CyanogenMod has now released the first official “non-nightly” build of CyanogenMod 13. CM 13 will bring Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 to your device and will include the ‘Doze’ mode which puts your device into a deeper state of “sleep” to help conserve battery. According to the CyanogenMod release page, you can expect all of the standard features that you’re used to seeing with CM releases.
It should be noted that there are different update scenarios that need to be considered before taking the plunge. These scenarios are outlined on the official CM 13 launch page.
As expected, CyanogenMod 13 will come with a bevy of changes. You can find a list of most of the bigger changes here.
To download CM 13, Release 1, to your device, follow these links:
*Please note that androidguys.com is in no way responsible for any damage or harm that may come to your device through rooting and romming. Download and flash custom roms at your own risk.
With an update rolling out today, Google Photos just got even smarter. Have you ever gone on a trip, took dozens if not hundreds of photos, and wish there was an easier way to manage them? With the latest update, Google Photos can now suggest an album for you, curated with “just your best shots.” Photos and videos will be included.
This seems like a mashup of the albums and story feature. The suggested albums will include maps to show how far you traveled, and locations pins so you can always remember where exactly you went. You can add captions to each photo, and turn on collaboration to let other people add their photos to the album.
If you don’t want to wait until your next trip, you can create this new kind of album yourself – complete with customized maps, location pins and text. In the past, Google did add a new feature called Auto Awesome which let them put their neural nets to work on automatically enhancing your photos, but the feature was later removed and rebranded into Creations.
This new feature will be rolling out to Google Photos on Android, iOS and the web-based interface.
Android users love their customization options, so when Google rolls out an update that allows us to personalize our devices even more, we get all happy and excited. Google Maps has recently received an update that allows for users to add nicknames and sticker icons to our most traveled destinations.
To set a your home or work address within Google Maps, the steps are pretty easy.
Open Google Maps
Using the search box at the top, enter the desired address
Swipe up from the bottom, once the address has been located
Tap “Label” and create label for location
Change Icon to customize how this location will appear in your maps
When choosing your “Home” location, there are 25 different icons to choose from, while there are only 13 to use for a work location. These stickers will appear on your Maps whenever you are nearby the set location, allowing you to easily navigate to said location.
Once you have gone through and labeled a few places, you can visit the “Your Places” section of Google Maps, which allows you to manage and delete any locations that you no longer need. From here, you can also view your Saved locations, your visited locations, and any offline Maps that you have saved.
By labeling and tagging various locations, you will begin to see updates about travel times to the locations, as well as alerts when there’s a slow down in your travels.
Hound is a voice assistance app from SoundHound Inc, the developers of the Sound Hound music recognition app. Hound aims to set itself apart from the competition by providing a level of depth that other voice assistants do not offer.
Hound was very easy to set up. Once you have downloaded it from the app store, find it on your device and open it. You will be asked to confirm and approve a few permissions. Simply hit allow on those. Hound will begin to walk you through a brief tutorial and once that is complete, the app is ready for you to use.
Impressions
When it comes to voice assistance on a mobile device, Apple has Siri, Android has Google Now. Hound, by Sound Hound Inc., aims to change that.
Hound does the same thing all of the other voice assistant apps on the market do: it tells you the weather, shows you where restaurants, coffee shops, and movie theaters are near your location. At first glance this is nothing special. We’ve had this technology available to us for years. However, Hound takes it one step further: Boolean logic.
Boolean logic refers to complex logic in questions. You often see it used in development and database querying. Hound uses Boolean logic quite effectively through allowing you to ask it complex, multi-part questions. You read that right; you can ask Hound complex, multi-part questions. And when I say complex, I mean complex.
I’ll take the examples from Hound’s tutorial to illustrate this point:
Hound has you ask it, “Show me coffee shops in my area.” After you ask the question, Hound will return a list of coffee shops in your area. Hound then has you ask it, “Which ones have wifi and are open after 7pm on Sundays?” Hound then refines and filters the results from the previous question with this new criteria.
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Hound has you ask it, “Show me Asian restaurants within 10 miles, excluding Korean or Japanese, sorted by rating.” Hound will return a list of restaurants within 10 miles that fit this criteria.
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I feel it is important to note that I tried asking these same questions to Google Now and it could not return accurate answers.
It’s nothing short of astounding that Hound can accurately answer such complex questions. But that’s not the only trick Hound has up its sleeve. You can also ask it to play music clips from your favorite music artists. The app’s tutorial illustrates this by having you ask it to play top hits by Taylor Swift. I asked Hound to play top hits by Queen (my favorite band) and it immediately started playing a clip from Bohemian Rhapsody, followed by a clip from Under Pressure. Hound will continue to play music clips from the desired artist until either your phone goes to sleep or you stop it.
