Samsung's half-baked Bixby digital assistant finally gains voice capabilities stateside, but only as part of an Early Access Program.
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Samsung’s fourth Galaxy S7 Nougat beta build brings bug fixes, removes Experience tag
Gearing up to bid adieu to both Samsung’s already lengthy Galaxy S7 Nougat open beta program, and the always inconvenient TouchWiz UI name? Not so fast, as the world’s most popular Android smartphones still have pre-release bugs to quash before spreading the N love to the masses, with “Samsung Experience” oddly left out of the fourth beta version equation.
It’s official now, there will be no over-the-air rollout of polished, all-ready-for-primetime 7.0 or 7.1 goodies as far as the S7 and S7 Edge are concerned this year. And to think Sony has just raised the tally of updated Xperia models to four, while Motorola, LG and HTC can each flaunt at least one flagship device promoted beyond Marshmallow.
We’ll be sure to keep an eye on the possible comeback of the TouchWiz-replacing Samsung Experience, as perhaps the less cumbersome software brand broke cover prematurely. Samsung Notes is another important omission from the latest major Android Nougat beta makeover for the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, a number of unnamed bugs also getting fixed, and general “stability improved.”
Weighing in at around 280MB, this fourth N OS distribution (build ZPLH) is apparently to be further “improved” during the “remaining beta period”, which suggests one or two provisional patches might still be coming before Samsung finally decides to radically alter the S7 duo’s user interface for all.
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Nextbit Robin gets early taste of Nougat with sanctioned help from Paranoid Android
While you can still probably count the number of non-Nexus Android device models officially updated to Nougat, at least in one country or on one carrier, on the fingers of one hand, there are many more from several manufacturers treated to public beta builds.
Ambitious startup Nextbit today follows Samsung, Sony or Huawei’s suit with an experimental 7.0 rollout of its own for pre-release Robin software testers. The unique and surprising thing about the cloud-first phone’s beta community program is that Nextbit’s devs have actually partnered with the Paranoid Android team to “speed things along.”
Second only to CyanogenMod, PA is a hugely popular custom Android ROM with an estimated 200K+ users as of last year. This is likely the first time an OEM shows such openness to this particular open-source initiative, apparently being “there every step of the way” to help shape up and test its early N builds.
What courageous and cooperative Nextbit Robin owners will be getting over-the-air starting today is thus a joint effort to stabilize and improve the Nougat experience as quickly as possible without modifying too many stock features.
A “few bugs and kinks” obviously still “need to be worked out”, but otherwise, Nextbit and Paranoid Android hope your introductory beta version of the next software release will only make your “day-to-day experience” better, requiring minimal additional efforts and time before a proper, wide-scale launch takes place.
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Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge will start Nougat Beta Programme this week, end tests ‘mid of December’
It looks like things are very rapidly advancing on the Android 7.0 Nougat update front for recent Samsung Galaxy flagship phones, as the Korean tech giant desperately needs something positive to bump the Note 7 fiasco off the spotlight.
Mere days after first hearing of the possibility to sign up for public beta testing of fresh software on British shores, we’ve just received confirmation both the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge will kick off said pre-release experiments on Wednesday, November 11.
The plan is to conclude the “Galaxy Beta Programme” around the “mid of December” at the moment, although “the end date may be subject to changes based on results of feedback.” The timeline of the eventual wide-scale rollout obviously depends immensely on how these tentative goodie packs are evaluated by those of you who will be open to “experience new features and the latest UX based on Android 7.0 Nougat first.”
Keep in mind that not everyone wanting in will be selected to sample the OS makeover, though it might help to register as soon as possible by using the dedicated form in the “Galaxy Beta Programme” application available as a free download through the Galaxy Apps service.
Don’t forget to back up your data once the tests are underway, and note that only unlocked standard versions of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge in the UK are for the time being included in the pre-release examination.
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Apple Maps debacle is the main reason we now have public iOS beta tests
Four years after the spectacularly failed replacement of Google Maps with Cupertino’s own in-house alternative as the default mapping and navigation service on iOS 6, Eddy Cue believes a lot of good came from perhaps the worse Apple-centric software fiasco in the company’s history.Tim Cook’s second-in-command when it comes to “services” opened up in an extensive FastCompany piece that includes numerous interesting quotes by both the SVP, his skipper, and Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of ...
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