Just 0.3% of Android devices are running Nougat, 25% still on KitKat

The latest Platform Versions numbers show the same old story.

As of the start of this month, Android Nougat represents just 0.3% of active Android devices, following a common trend we see each time a new version is released. Android 7.0 Nougat has been out in the wild for Nexus owners for a couple of months now, but these numbers remind us all that Nexuses are not only a tiny fraction of phones sold in 2016 … they’re an even tinier fraction of active Android phones in the world. At the same time phones like the LG V20 haven’t had enough time to influence these numbers.

You’ll also notice that in the chart above Android 7.1 hasn’t even been broken out into its own category, which is due to the fact that it has less than 0.1% of the Android market — Pixel phones have only been on sale for a couple of weeks at this point.

One-fourth of active Android devices are running Android 4.4 KitKat.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which represents the largest chunk of mid- to high-end phones sold in the past two years, is at a respectable but still annoyingly low 24% of the Android market. The combination of Android 5.0 and 5.1 Lollipop come out to 34.1%, while Android 4.4 KitKat is still powering over one-fourth of active Androids. Thankfully things drop off sharply after that, with super-old Jelly Bean devices at 13.7%.

Those legacy KitKat devices are likely to hold on a bit longer as they won’t be updated past Android 4.4 at this point in their lives yet are likely living on as super budget phones that aren’t going to be replaced as quickly. From this point of view the Lollipop phones and tablets are the most concerning, as they’re likely more modern hardware that often could take a jump to Marshmallow, but likely won’t as they land outside of many manufacturers’ update windows.

With updates to Nougat starting to be tested and arriving for some modern Android phones at the end of the year we could be in for a notable jump in these numbers by January or February 2017, but the situation will still seem rather depressing when you consider the hundreds of millions of devices that will never see the latest software.

The T-Mobile Galaxy S7 just got a whole lot faster

256QAM? 4×4 MIMO? All you need to know is that the T-Mobile Galaxy S7 is now way faster.

If you’re running a Galaxy S7 or S7 edge on T-Mobile, today’s update just made your phone a lot faster — network-wise, that is. Specifically, the second part an update promised back in September (and rolled out in October) enables connection speeds up to 256QAM for downloads and 64QAM for uploads in markets that support it.

This comes after an update was issued for the phones to enable 4×4 MIMO (multiple input, multiple output), a technology that has long been used to improved throughput on wireless devices from home routers to smartphones — essentially making the phone the world’s fastest, at least in theory. While most people will never experience the theoretical peak speeds of 400Mbit/s, it’s nice to know that T-Mobile continues to push its mandate of being the most technologically-forward in the U.S.

There are practical benefits to this, especially for those who aren’t in markets densely populated by T-Mobile towers. Because 256QAM connections rely on having a very low signal-to-noise ratio between the phones and towers, people are going to experience these faster speeds on less crowded towers, and in places where there is much less multipath — signals bouncing all over the place due to tall glass buildings and tons of interference. T-Mobile says that all of its cell sites have been updated to support 256QAM, and that 319 markets support the previously-released 4×4 MIMO. T-Mobile’s LG V20 should also support both of these network improvements, but only supports 3x carrier aggregation out of the box, according to Cellular Insights.

The update should be rolling out to all T-Mobile Galaxy S7 and S7 edge customers now, and Reddit users are noting speed test increases in the realm of 10% to 25% depending on the market. What are you seeing?

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Best apps to follow the 2016 U.S. election!

Are you ready to anxiously refresh results pages every minute of the day?

You may or may not have noticed the 18-month roller coaster we’ve been lovingly referring to as the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, but it’s (probably) coming to a close at some point on November 8th. At least, that’s the best case scenario. Goodness only knows what reality will have in store for us.

If you’d like to spend the day constantly refreshing election results pages to see who will be our next Commander-in-Chief, we’ve got a few apps and site shortcuts for you to install. If you’re still not sure where you’re vote is being cast, we’ve got something for you as well. If you’re hoping for a grand election-themed escape, we’ve got something in mind for you as well.

Voter

One constant theme with this election has been the massive number of undecided voters out there. Plain and simple, there’s a lot of folks out there not particularly thrilled with any of the choices available. If you’re in the group and would like some reading material on where to push the button, the Voter app may be what you need.

Voter poses a series of questions to determine your general political leaning, and offers you information surrounding the candidate that acts like they agree with your personal position. From there, you can look up other candidates or take a look at a news feed full of current events from a bunch of different news sources. It’s a good all-around source that may help you choose, if you haven’t already.

