Android Central’s Best of 2017 Awards

The Android world never stops moving. It starts with the crazy variety of phones and tablets from dozens of different companies, but gets even more interesting when you thrown in all of the phone accessories, Chromebooks, smart home devices, Google’s services and all of the apps we use every day.

These are the best of the best that we’ve seen come across our desks and be part of our lives over 2017. They’re our Android Central Best of 2017 winners!

Best Hardware of the Year

Best Android phone

Google Pixel 2

Google makes the quickest, smartest and most consistent software, and wraps it in strong hardware filled with great specs. And the camera absolutely leads the industry.

Runners up: Samsung Galaxy S8 LG V30

Best less-expensive Android phone

OnePlus 5T

The OnePlus 5T isn’t just the best phone deal of the year, but it’s the most impressive $500 phone we’ve seen. OnePlus redesigned the OnePlus 5 in all the right ways while improving its camera. Win-win!

Runners up: Moto X4 Moto G5 Plus

Most underappreciated Android phone

LG G6

LG had an interesting year. The G6 is one of the best flagships of 2017, but was instantly overshadowed by the flashier Galaxy S8. That’s too bad because its camera, and its style, won us over.

Runner up: HTC U11+

Best Android phone camera

Google Pixel 2

The best Android camera is the best smartphone camera, period. The Pixel 2 blew us away over and over again and we’re still trying to come to terms with our newfound power.

Runners up: Huawei Mate 10 Pro HTC U11+

Biggest flagship phone letdown

Moto Z2 Force

Motorola set high expectations, and a high price to match, but the terrible camera and screen that scratched the moment you took it out of the box completely killed the experience.

Runners up: Sony Xperia XZ Premium Essential Phone

Best phone design

Samsung Galaxy S8

The Galaxy S8 took everything we loved about the Galaxy S7 and stretched it —both figuratively and literally — into a new shape. The tall 5.8-inch screen is stunning in every way, but it’s the way the curved glass meets the shiny metal that … we’re going to need a minute.

Runners up: HTC U11+ Essential Phone

Best Android tablet

Samsung Galaxy Tab S3

It’s tough to recommend any Android tablet. But if you need one you probably want the Tab S3’s big screen, great specs and optional keyboard to make the most capable machine possible. It’s basically a Galaxy S7 blown up to a tablet size, and that’s a great starting point.

Best Chromebook

Google Pixelbook

The Pixelbook is an incredible engineering feat, and the single best showcase for Chrome OS as an alternative to Windows 10 and macOS. Half laptop, half tablet, but all class.

Runner up: Samsung Chromebook Plus

Best Accessories

Best smartwatch for Android users

Samsung Gear Sport

A smartwatch that’s reasonably sized, good looking, packed with features and completely capable as a full-on fitness tracker as well. It doesn’t run Android Wear, but that just isn’t a problem.

Runners up: Fitbit Ionic LG Watch Sport

Best fitness tracker

Samsung Gear Fit2 Pro

Samsung took all the basics of the Gear Fit2 and compressed them into a slightly more compact, significantly more water resistant, fitness tracker. For $199, this is a steal.

Best connected home accessory

Nest Thermostat E

In 2017, Nest rebounded in dramatic style. Its new $179 Thermostat E is purposefully unassuming, but its lack of flare belies an essential home tool.

Runners up: Google Home Mini Google Home Max

Best Android accessory

Google Chromecast Ultra

Anyone with a smartphone can benefit from having a Chromecast Ultra plugged into their TV. It’s a super-powerful streamer with 4K and HDR support, and just about any media app you can think of has Cast support to send content right to the big screen.

Best wireless headphones

Sony WH1000X2

Incredible noise cancelation is to be expected from a pair of Sony headphones, but the WH1000X2 go above and beyond, producing vivid sound and accurate, plentiful bass.

Runners up: Bose QC35 II Apple AirPods

Best VR headset

Samsung Gear VR 2017

It’s limited to just Samsung phones, but it’s hard to argue that Samsung’s VR content library is great. And after a few iterations, its headset has gotten even more lightweight, comfortable and perfect for longer VR sessions.

Runner up: Google Daydream View 2017

Best Software and Apps

Best new Android Oreo feature

Project Treble

Sometimes the most important features are the ones you can’t see. Project Treble will reveal itself going forward, when phones that ship on Oreo can receive future software updates much faster than ever before.