Despite its complexity, Hound still does the basic stuff well. You can ask it for Hotel prices in your area, local movie times, the local weather, etc. Just about anything you can think of you can task Hound with. I even asked it how old Bruce Lee is and it told me his date of death, how old he was when he died and how old he would be today, down to the month!
Aesthetically, Hound looks great. It has a simple, bright, clean design that looks very similar to Google Now. I found Hound to be very easy to navigate and I never felt lost when using it.
Conclusion
Hound is a game changer. Its ability to answer complex questions, as simple as it may seem, really raises the bar for its competition. Hound does what every other voice assistance app does, but it does it better and with greater complexity. Despite whatever loyalties you may feel towards Google Now, Apple’s Siri, or any other voice assistance app that you may use, Hound is a solid entry into the fold that definitely deserves your consideration.
HTC is running another flash sale. They’ve been running a lot lately to drum up sales, but this one may be the best. For today only, if you pick up an HTC One M9 from HTC.com, you’ll get a free HTC made Nexus 9 tablet. You’ll want to jump on this one quick as the sale ends at 11:59 p.m. PT on 03/22/2016.
$649 for the HTC One M9, especially at this stage in its life cycle, is pretty crazy, but it’s a pretty easy deal to justify if you’re picking up the Nexus 9, too. This is pretty obviously a move to clear out stock. We’re hearing a lot of leaks for HTC’s next flagship phone which we’ve collected here in our What We Know post for the HTC 10.
Does this deal tempt you to pick up an HTC One M9? Let us know down in the comments!
There are apps for all kinds of things in the Play Store. Apps that let you play games. Apps that make you work more productively. Apps that help you better yourself. Apps that track your health and health goals. Apps for making life more convenient.
Now there’s an app that pays you to check out other apps, along with getting your friends to join in on the fun. It’s called Showbox, and it can turn you into a money-earning, app-trying machine.
Setup
Simple setup; Download from the Play Store. Create an account with either your email & password or the ol’ Facebook one-click method. Once done you are in.
Upon opening the app there is a full-window splash ad for a (supposedly sponsored) app to download; you can choose to download the app or close it and move to your home screen.
Usage
Using the app is really simple. You earn by two main efforts: downloading listed apps, recruiting your friends to join Shobox themselves.
For downloading apps, you earn $1 in monetary funds for every 1,400 points accrued. I’d say most of the apps offer 40-200 points per, but there are some that jump to 1,500, 2,500, or more. In any case, you have to quite a bit of downloading to acquire enough points to make a highly anticipated payout. Â If you average 80 points per app download, you would have to download over 17 apps to earn $1. Â That’s the math.
For friend recruitment, you earn points upfront (100 points for every friend who signs up), and you also get 50% of the points earned by each friend during their 1st month of use.
Your home screen lists all the apps you can accrue points by downloading. Most apps require only 15 minutes or so of usage to acquire your points, though some take up 24 hours. Once you’ve earned your points, you can keep the app (of course), or uninstall and move on to the next one.  If you’ve already downloaded the app in the past, though, you won’t be eligible to download on Showbox for points.
You earn by acquiring points, which can be redeemed several ways right in the app:
Monetary payout to your PayPal account.
Amazon gift cards.
Netflix gift cards.
Donating to charity.
Topping-up your current phone bill (for Singapore-based users only; the app developer is based in Sinagpore, so there you go).
You can also earn big chunks of points by winning periodic contests held by the app developers (mostly weekly point-races). Â If your points don’t happen to show up after your app trial, you can submit a support ticket to the developer to rectify the situation.
Summary
Showbox is an app best suited for folks who already & regularly try out a bunch of apps on a consistent basis. Â If this is you, then it only makes sense to do what you’re doing and perhaps acquire some assets while doing it.
For the rest of us, while it would seem to be a simple way to make a couple of extra bucks while wasting time on your phone or device, in the end I believe it would result in just that; a couple of dollars.
If you do truly have a penchant for acquiring new apps on a daily basis, then I’d say why not also download Showbox and earn some payback for your time?
Is there any greater feeling than when it’s time to upgrade your phone? Well…yes, there is, but the rush of turning on your shiny new device is still up there in the list of top ‘greatest’ feelings.
Your device is booted, it’s set up; now you have to decide what to download first. Below are a sampling of my personal Day 1 apps that I must have above anything else.
Twitter (official app)
So many people wonder what the purpose of Twitter is, or how to even use it. Honestly, the explanation is not all that clear to me, either. However, Twitter is a great social medium to connect with friends, family, and even your favorite celebrities. What differentiates Twitter from social media applications like Facebook or Google+ is its 140 character limit in your posts. I think this is what confuses people the most about Twitter, but despite that, it usually is enough characters to say what you need to say.
