offer similar features, but Swype is definitely a excellent keyboard that anyone could find something to love in. A solid recommendation for anyone looking to replace Fan stock keyboard, or spice up their phone theme with even more customization.
Download Swype in the Google Play Store
Google Pixel: Why controlling both software and hardware matters
Having control of all things is an important part of the Pixel. It puts the phone’s future, as well as the future of Android itself, in Google’s hands.
The Pixel and Pixel XL are not the first phones from Google. The very first Android phone — the T-Mobile G1 was a Google phone. The Nexus One started a run of phones from Google that lasted up until the Pixel launch, where we found out that the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X were the last Nexuses. The idea of Google having phones built for one reason or another just isn’t new. But the Pixel is an entirely different strategy.
Previous phones like that G1 or Nexus 5X were sold to be the reference device so people knew what worked and what didn’t with the latest version of Android. Developers needed a phone they could test the different ways to do the things that make their apps great. When we say the Nexus phones were developer phones (which has been debatable for a while) what we mean is they are a bare-bones conduit for application developers to make their stuff work best with Android. You need things to work with the operating system before you try and make things work with the ways other companies have changed it. But the Pixel is not a reference phone.
I’m not entirely sure what Google expects developers to do when they need a platform reference to test new platform APIs and features. Maybe the Pixel brand will always incorporate them with no changes and can be used as such. That makes sense, but it’s not why the Pixel exists. The Pixel is Google trying to be a phone manufacturer. They worked with HTC (and no, we don’t know the exact details) but the phones themselves are Google’s product and design. The software is no longer that bare-bones reference flavor and has a number of features that aren’t part of Android for anyone else to use as they see fit. The Pixel is Google’s baby, for good or bad.
That means they have complete control, and that can be an important thing. Let’s look at why.
Support
Supporting a thing you sell — especially a $1,000 thing — is important. When a part goes bad or something gets broken, someone needs to be able to get it fixed and back in working order. If you break the screen on your Nexus 5X, LG will be happy to quote you a price to get it fixed. Same goes for Huawei and the Nexus 6P. But the Pixel will have Google taking care of hardware support themselves.
Support matters more when you’re making phones for the mainstream.
I doubt they will be fixing phones at desks or Fruit Smoothie stands at the Mountain View campus. They’ll probably ship it back to HTC if it needs any hardware issues taken care of. But the important part is that it’s all done on their terms instead of another company deciding when to offer support or how much to charge. This isn’t automatically a good thing. Google doesn’t have a lot of experience fielding hardware warranty issues on a large scale. But it’s theirs to do well with or screw things up.
The same goes for software support. The Pixel has a built-in support client in the settings where you can ask for help from Google if you have questions or issues. With Nexus models, they had a support channel that started with a Python script questionnaire and weaved through mailing lists and Google Groups. That doesn’t work when the phones you’re selling are designed for the mainstream. Once you go full retail, you’ll have plenty of questions to answer and bugs to look into. Especially if you sell a lot of phones. Google needs to have complete control over the process if they hope to handle it well.
Having someone else build your phone and sticking their name on the back, then selling them alongside you makes it tough to do it your way. Controlling everything about the Pixel lets Google decide what they think is best when it comes to supporting them.
Security
Security on your phone might not be important to you but’s it’s very important to Google.
Every time there is a high-profile incident surrounding Android phones, Google takes one on the chin. Android is their product, and if some company gets lax and malware or hacking hits the news cycle, Google doesn’t have to be at fault to take the brunt of the outrage. Google was never shy about “owning” the software on the Nexus line. Good or bad, no matter what came up they addressed it and provided a solution. Even when it took multiple solutions, we knew it was being addressed. They’ll do the same with the Pixel and Pixel XL. The phones will be kept up to date (even Verizon has promised as much, though we’ve heard that before) and get monthly patches to address exploits both current and future. Nothing changes there.
Google takes security very seriously. More control means they can do a little more.
As a hardware partner — yes Google Hardware is a client and partner of Google Android as a separate entity — which builds their own phones they also have some say into support contracts with the people who made the components. Huawei was involved in getting security issues with the Qualcomm processor in the Nexus 6P resolved. Now there is no middleman and Google has to make sure they made the right contract and work with Qualcomm in a greater and different capacity to get things sorted if it were to happen again. The same goes for any and all software that is needed to support the hardware — if it gets exploited, Google can work directly as a licensee to help sort it out.