Runners up: Username/password autofill Notification dots and previews

Best new Google app/service

ARCore

Project Tango is going away, but ARCore is proving to be a worthy successor. It doesn’t have dedicated hardware requirements, and if the content partnerships keep growing we can see this be a strong foothold for Google in the AR/VR space.

Runner up: Files Go

Most improved Google app/service

Google Assistant

It’s hard to pinpoint a single important improvement in Assistant, but it’s quickly getting smarter about how it handles all sorts of questions. And best of all, Assistant is now far closer to parity across different devices and lets you type to it on phones.

Biggest Stories of 2017

Big story

Taller 18:9 aspect ratio displays are the new thing

The new form factor for smartphones now revolves around “tall” displays. The 2:1 aspect ratio gives you more screen without making the phone unwieldy in terms of width, and when combined with shrinking bezels just makes the experience of a modern phone more enjoyable.

Big story

The price gap between flagship and budget grows

2017 marked an inflection point where flagship phones got surprisingly expensive at the same time as the lowest-end budget phones got even cheaper. This year we got a Galaxy Note 8 near $1000, but also a super-capable Moto E4 for less than $100. What a world.

Big story

The Play Store exits beta on Chrome OS

It’s been a much longer road than anyone would’ve guessed, but Google is finally confident that Android apps from the Play Store are good enough for Chrome OS. There are still a few speedbumps to encounter, but Chromebook users have a new and growing bank of powerful apps available.

Big story

Google’s new TPUs rule the cloud

None of Google’s services would work as well as they do if it wasn’t for the company’s new Tensor Processing Units, aka TPUs. This server infrastructure lets Google manage massive data sets, give lightning-quick responses to online queries and make its apps more powerful than just about any other company can.

Big story

Android Go announced

As Android gets bigger, Google continues to have an eye on “the next billion” internet users. Android Go is the software for them, designed to run on phones with very low specs. Rather than creating a whole new version of the operating system, Android Go is smartly just a configuration of Oreo (and beyond) — that critically makes it easier for companies to implement.

Big story

Android One goes higher end

Corresponding with the announcement of Android Go, Google’s expanding Android One to new markets and pushing to nicer hardware at the same time. It’s bringing a “Google experience” to even more people, and that’s definitely a good thing.

OnePlus 3/3T get new Notes app and security patch in latest Open Beta

Open Beta 29 for OnePlus 3, Open Beta 20 for OnePlus 3T.

The OnePlus 5T might be OnePlus’s latest product, but that doesn’t mean the company’s stopped supporting its older hardware. After pushing out Android 8.0 Oreo to the OnePlus 3/3T and OnePlus 5, there’s now a new OxygenOS Open Beta for the 3/3T that has a pretty lengthy changelog.

Perhaps the most notable addition with this latest version of the Open Beta is the new OnePlus Notes app. Along with taking regular text-based notes, you can also share notes you take as pictures and add them to the Shelf with the Memo widget.

OnePlus also has a new widget for its Weather app, and there are enhancements when copying and editing for OxygenOS’s Quick Clipboard feature.

The File Manager now has a new category for large files and improvements in speed when deleting bigger files, and general System updates include:

• Added OTG toggle in Quick Settings
• Added notification when 3rd party apps delete contacts
• Updated Android security patch to December
• General bug fixes and improvements

This version of the OxygenOS Open Beta is v29 for the OnePlus 3 and v20 for the 3T, but OnePlus says that it’s temporarily stopped the rollout due to a “small issue.” The update will be resumed once this is fixed, and we’ll update the article accordingly when that happens.

OnePlus 3T and OnePlus 3

• OnePlus 3T review: Rekindling a love story
• OnePlus 3T vs. OnePlus 3: What’s the difference?
• OnePlus 3T specs
• Latest OnePlus 3 news
• Discuss OnePlus 3T and 3 in the forums

Twitter bans ‘Impostor Buster’ bot that ID’d Nazi trolls

It’s been a rocky road to Twitter’s newfound pledge to kick members of hate groups off its platform. For those on the end of racist abuse, reporting trolls to Twitter has been a frustrating process. But, earlier this year, one journalist decided to take matters into his own hands. After suffering a record amount of harassment, reporter Yair Rozenberg teamed up with dev Neal Chandra to build a bot that unmasked impersonator accounts manned by bigots. It got off to a great start, explains Rozenberg in a New York Times op-ed, before Twitter shut it down at the behest of Nazis.