Facebook is easily the most popular social media application available today. With the ability to share pictures, videos, and just share your thoughts, Facebook is a great way for you to connect with your family and friends, both close and far away (geographically).
Most Android devices come with a pre-installed generic browser. They’re usually nothing special so we often times find ourselves looking for an alternative. There are many choices available on the Google Play Store such as Dolphin, Fire Fox, or even Opera Mini. However, my personal favorite is Google’s mobile Chrome Browser. It’s fast, stable, reliable, and I really like the user interface. I love Chrome’s ability to sync across multiple devices. This feature is great because it allows me to share bookmarks across devices, which is invaluable for what I do.
One of the most important responsibilities of being a tech blogger is keeping up with the latest tech news. There are many outlets out there for this, but my favorites are feedly, Sync for reddit, and Flipboard. I’ve chosen to combine these three in one section because their purposes are essentially identical.
feedly and Flipboard provide a nice RSS feed for your favorite news sources and topics. Both apps have beautiful user interfaces and are very easy to use
Sync for reddit is a great app for keeping up with your favorite sub-reddits. Sync lets you connect your Reddit account to it and gives you access to most of the features you will find on the Reddit site itself, but in a nice, mobile package.
We all love music. Vinyl is making a comeback, which is exciting, but in this day and age, it’s all about digital. The problem is, buying mp3s and albums can get expensive. To help with this, many companies have started offering music subscription services that let you listen to any music you want, as much as you want, for a flat, monthly fee. My personal favorite music service is Spotify.
Why do I like Spotify? Because it’s free and I can listen to whatever artist and album I want. With the free service, you are relegated to only being able to shuffle albums and playlists and you will hear the occasional ad, but quite honestly, I don’t mind this. The ads are usually short and there aren’t many of them. For free, you can’t beat Spotify. Spotify even offers a monthly subscription service that eliminates ads and removes the shuffle play restriction.
I get lost; a lot. I even get lost in my home town and I lived there for decades. I tell people that I was born without an internal compass. Thankfully, I live in an age where our planet is cluttered with orbiting satellites, many of which provide GPS. When it comes to GPS apps, there are many choices, but I prefer Waze.
Waze is designed to get you from Point A to Point B as fast as possible. It does this by plotting routes that avoid traffic issues. Waze will literally create a route for you that avoids slow traffic, construction zones, and wrecks. If it will slow you down, Waze will find a way around it. Waze also has a nice social media feature that allows you to connect with your Facebook friends and also shows other Wazers on the map.
One of the best features Waze offers is the ability to report traffic hazards and conditions. You can report potholes, stopped cars, slow traffic, police, red light cameras, traffic accidents, and many other things. You can even unlock achievements!
When it comes to GPS, there is no substitute for Waze. And best of all, it’s free!
Do you like free money? I do, and Google Opinion Rewards gives you the ability to get it. Opinion Rewards will give you Google Play credit for taking the time to answer short surveys. The surveys can last from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. The longer the survey, the more Play credit you get. I’ve been using Google Opinion Rewards since it’s launch and I’ve made close to $15-$20 in Play credit since then. If you’re not using Google Opinion Rewards, download it now; you’re missing out on easy money.
These are some of my must have day 1 apps that I can’t live without. For brevity’s sake, I have not included them all. What are some of your day 1 necessities? Leave them in the comments below!
We’re huge fans of changing the home screen around a bit and creating a new user experience for our Android. In fact, we love it so much that we have an ongoing series of Get This Look posts. In a nutshell we show you a new layout, app, widget, or icon set for your Android handset and tell you which apps you’ll need to mimic the feel.
Some of these are a little easier to create than others and many of them can be tweaked to no end. The following details are but the ingredients to which you can create your own delicious Android dish; your results will vary. Which is awesome! If nothing else, this is a great way to discover new apps, widgets, icons, and more!
This week we’re going back in time to the glory days of the 1980’s.
Although our site’s readers vary in age, it’s safe to assume that many of you remember the good ol’ days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nothing today quite captures the charm of 8-bit graphics. With the surge in retro gaming today, I felt it appropriate to bring you, our readers, something to help honor the glory days of video games while also giving your phone an awesome, retro look!
Why pay for some of these apps?
You might put in a few bucks to get things rolling but you’ll be glad you did in the long run. The sheer level of configuration and customization behind a few of these titles means endless designs. If you’ve been doing the custom home screen stuff for a while, you may have already purchased some of these apps already.