Like supporting customers, we have no guarantee that these changes will make things better. We assume Google has a plan and has thought long and hard about becoming a company that makes Android phones and will be able to offer the same, or a better, level of security for our private data.
Experience
This is an important — maybe the most important — reason Google benefits from having control over everything about the Pixel line. Google has always been a company that makes money from services, not from hardware sales. Google develops Android because having $100 phones means ever-more people can afford them and can use Google’s services. Before the Pixel, it’s not a stretch to think that Android was an operating loss for Google but happily continued because it supported the balance sheet in other ways. They don’t appear to feel the same way about the Pixel.
Google will still make money from every iPhone sold (from its search deal and ads) and by keeping Android as a compelling lure for other companies that can’t or don’t want to spend the money to make their own software. But they seem to want to make money from Pixel sales, and that means they have to nail the experience so we have a reason to buy them.
The Pixel is Google’s iPhone. It’s what they think you’ll love in the package they want it to be in.
They way they’re doing it is in stark contrast to other companies who make Android phones. Samsung and LG make phones that deliver unique experiences through features not available elsewhere. The Note series may have taken some very hard knocks recently, but for years it was the phone to buy if you wanted the S Pen and all the features that came with it. The LG V10 was one of the best phones you could buy if you wanted to get more serious when you were creating and consuming media. Sometimes, the features weren’t such a hit. S Voice never was as popular as Google’s solution with Google Now, and the G5’s modular idea failed to gain any traction at all. But Samsung and LG continue to push the envelope when it comes to the feature set.
Google isn’t offering S Pens or HDR microphones or software that uses either. The Pixel isn’t water resistant like phones from Samsung and Apple. It doesn’t track your eyeballs to keep the screen from shutting off while you’re looking at it. Instead, Google is offering a very specific set of features — including a Pixel-only Google Assistant — and focusing on making them work the way they think is best. They are selling you the Google Experience, and they think it’s the best experience available. Tailoring both the software and the hardware, take the camera as an example, to bring it to you in a way they think is better than anyone else is doing it is only possible if they have control. Without the Pixel’s camera-specific software and the image processing features and sensors of the Pixel hardware, that isn’t possible.
Yes, this is what Apple does with the iPhone. In fact, the Pixel is Google’s iPhone. Simple, powerful and wonderful — at least in their opinion — all at the same time. Whether or not we agree after using it remains to be seen.
This is how Google gets control of Android
Plenty of us wants to see Google force the companies making Android phones to do better. That’s just not possible. Android is freely given to anyone who wants it and Google has no way of taking it back. They can’t very well deny access to services they already agreed to give, like Google Play or Gmail, nor do they want to because that’s how they make money from Android. Having companies do things their own way sometimes proves to be a PR disaster.
Controlling the experience is how Google wants to show how great Android can be.
Early in 2016, there was a rumor that Google was preparing to shame Android phone makers that didn’t update their phones or that ruined the experience. On the surface that was — and is — a crazy idea. Throwing your partners under the bus will only make them unhappy, and unhappy partners are less willing to give into suggestions. Building a phone that showcases Android at its best, though, is an easy way for Google to separate themselves from companies who don’t do enough to improve Android’s image problem. They don’t need to shame anyone if they can show how good it can be.
With the Pixel and Pixel XL, Google has complete control of an Android phone and the user experience that comes with it. There are some very legitimate concerns over the future of the “open” Android and a widening gap between what Google can do and what other companies can do, but the Pixel line is something Google has needed to do for a long time. If their experience is as good as they think it is, and if they haven’t priced themselves into obscurity, the Pixel is great for their image when it comes to Android.
Any other effects they may have, good or bad, remain to be seen.
Google Pixel + Pixel XL
- Google Pixel and Pixel XL hands-on preview
- In pictures: Google Pixel and Pixel XL
- Pixel + Pixel XL specs
- Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
- Verizon is the exclusive U.S. carrier for the Google Pixels
- Join the discussion in the forums!
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