Category: Android Marshmallow

Owners of the HTC One M8 and One M9 have a lot to look forward to next week according to Mo Versi, the company’s Vice President of Product Management.  In a series of Tweets over the weekend, he announced that the One M9 running on Rogers, Sacktel, Videotron and Wind in Canada will see the Android Marshmallow update hit their devices this week.

Great news for our Sasktel, Rogers, Wind and Videotron HTC One M9 owners! We’ll go live on Monday for the Marshmallow OS update. Thank you!

— Mo Versi (@moversi) January 15, 2016

The news is certainly welcome and is another example of how HTC is really pushing to get the latest version of Android out to devices quickly.  We all know that the unlocked One A9 receives updates within 15 days of their release from Google.  The company however committed to having updates out for the One M8 and One M9 in the first quarter of 2016.  Looks like they will reach that goal in the first month of the quarter.

There is some good news for those of you based in the US as well on updates.

After months of delays, AT&T has finally approved and with the help of Google is rolling out the Android Marshmallow update to Nexus 6 devices locked to the carrier.  In a support post, AT&T stated that the Marshmallow 6.0.1 update MMB29K is rolling out to a small group of devices but will be ramping up to 100% over the course of the next week.  The news is most certainly welcome to those Nexus 6 owners tied to the carrier as they are seemingly the last group with these devices to get the update.

The good news in all of this is that AT&T has opted to go to the December 2015 build of Marshmallow and not just to the original 6.0 release.  That means AT&T Nexus 6 owners will be more current on their security patches and other improvements that came in 6.0.1.  You can read about the improvements in the .1 release here as well as my review of Android Marshmallow

For those of you who are LG G4 owners on US Cellular here in the United States, today is a good day!  The 5th largest mobile carrier has released the Android Marshmallow update for the G4 today, bringing with it all of the goodies that it contains.  The update brings your device to v6.0 and follows in a long line of devices and cellular updates to devices over the course of the past few months.

If you by chance have not read anything on Marshmallow, take a look at my review for all the highlights but it is sufficient to say that this update is well worth the time and effort to get on to your phone.

Once again the Nexus 6, last year’s flagship Nexus device built by Motorola, is on sale at Amazon.  The 32GB model is available for only $249.99 while the 64GB model is $299.99. That is a savings of $400 from when the phone was first released last year and this phone is still got plenty of swagger when it is compared to phones that are being released today.

I personally use a Nexus 6 as my daily driver and love this phone.  It has outstanding specs and performance and with it being a Nexus device, it already has Android Marshmallow running on it and I can use Project Fi.

• Display: 5.96″ AMOLED, 1440×2560, 16:9 aspect ratio, 493 ppi, Corning Gorilla Glass 3
• Weight: 184 grams (6.49 ounces)
• Battery: 3220 mAh Mixed usage up to 24 hours*
• Processor: 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 with quad-core CPU (APQ 8084-AB), Adreno 420 GPU
• Memory: 3GB
• Camera: 13MP IMX 214 Image Sensor

Nexus 6 32GB – $249.99 – Amazon

Nexus 6 64GB – $299.99 – Amazon

Chinese manufacture Huawei has become a dominant player in the global Android phone market but has struggled to gain traction here in the United States.  That has changed a little bit with the launch of the Huawei built Nexus 6P and the company is looking to capitalize on that success.  2016 the company is planning on making a significant push into the US market and it will be lead by their new 6″ phablet device, the Mate 8.

The Mate 8 was announced last month in China but yesterday at CES 2016 it was announced it was going global.  It mighty impressive specs that make it a true flagship device for the company.  While it won’t launch immediately here in the US – it will be in Europe, South America and Asia first before it hits the US and UK – it will be here by the end of the 1st quarter.  To start, it has a 6″ Full HD 1080p display, is powered by the Huawei Kirin 950 Octa-Core processor running at 2.3Ghz and has an ARM Cortex A72 co-processor running at 1.5Ghz.  It will come in two variants as far as RAM and storage are concerned.  The base model will come with 3GB or RAM and 32GB of storage while the upper end will have 4GB of RAM and 64GB of Storage.  Interestingly, the upper end model will also support dual SIMs while the base model will be single SIM.

Android Marshmallow continues to roll out to a wide range of devices with even more expected in this quarter but to suggest the adoption is setting the world alight would be an great overstatement.  In their latest report on Android versions that have hit the Google Play Store, Google has posted that devices running the latest version of the mobile OS accounts for 0.7%.  While that is up .2% from December, it is a far cry from rapid adoption.  Worse, Android Lollipop, the previous version, continues to hold steady with about 32% of the market.  While the information is not 100% accurate, it does give developers a good idea of users who are coming to the store which in turn gives us as users a good idea too.

By far the two most dominant version of Android remain Lollipop at 32.6% and KitKat at 36.1%.  KitKat has seen a slow drop in usage as more people move to newer devices with a newer version of Android but it gives you a good idea of the challenge Google faces in getting consumers and manufactures to move up to the latest version of their mobile OS.