The bot, dubbed “Impostor Buster,” went after trolls with fake profiles of real individuals from ethnic minorities. To fool unwitting users, they’d adorn these accounts with clear identifying markers “like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab,” along with descriptors like “jewish,” “muslim” or “enemy of the alt-right” in their bio, writes Rozenberg. Armed with the fake identity, they’d interject their racist bile in Twitter conversations by high-profile users, in the hopes of defaming an entire community.

Tapping into a crowdsourced database of impersonator accounts, which were curated to avoid false positives, Impostor Buster leapt upon the hijacked conversations to publicly expose the fakers. In a matter of weeks, the bot accrued thousands of followers, while its creators received thank-yous from victims, making it a success story for our troubled times. Then the Nazis mounted a fightback.

Inundated with reports of harassment from bigots, Twitter briefly suspended the bot in April. Despite fine-tuning it to evade Twitter’s alarms, the bot was permanently banned this month. It seems Twitter gave into the reports of spam and unsolicited replies from the neo-Nazis the bot had been targeting.

The move is just another sad chapter in Twitter’s paradoxical fight against hate on its platform. The moral of the story, according to Rozenberg, is that the company’s top-down enforcements are unfeasible. Instead of censorship, he posits a bottom-up approach using bots like his own to nurture a “healthier culture below.”

Source: The New York Times

Google will continue to let sites opt out of showing in search results

Google swears it won’t start scraping websites that previously opted out of web crawling just because it can now legally go back to its old ways. Back in 2012, the tech titan promised to change its practices in several areas to settle an antitrust investigation by the FTC. Those changes include removing AdWords restrictions that made it difficult for advertisers to launch multi-platform campaigns, as well as providing websites a mechanism to opt out of having their content crawled and displayed on search results. Both commitments expired on December 27th, 2017, but in a letter to the FTC, the company says it intends to continue honoring them.

Part of the letter reads:

“We believe that these policies provide additional flexibility for developers and websites, and we will continue them as policies after the commitments expire.”

Despite that promise, the companies that opted out of web crawling will likely keep on monitoring Google’s search results anyway. In September, Yelp told the FTC that the big G still uses its images for local-business listings in search results even though it asked the tech giant to stop scraping its content. “This is a flagrant violation of Google’s promises to the FTC, and the FTC should reopen the Google case immediately,” Yelp’s Public Policy chief Luther Lowe wrote.

Earlier this year, the European Commission also slapped Google with a $2.72 billion antitrust fine for its anti-competitive practices. The commission came to a conclusion that the tech giant abused its market dominance as a search engine to promote its own products and demote its competitors’.

Via: Recode

Source: Google, FTC

Russia lost a $45m satellite because of a launchpad mix-up

Despite Russia’s ambitious plans for space domination it’s not had a great deal of luck bringing its designs to fruition. The Roscosmos program’s budget was slashed in 2015 (because of “moral decay”) and in April last year a technical glitch postponed the launch of its first rocket from the Vostochny cosmodrome. Now, the team have straight-up lost a satellite after setting it to launch from the wrong place.

The 2.6 billion-rouble ($45 million) satellite — the Meteor M — was launched last month from Vostochny, with Roscosmos losing contact with it shortly after. It then emerged that the rocket carrying the satellite had been programmed with the wrong coordinates, and had instead been given bearings for far-off cosmodrome Baikonur. Deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin blamed the snafu on an “embarrassing programming error”, which isn’t going to instil much confidence in future guests of Russia’s space hotel, also announced this week.

Source: Guardian

A ‘Final Fantasy’ VR coaster is coming to Universal Studios Japan

Universal Studios Japan is launching a limited-time Final Fantasy ride and just released a video and other info to show what it’ll be like. Called the Final Fantasy XR ride, it uses the existing Space Fantasy the Ride roller coaster, with the addition of VR headsets playing Final Fantasy content. Riders will board airships and warp between various Final Fantasy worlds, meeting up with heroes and jeopardy along the way.

You’ll see Final Fantasy VII’s Sephiroth (above), along with Cloud, Squall, Lightning and others from pretty much all the game’s versions. All the visuals were produced by Final Fantasy developer Square Enix’s FX house, Visual Works, which created cut scenes for many of the games.

The ride is part of Universal Studios Japan’s annual Cool Japan event. It’s running for a limited time, but on the off-chance you’re in Osaka between January 19th and June 24th and happen to be a Final Fantasy fan, it looks worth a side-trip. Given the number of Final Fantasy versions and volume of content, we’re frankly surprised the game doesn’t have its own theme park.