Download: Voter (free)

FiveThirtyEight

While not an app, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better source for statistical information regarding the election than Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight team. The website does an incredible job breaking down as much information as possible into easy to consume graphs. If you’re done looking at pretty pictures, these graphs are often accompanied by detailed explanations of what happens next.

This site is also not politically charged, meaning they don’t have an opinion on the issues shared on the site. This is where you go for data, in the form of volume and more. The site is very mobile-friendly, and looks great just about anywhere.

Visit: FiveThirtyEight (free)

NPR One

If you’d rather listen to what is happening during the actual election, you’ll find some great resources in the NPR One app. This app is built to gather data from your usage and offer you a stream of podcast-style news snippets geared toward your interests, but will serve you well for the election and surrounding stories if you’re interested in that constant stream of information.

You could continue to use NPR One after the election of course, but for this particular day if you want something in your ear while working there’s a good chance this is what you’re looking for.

Download: NPR One (free)

Twitter Moments

We know those silly Mainstream Media people can’t be trusted, and the folks at Fox News are pure evil, so obviously the best place to get election news is from random people posting whatever they think will get the most retweets on Twitter, right? RIGHT?!

Hyperbole and shouting claims of bias aside, Twitter Moments is actually pretty great for capturing a bunch of information on a topic. For the election, there’s could to be more than a couple of these moments full of stories from sources all over the web that help to create a story. Whether that story is entirely accurate is totally up to you to research.

Download: Twitter (free)

Showtime

If you’re not really interested in anxiously refreshing things and would rather have some fun while you wait to see who is next in charge, Showtime is going to have some fun stuff for you. There’s some good shows and documentaries for you to watch surrounding the election, but as the sun goes down Stephen Colbert is going to be doing a live and likely adult-themed special all about the results.

It’s supposed to be something similar to his Late Show, but who knows what will actually happen. If you’re looking for a way to laugh through the event, this is probably a good place to look. This one is U.S.-only, unfortunately.

Download: Showtime (free)

Take a deep breath, it’s almost over

Do you have an election day plan? Will you be in front of a television with nachos and a cold one, or are you going to be out encouraging others to participate in this event? Share your plans to stay connected and survive the season finale of America in the comments!

Partial Screenshot mode from Google’s Pixel C headed to phones (sort of)

This sure would be handy.

Grabbing a screenshot and cropping it is no big deal, but how cool would it be to just screenshot what you needed on your phone and not bother with the editing? A little-known feature on Google’s Pixel C does exactly that, but you can only access it with the keyboard attached. Pressing Control+Search+Shift+S on the keyboard makes the screen go dark, and when you drag your finger across part of the screen you see it light up and then go away when you lift your finger. That captures a partial screenshot, which is pretty handy on a screen that size.

For some reason, Google decided phones didn’t need that feature and the commit was never made an official part of Nougat on phones. Do you think that stopped people from enabling the feature in custom ROMs though? Of course not.

What you see there is a manual edit that enabled this feature on a phone, and it works almost exactly the same as it does on the Pixel C. There’s no keyboard attached, of course, but you get the idea. This may have been something Google decided wasn’t quite polished enough to make its way to Nougat without a clear way to activate it, but you can expect some version of it to be all over the ROM world for the foreseeable future.

What about you? Do you want this feature on your phone?

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AT&T BlackBerry Priv has an official fix for the ‘no service’ bug

BlackBerry provides a stand-alone fix you can download and install at your leisure.

If you have an AT&T BlackBerry Priv and have been affected by the “no service” bug some have been seeing since September, BlackBerry has your fix.

It comes in the form of a small app from AT&T and BlackBerry, and you can download it directly from BlackBerry. You’ll need to temporarily enable the Unknown sources setting that allows applications outside of Google Play to be installed, but you’ll be able to enable it again once you’re finished.

The folks at CrackBerry are on top of things and ready to offer assistance to anyone who needs it, and the simple instructions from the BlackBerry Knowledge Base are below.

Install the BlackBerry “No Service” Prevention Tool.

