Category: Android Oreo

Good news for those of you who have the ZTE Axon 7, Android Oreo is now in beta for your phone.  The Chinese manufacture quietly began rolling out a beta program for the latest version of Oreo over the weekend, with select users being able to opt into the program.  While no official timeline was given on when an official Oreo build will come out for the 2016 flagship phone, which actually launched with Marshmallow at the time.

In the ZTE forums, there is a screenshot of the Axon 7 running Oreo with the notice that it is in the first round of beta testing.  Again, how many cycles there will be on the beta test is unclear.

Good news for those of you who have the HTC U11 on Sprint here in the United States.  The Android Oreo update for the phone will start rolling out tomorrow according to HTC’s Mo Versi.

Sprint HTC u11 owners! Appreciate your patience, we have received technical approval from the carrier. Updates to Oreo OS will start on Monday! Enjoy!

— Mo Versi (@moversi) January 20, 2018

This announcement follows up the November 2017 release of the build for the unlocked variant of the phone.

Huawei has announced this afternoon that the Huawei Mate 10 Pro will be available from a wide range of retailers here in the United States starting February 18th with pre-orders starting February 4th.  The 6″ phablet will be priced at $799 and will be available in Midnight Blue, Titanium Grey and Mocha Brown.  

“We’ve experienced unprecedented growth worldwide and are now bringing our award-winning products to the U.S.,” said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group. “Huawei is and has been in the U.S., and is part of a community of visionaries that strive to push boundaries and improve daily lives through technology. Our newest consumer solution, the HUAWEI Mate 10 Pro, is the smartphone that U.S. consumers need and deserve.”

The phones will be available from Amazon, B&H, Best Buy, Microsoft Stores and Newegg with Best Buy having the phone available in their retail locations to view and purchase.  The phone will be sold unlocked and will work with various GSM carriers here in the US like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Cricket Wireless.

Google has released the December 2017 Android Distribution Report this week.  The report reflects the version of Android on devices that visited the Google Play Store for the 7 day period ending January 8, 2018 and it shows that while Android Oreo was only one of two versions that saw growth for the reporting period, that growth is anemic.  And that is putting it nicely.

Oreo gained just .2% in this month’s report, with both 8.0 and 8.1 accounting for a total of just .7% of device share.  The only other gainer in the report, Android Nougat, gained 3% and now sits at 26.3% for device share.  That moves Nougat into second behind Android Marshmallow as the most widely used version of the platform.

At CES 2018, Huawei has announced that the Honor View 10 will be making its way to the United States in 2018.  The View 10 is currently Honor’s flagship device and will available in Europe and Asia starting today.  While a timeline wasn’t given on when the phone will hit the US, it appears to be in reasonably short order based on rumors.

For those that may not know the specs of the Honor View 10, they are pretty impressive.  The phone sports a 5.99″ IPS FHD display with a 18:9 ratio.  It is powered by Huawei’s Kirin 970 SoC, has up to 6GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage.  It has dual rear cameras of 16MP and 20MP while the selfie camera is a 13MP shooter.  All of this is powered by a 3750mAh battery.

The Android Oreo based OxygenOS build for the OnePlus 5 is starting to roll out again.  The original update was released to a small group last week but was halted after a bug was found in the initial release.  OnePlus reworked the build, incremented it up to OxygenOS 5.0.1, and has re-released it.  So far, no issues have been reported.

The 5.x train for OnePlus’ Android builds, brings it up to Oreo as the base platform and the company has now released it for the OnePlus 3, 3T and 5.  Only the 5T remains in beta but that shouldn’t be for much longer.

As for changes, there are a lot in this update for the OnePlus 5.  The launcher has been updated, the camera now has portrait mode and there are a lot of overall system optimizations that are happening that should improve the stability and performance of the phone.