Desktop grid is set to 5×4 with subgrid positioning enabled
The Dock is set at 7 icons
Pixel Art Clock widget settings are:
Use Theme – Bugdroid x Star Wars
Use Decorations – Space
Blue Cube color (found at the top of the widget’s settings page)
12 hour format
All other settings are default
We have hidden Android’s notification bar in Nova Launcher’s settings
We have added all of our app icons to the Dock
We have chosen a different color variation for the Dock and Camera icons. Both color variants can be found in the icon pack’s icon list
Once again, what we’ve shown you here is only the tip of the iceberg with what you can do with your phone’s look! Using the above listed apps, the sky is the limit with what you can do. Feel free to leave your ideas and creations below in the comments, and stay tuned next week for a new edition of Steal This Look!
Having just been announced, the iPhone SE is a refresh to the 4-inch iPhone line. Basically, it has the body of the iPhone 5 with the guts of an iPhone 6s. It wouldn’t be fair to compare the iPhone SE with the likes of newer Android Phones like the Galaxy S7 or LG G5. They are in different categories. We can, however, Â safely and fairly compare it with the Nexus 5X. The 5X was released to be a budget Android phone with mid-quality specs. It doesn’t drive the Android phone market forward, and it wasn’t meant to. On the other hand, its big brother the Nexus 6P was meant to be a leading contender in the Android phone race.
iPhone SE
Standing for “Special Edition”, the iPhone SE is what Apple has needed to keep the customers who prefer the 4-inch form factor. As noted in the keynote, the majority of people who want a 4-inch iPhone are new users. About 50% of customers in the United States prefer it, and in China about 75% start with a smaller iPhone, and work their way up if they want.
Thankfully, there wasn’t any planned obsolescence with the new iPhone. Since it has the same form factor of the iPhone 5 you won’t have to buy a new case for it. Just keep the iPhone 5 case you’re already using. The new iPhone SE starts at $399 with 16GB of storage and maxes out at $499 with 64GB. It’ll be available in the usual Apple colors (gold, rose gold, space gray, silver). Preorders begin on March 24th and the phone will be available on March 31st. The SE will be in more than 100 countries by the end of May.
Released last fall along with the Nexus 6P, the LG Nexus 5X is Google’s budget phone. Learning from some of the poor reviews of the Nexus 6, Google wisely released two phones in different sizes to keep users happy.
As an Apple user writing for an Android blog, I urge you to buy the obviously superior iPhone SE. Just kidding – buy whatever you want. Although the wars between iOS and Android users will probably never end, it doesn’t really matter which phone you use. Neither one is objectively better than the other, it just comes down to personal preference. Thanks to the advances in both operating systems, they can do about 99% of the same things that the other OS offers. Sure, you can argue about cameras, screen quality and fingerprint sensors until you’re blue in the face, but it all depends on which company you prefer.
I think customers should align themselves with companies based on values, not specs. If you care about the environment, then as noted in today’s keynote, Apple has pledged itself to being reliant on 100% of renewable energy. In just two years, Apple has reached 93%. Apple is also extremely committed to user privacy and is willing to fight the FBI for its customers. If the freedom and sharing of mankind’s knowledge are important to you, then you’ll want to read up on what Google is doing. With Project Loon, Google has committed itself to providing internet access to people all over the world. Like George Carlin said, let’s all focus on our similarities rather than our differences.
Google is pretty good at getting updates out to Nexus devices as quickly as possible, and this new update needs to be fast. A new vulnerability referred to as CVE-2015-1805Â is a rooting application using an unpatched local elevation of privilege vulnerability in the kernel. This was first discovered and fixed in April 2014 but it wasn’t designated as a security fix until February 2, 2015.
On February 19, 2016, the CORE Team told Google that the vulnerability could be exploited and a patch was developed. It wasn’t until last week on March 15, 2016, that Zimperium found that this exploit had been abused on a Nexus 5 phone.
“This issue is rated as a Critical severity issue due to the possibility of a local privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution leading to local permanent device compromise.”
This vulnerability applies to all unpatched Android devices on kernel versions 3.4, 3.10 and 3.14. Android devices running kernel version 3.18 are not vulnerable.
“The (1) pipe_read and (2) pipe_write implementations in fs/pipe.c in the Linux kernel before 3.16 do not properly consider the side effects of failed __copy_to_user_inatomic and __copy_from_user_inatomic calls, which allows local users to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly gain privileges via a crafted application, aka an “I/O vector array overrun.”
Cisco
What is a vulnerability?
A security vulnerability is a weakness in a product that could allow an attacker to compromise the integrity, availability, or confidentiality of that product. As noted in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE),
For CVE, a vulnerability is a state in a computing system (or set of systems) that either:
allows an attacker to execute commands as another user
allows an attacker to access data that is contrary to the specified access restrictions for that data