Via: Kotaku

Source: Universal Studios Japan (translated)

Apple Pay Promo Offers $5 Off Fandango Movie Tickets

Apple is offering an Apple Pay promotion this week that discounts Fandango movie tickets by $5 when you make a purchase using either the Fandango app or the Fandango.com website.

The discount will be available on movie ticket purchases made through January 2, according to the email that went out to Apple customers this morning. When you make a purchase using Apple Pay, you will need to use the promo code “AppleCheer” at checkout to get the Fandango discount.

In addition to providing the Fandango deal, Apple is also highlighting retail apps that accept Apple Pay and can be used for New Year’s party planning, including Safeway, Party City, ULTA Beauty, Lyft, TouchTunes, and McDonald’s.

Over the course of the two months, Apple has been promoting Apple Pay through a series of emails that include deals and discounts. A November, email, for example, offered a discount on a Postmates Unlimited subscription.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
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Italian Clothing Company Wins the Right to Use Steve Jobs’ Name

An Italian clothing company that uses the name “Steve Jobs” as its brand will be able to continue using the moniker after winning a multi-year legal battle, reports Italian site la Repubblica Napoli (via The Verge).

Brothers Vincenzo and Giacomo Barbato named their clothing brand “Steve Jobs” in 2012 after learning that Apple had not trademarked his name.

Image via la Repubblica Napoli
“We did our market research and we noticed that Apple, one of the best known companies in the world, never thought about registering its founder’s brand, so we decided to do it,” the two told la Repubblica Napoli.

The Barbatos designed a logo that resembles Apple’s own, choosing the letter “J” with a bite taken out of the side. Apple, of course, sued the two brothers for using Jobs’ name and a logo that mimics the Apple logo. In 2014, the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office ruled in favor of the Barbatos and rejected Apple’s trademark opposition.

While the outcome of the legal battle was decided in 2014, Vincenzo and Giacomo Barbato have been unable to discuss the case until now, as their claim on the brand was not settled until 2017.

The two told la Repubblica Napoli that Apple went after the logo, something that may have been a mistake. The Intellectual Property Office decided that the “J” logo that appears bitten was not infringing on Apple’s own designs as a letter is not edible and thus the cutout in the letter cannot be perceived as a bite.

Image via Business Insider Italia
While the Barbatos currently produce bags, t-shirts, jeans, and other clothing and fashion items, they told Business Insider Italia that in the future, they plan to produce electronic devices under the Steve Jobs brand. “We are working on a line of highly innovative electronic devices, projects we have been working on for years,” said the two.
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‘Half-Life 3’ fan venture ‘Project Borealis’ is taking shape

The team behind Half-Life’s fan-made third instalment, Project Borealis, have been busy. In an update posted to Reddit, the developers revealed some of the progress they’ve made in their first few months of real pre-production, sharing screenshots of concept art, links to music samples and a few clues on the game’s plot structure. But while it’s no secret that the game is based on Marc Laidlaw’s Epistle 3 tale, the team is adamant it’s not going to leak any spoilers on the story “beyond what was originally laid out by Marc”.

The post also details some of the work being done with 2D and 3D components, as well as the “nuts and bolts” of the gameplay system. The team has spent hours looking at Half-Life specs to make sure it gets the mechanics right and to “make the base experience as close as possible to the original”. Still no work on when players can expect the game to land, but the update suggests meaningful progress is being made and that the team is just as eager as the fans to get it out there.

Source: Reddit

‘Ring in the New Year’ Activity Challenge Begins Appearing for Apple Watch Owners Ahead of January

One year after launching a “Ring in the New Year” challenge for Apple Watch owners, Apple today is rolling out the challenge again for 2018. The challenge’s rules appear slightly similar to last year, requiring you to close all three Activity rings for seven days in a row in January. During the previous challenge, you had to accomplish the same goal coupled with the specific requirement of the Activity streak lasting from a Monday to a Sunday.

Once you complete the task you’ll get a special Apple Watch achievement, which has been designed liked the 2017 award. Apple has been consistently launching Apple Watch challenges for its users, most recently including Thanksgiving, Veterans Day, Mother’s Day, Earth Day, and even a challenge designed to celebrate America’s national parks.

Apple Watch owners in the United States should start noticing the challenge appearing on their Apple Watch and within the Activity iOS app today. For users in other countries, the challenge began appearing yesterday.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4Tag: Activity ChallengeBuyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Buy Now)
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