Never thought I’d write this, but coloring books are all the rage nowadays. Particularly 
for adults, the allure of sitting down and quietly & simply filling in intricate drawings with a myriad of colored pencils is at an all-time high. No goal or objectives to hit, this form of informal art therapy is ringing true with thousands if not millions of over-worked, over-stressed adults.
Now developer BLONDEA has come out with an Android app, Art Coloring Book for Adults, that looks to capture the charm and peace that comes with this increasingly popular pastime.
Setup
App setup is pretty simple: download the title from the Play Store. From there you just open and off you go. Upon opening, you are greeted with a simple title screen, where your only option is to press a large “play” button. Once doing so, you are greeted with the main screen where you pick your template to color.
How To Draw
While in this ‘template’ screen, you can pick from a large number of template categories.
These categories are:
- Fairies
- Animals
- Skulls
- Floral
- Mandela
- Music
- Places
Each of these categories has 5 different templates within to choose from, with the exception of Animals, which has 3 separate categories for a total of 15 templates.
Once you click on a template you are taken to the drawing screen. Here again the features are pretty spartan. Along the top you have a home button in the center (which takes you back to the templates if you want to pick a new one), and a couple of other buttons which I’ll cover shortly.
Along the bottom you have your palette; a line of colored pencil icons of varying base colors. Once you tap on one, a sub-menu of 11 hues of that color appear, allowing you to pick just the one that suits you. Then you simply tap on the open spaces in our template to begin filling it in.
If you feel you don’t like a color in a particular spot, there is a ‘undo’ button top-left; tapping this erases your last move. Once you’re satisfied with your creation, and if you so choose, you can tap the ‘share’ button top-right, and post it to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
App Experience
The overall experienced was mixed to disappointing for me, for several reasons. The first is that you don’t fully “color” like you would on paper. Instead you just tap each white space and the color fills in automatically. This takes away from the ‘focus’ feeling you can get with a more traditional pencil & paper (or with other apps that let you manually fill the colors in). It makes it rather easy to reduce the satisfaction of the app, I tended to start “mailing it in”.
Secondly, these templates (as you may already know) can be quite intricate, and using this tablet on an 8″ tablet still rendered exact placing of color a pretty tedious task. A user would be well-advised to bring a stylus if they are really serious in completing a template to their true satisfaction.
Also, after using this app on a tablet-sized screen, I can’t imagine even trying on a phone….though I’m sure there’s some common sense in that thought somewhere. 🙂
Overall the app is slow in response to touch, swiping, and tapping. It feels like you are dragging the app along. This alone can get a little frustrating. If it was more responsive I would be willing to give it some more time on my device.
For audio- well, there isn’t any. Really. Just a coloring surface for you to get lost in. I 
take this as a good thing; I believe some kind of background music would just be distracting. The developer got this right; there are far too many “relaxing” apps that put such focus on intrusive zen-style background music.
Overall
While I appreciate the idea of Art Coloring Book for Adults, the execution leaves a little wanting. If the responsiveness could be increased, it would go a long way to improving the experience.
Also, a notice to the user to bring a stylus to this party would also prevent possible frustrations, though again most users should likely expect that to be an almost-necessity.
If you’d like to give it a try yourself, download Art Coloring Book for Adults from the Play Store here.
The ZTE Blade V8 Mini and ZTE Blade V8 Lite are watered down versions of the ZTE Blade V8 Pro. They bring forth smaller displays but less impressive resolution. So if you’re looking for an upper mid-ranger, the Blade V8 Pro is certainly the model to consider. However, for regular use the screens of the Blade V8 Mini and Blade V8 Lite should be more than enough.
Naturally, the Blade V8 Pro is going to be the most responsive of the three, as it relies on a Snapdragon 625 – an octa-core 2.0GHz Cortex-A53 affair. As for the Blade V8 Mini it features a Snapdragon 435 which is a octa-core 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 chipset, while the MediaTek MT6750 inside the Blade V8 Lite is an octa-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 construct.
The Blade V8 Pro can be considered a remarkable device especially because it offers a dual camera setup on the cheap. But ZTE has just lowered the price bar for dual camera phones with the Blade V8 Mini.
The newest ZTE Blade V8 phones come with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, while the Blade V8 Pro ships out with Android 6.0 Marshmallow (a shame really, for a device launched in 2017). We don’t know whether the phone will get Android 7.0 Nougat in the future or not, but we certainly hope this will be the case.
The Blade V8 Pro is known for having a great battery life cycle and with Android 7.0 Nougat onboard, it might get even better in the future. As for the two new Blade V8 models, we expect them to last quite a lot, given that they feature low-res displays, less power hungry processors and the new Android onboard. All phones have non-removable batteries.
The Blade V8 Pro is currently available for $229 on 
The device also rocks a 13MP main camera with auto-focus plus a 5MP selfie snapper. Keeping the lights on is a 2,100 mAh battery. The phone ships out with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box.
We’ll also have to note that the FreedomPop V7 has a dual-SIM card slot which isn’t restricted to FreedomPop’s offerings. So you are free (Freedom right?) to use another SIM card with the phone.
According to the current source, the Nokia flagship will feature one camera sensor of 23MP variety and either 4GB or 6GB of RAM. There’s going to be two variants, one coming with a smaller display and one with a more spacious, accommodating one – kind of like the Pixel and Pixel XL or Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. And the entry-level model might end up selling for approximately $580, while the more advanced version will bear a $650 price-tag.
The device comes equipped with a frontal (huge) and back 13MP wide-angle fisheye lenses. The device works by capturing images from both cameras and then stitching them together with 0.02 seconds for real-time viewing experience.
The Darling is also a pretty luxurious device – it’s apparently made of 3.09 grams of “pure gold” and features four diamonds on the front panel.
Anyway, the ProTruly Darling has a 5.5-inch display with 1920 x 1080 resolution. The phone is unusually tall due to the big fisheye sensors locates on the front and back, so it might feel quite awkward when you hold it in hand.
For those of you who are wondering, this strange device is more than a prototype. ProTruly plans to make the phone available in in China by the end of November. Although we don’t know if the Darling will be offered in other markets as well.
The Darling comes in two variants – the gold one with diamonds and a fingerprint sensor located on the back which should go on sale for approximately $1,300 (ouch) and a standard one without all the fancy attire which should carry a more “affordable” $600 price tag. Note, the lower-end version has a fingerprint scanner located in the physical Home button.
Here are the most downloaded apps from the 
Fitbit didn’t stop with just the Alta HR, it also announced two more pieces of technology today. The first, Sleep Stages uses information obtained from your heart-rate enabled Fitbit wearable to estimate the amount of time you spend in light sleep, deep sleep, and in REM sleep. It also knows how many times you wake up each night and combines all this information together to give you a better understanding of your sleeping patterns. Sleep Stages will work with Alta HR, Blaze, and Charge 2 and release in Spring.
Adobe says that the new HDR mode for mobile devices enables a dynamic range that was previously only possible on DSLR and mirrorless cameras. Basically Adobe is one step closer to turning your smartphone into a DSLR.
Sadly, not everyone will be able to use this feature – as you will need a high-end smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge or Google Pixel/Pixel XL. However, Adobe is committed to bringing the new feature to more devices in the near future.