Google-branded Bluetooth Headphones appear in FCC documents

In order for electronic products with any potential for wireless interference to be sold within the United States, these devices must be certified by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). All products receiving certification are made public by the FCC, so it is through this government service that we often learn much about unannounced products thanks to pictures and documents that companies send for FCC certification. This time, it appears that a pair of Google-branded Bluetooth headphones (model GID5D) with active noise cancellation (ANC) has passed through the FCC.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the look. These are fairly bland looking over-the-ear headphones that simply have Google's color branding on the outside. The pads appear quick thick, which should provide some comfort, but we'll have to see how long we can wear these before our ears start to hurt.

In the quick start page included in the FCC documents, we can see that there will be your typical multi-function button (MFB) for controlling phone calls, volume up/down buttons, and previous/next buttons for controlling your music. These buttons, along with the micro-USB charging port, will all be located next to each other on the outer ring of the right piece. On the left piece, the power button, ANC button, Bluetooth indicator, and 3.5mm headphone jack will be placed side-by-side.

The hardware specifications for these mysterious headphones are as follows:

Again, we'll actually need to play around with one of these headphones to see if they provide a high quality listening experience. The battery life seems fairly decent on paper, but that's a claim we'll need to test to verify.

Earlier this month, we revealed the existence of a mysterious device type called "Bisto" in an APK teardown of the Google App. At the time, we speculated that these strings may have something to do with headphones, given what the preferences were stating:

  <string name="bisto_device_notifications_pref_summary">Notifications will be read aloud inside your headphones</string>  <string name="bisto_device_notifications_pref_title">Spoken notifications</string>  

It's possible that these headphones is "Bisto", but we can't verify this claim and think that these cheap-looking headphones probably don't fit the bill. The passing of these headphones through the FCC and the APK teardown revealing "Bisto" could just be entirely coincidental, after all. Though we do hope it ends up being true (maybe not with these particular headphones), since having headphones that integrate with Google Assistant would be a pretty cool feature.

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Via: 9to5Google

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Google Home Can Finally Read you Step-by-Step Recipe Instructions

When I first purchased my Google Home device, I was initially disappointed by how lacking the official integrations were. Although the list of available services has grown over time, many basic features involving communicating with your smartphone, adding calendar events, or reading recipes were missing. Today, however, the latter of these missing features is finally making its way to your Google Home – the ability to read step-by-step cooking instructions.

In a blog post published today, Google announced that they're partnering with recipe services from Bon Appetit, The New York Times, Food Network, and more in order to bring you cooking instructions for over 5 million recipes. All you have to do is find your recipe using the Google Assistant or through a Google search on your phone and select the "Send to Google Home" button. Then, you can start following the directions by saying "OK Google, start cooking" or "OK Google, start recipe." If you miss a step you can say "OK Google, repeat" or if you want to go back to a previous step you can say "OK Google, what's step two?"

The feature will be rolling out within the coming week. Google did not specify whether or not this feature will roll out to Google Home users within the U.K. at this time, but we're hoping that our friends in the U.K. aren't left out in the dust just like when multi-user support rolled out earlier this week.

Although this is a minor upgrade for the Google Home platform, it can make a huge difference for families when considering purchasing this device. We're happy that Google is adding these features over time, even if we had hoped that Google Assistant supported this out of the box. You may just finally decide to move your Google Home to the kitchen thanks to the inclusion of this feature.

As for me, this means I can ditch my convoluted work around using AutoVoice and Tasker which involved finding a recipe using the RecipePuppy API and then scraping the HTML data from AllRecipes to build a text file with the step-by-step instructions. Yeah, that wasn't pretty. I'll just stick with the official feature from now on.

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Source: Google

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Report: Huawei Overtakes Oppo in China, Has the Largest Market Share in the Country Again

The smartphone market over in China is fierce and incredibly fast paced. Companies such as Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Vivo have been battling it out to see who can sell more smartphones than the other. This has resulted in some companies like Oppo to turn to local celebrities to promote their products. While others like Xiaomi have lost their momentum but are still holding strong thanks to their dedicated enthusiast fan base.

Oppo's method of using celebrities worked and enabled them to take the #1 spot within the country but it didn't seem to last very long. It's not like Oppo has been performing poorly either as the company produced a strong annual growth of 55%. However, it wasn't enough and a new report from Canalys says they were short by about 1 million units during the first quarter of this year. According to their data, Huawei shipped close to 21 million smartphones which equates to 18% of the market in China.

This report goes on to say that Oppo shipped just under 20 million units for the quarter despite the company's overall growth. They have dropped to 2nd place while Vivo was able to capture the 3rd spot. It's been reported that Vivo did see some growth this year, but it wasn't very much. Still, the company was able to maintain its 3rd-place spot by shipping 17 million units as it gives them 15% of the overall smartphone market share in China.