To install the BlackBerry “No Service” Prevention Tool, complete the following;

1). Enable the installation from Unknown Sources. To enable this, complete the following;

• Navigate to the Settings > Security on the PRIV
• Under Device administration, enable Unknown Sources
• Tap OK when presented with the warning message

2). From Chrome on your PRIV, click here​

• Should the message “Chrome needs storage access to download files”, select UPDATE PERMISSIONS
• Tap ALLOW

3). Tap OK when the message “This type of file can harm your device. Do you want to keep LteCaBugfix.apk anyway?” appears at the bottom of the screen

​​​Please note: Lookout Security & Antivirus may block the direct opening of the downloaded application

4). Once downloaded, select the LteCaBugfix.apk file from the Notification shade. Alternatively, tap the Downloads icon from the App Drawer

5). Select LteCaBugfix.apk

6).Tap INSTALL

7). Tap OPEN

8). From within the BlackBerry “No Service” Prevention Tool, select the Check Box for “I accept BlackBerry Solution License Agreement.”

9). Tap Enable “No Service” Prevention.

10). Once the message The tool has been enabled successfully is displayed, tap UNINSTALL to remove the BlackBerry “No Service” Prevention Tool as the fix has been applied.

11). Disable the installation from Unknown Sources. To disable this, complete the following;

• Navigate to the Settings > Security on the PRIV
• Under Device administration, disable Unknown Sources

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Pokémon Go just got a lot more tedious for power users

It might be time to start playing again, if more things to catch interests you.

Niantic made their usual announcement regarding the most recent update to Pokémon Go, but it looks like they left a few things out. Most of these new things are really great for users, especially casual users, but you’ll want to take note if you’re a power player looking for the next best strategy.

Let’s break this down.

No more gym sniping

I know, right?! Gym sniping is a thing of the past, which is either really good news or really bad news depending on how you play. From now on, when you take a gym there’s a brief period of time where you are the only one who can claim a gym.

This means you’re going to need to communicate a little better if you’re taking a gym as part of a group if you want to avoid some arguments, but for the most part all this does is stop people from slipping their creature into your hard-fought gym while the animations finish out on the screen. While hilarious, it was kind of a jerky thing to do.

Daily bonuses!

Niantic will not reward you with some extra XP for logging into the game every day an doing things. The biggest place you’ll see this matter is the First Catch of the Day. If you’re up and catching Pokemon every day, you’ll get a small bonus with your first catch. Do that for a week straight and you’ll see even more bonus XP show up.

This is a small, fairly standard gesture to keep people from forgetting they have the game installed on their phone, but so few people only open the app to catch a single creature so this is a good way for Niantic to keep people playing for extended periods of time.

No playing while driving

When this game first launched, people playing while driving was a real problem. This hasn’t been as big an issue since Niantic started popping up a warning in-game when you were going too fast to be running, but that clearly wasn’t enough for someone.

Now when you exceed that magical 8mph threshold you’ll notice everything disappears from your Nearby menu and it’ll be much more difficult to check in to PokéStops while cruising. If you were still playing the game in some small way while driving before, it just got a lot harder. That’s a good thing: you shouldn’t be playing in your car anyway. On the other hand, winter is coming and people generally play outdoor games less when the weather is bad.

Ditto and Generation 2 Pokemon

The Silph Road found references to 100 new Pokémon that are not part of the game right now, and one of them is Ditto. That means a couple of things, all of which are fairly exciting.

For starters, we’re getting second generation Pokémon sooner than expected. Right now that means more things to catch, but the inclusion of Ditto and its Transform ability in this batch means either Pokémon breeding is about to be a thing in the game or individual battles are about to be a thing in the game. There’s not enough to speculate too far yet, but either will be very interesting.

What do you think?

Will these changes affect the way you play Pokémon Go? Do you even still play?

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A glorious white iPhone 7 from Apple might soon become a reality

Apple is trying something new in order to get you to buy an iPhone 7.

Smartphone sales are flatlining – and even the mighty Apple out of Cupertino, CA can’t escape this wrath. Analysts expect the company to ship 40 million to 50 million iPhones in the first calendar quarter of 2017, down from 51.2 million in the year-ago period. And if Apple doesn’t introduce a new iPhone SE in the spring of 2017, total iPhone sales could slow even further to shipments of 35 million to 40 million units next summer.

To boost sales, Macotakara has claimed Apple may soon introduce at a “Jet White” option to its iPhone 7 lineup. The new colour might debut before the holiday shopping season, but Macotakara, which has a decent track record when it comes to leaking Apple news, said its own source for this rumour is “unreliable”. So don’t get your hopes up. If you still like to dream, feast your eyes on these white iPhone 6 concepts.

The iPhone 4S was Apple’s last iPhone model to offer an all-white finish. The current iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus models are only available in the following five colours: Gold, Rose Gold, Black, Silver, and Jet Black.