The largest smartphone market in the world is still growing, according to the report from Canalys, with shipments increasing by 9% YoY this past quarter (estimates of 114 million units total). Data from this report shows that the market is starting to consolidate though with the top three smartphone OEMs amassing more than 50% of the overall market within the country. Xiaomi used to hold the 3rd spot but has not been able to keep up with Huawei, Vivo and Oppo pushing hard in the online space.

Source: Canalys

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Xperia XZs Added to Sony’s Open Device Program

Sony is doing an excellent job in supporting the developer community. It's been a few years since the Japanese OEM first began releasing device trees, vendor blobs, and kernel sources for its most popular devices. And just yesterday, the company announced that the Sony Xperia XZs has joined the Sony's Open Device Program!

As you might know, the program is maintained by our very own Senior Recognized Developer jerpelea. A hefty number of various Sony devices (with Qualcomm SoC) have been maintained since 2014. Support for some of them have of course ended, nevertheless, official Sony fixes greatly help the developer community. Developers with an Xperia XZs device can now start working on custom ROMs and kernels.

Moreover, there is a guide which helps beginners build an AOSP ROM for this device, if they're just starting out. The camera is still in the works, though, as it's a bit blurry at the moment. However, this will be addressed in the upcoming updates for the program. As support has been added so early, developers are welcome to commit their own fixes. All binaries required to build Android Nougat are already uploaded on Sony's servers.

Together with support for Xperia XZs, binaries have been updated for the Xperia X performance and Xperia XZ to increase stability and to add the secondary camera. In addition, the kernel has also been updated to 3.18, bringing the initial support for the Xperia X and Xperia X Compact. We can't consider them as stable though, at least for the moment.

Available device trees and kernel source allow building AOSP for the following devices:

• Xperia X Performance (Dora)
• Xperia XZ (Kagura)
• Xperia XZs (Keyaki)

If you want to study the code yourself, head over to this GitHub repository. A repository for the Xperia X and Xperia X Compact is available here. Building instructions can be found here.

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Source: Sony Open Source Blog

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Samsung Using Facial Recognition for Mobile Payments is Years Away

Android has had their own version of facial recognition for a while. You can generally find this feature tucked away in the Smart Lock section of the setting's security page under the Trusted Face label. It's a very early version of facial recognition but it works well enough for a number of people to be happy with it. Samsung has taken this a bit further with an iris scanner in their recent flagships, but some people say true facial recognition is the next-generation of biometric technology.

It is said that facial recognition is more convenient than iris scans due to how the whole process works. Anyone with a recent Samsung flagship will tell you that you have to position your eyes in the exact spot Samsung wants you to for their iris scanner to work. You're also instructed from time to time to open your eyes wider in some cases which can add even more of a delay to unlocking your smartphone. Many people are happy with it but true facial recognition should be more convenient.

The Korea Herald has a piece up about how Samsung wants to move to this facial recognition methods in the future. Not only that, but how they also want to use it for high-level security such as financial transactions. However, they spoke to an unnamed "source from Samsung" and some "industry watchers" who are predicting that Samsung is years away from launching such strategy. These sources feel that it will take Samsung 4 years to use facial recognition for mobile payment authentication.

This delay is said to be due to the progress our mobile cameras have been making over the last few years. This plus the deep learning technology that would have to be developed and implemented into the smartphone is what seems to be holding this technology back right now. A Samsung representative says they don't need to use this feature for mobile financial transactions since they have high-level biometric technologies such as iris and fingerprint recognition that are already developed.

Source: The Korea Herald

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Theming App Elements with Substratum

In this XDA TV video, Rawad continues his series of tutorials related to Substratum theming. Previously we learned how to create a simple substratum theme and how to customize icons. In this video you will learn how to change the color of a specific element within an app.

Rawad uses Substratum to change the accent color in the default Google Calculator app

Rawad decompiles the apk using Android Studio in order to theme his app

Visit the XDA Themes forum for more Substratum themes.

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Learn 3D Modeling for Cheap – The Complete Blender Creator Course

If you're a game developer looking to expand your skill set, or a complete beginner who is willing to work hard to get into the field, this course is a great place to start. This set of 48 hours of on-demand videos is a highly-rated course that will help you learn how to use Blender to create beautiful 3D models. No prior knowledge is required to get started with this course. Normally this is valued at $195 but is currently on sale for only $10. That's less than you spent on lunch yesterday.

Blender is a fantastic platform which enables you to make AAA-quality models which can be exported to any game engine, 3D printer, or other software. Here are some of the reasons why you want to learn Blender with this online tutorial:

• Create assets for video games
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Purchases made through our sponsors benefit XDA. Our sponsors help us pay for the many costs associated with running XDA, including server costs, full time developers, news writers, and much more. While you might see sponsored content (which will always be labeled as such) alongside Portal content, the Portal team is in no way responsible for these posts. Sponsored content, advertising and XDA Depot are managed by a separate team entirely. XDA will never compromise its journalistic integrity by accepting money to write favorably about a company, or alter our opinions or views in any way. Our opinion cannot be bought.

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