For some time now, Samsung has been the dominant player in the Android space, especially at the high end of the market. From the Galaxy S2 onwards, Samsung has been able to ride the wave of the smartphone industry’s growth without much disruptio…
Late last year Huawei introduced the Honor 5X, a phone branded and sold under their Honor sub brand for their home Chinese market. A few months later, the company announced that it would be the first Honor branded smartphone to launch in the United States, and we were first given access to the phone during Honor’s launch event in Las Vegas. With the Honor 5X the company is hoping to bring a great smartphone experience with capable specifications to a relatively low $199 price point, delivering a phone at the tail-end of the mid-range category that should be able to punch above its weight.
Late last year Huawei introduced the Honor 5X, a phone branded and sold under their Honor sub brand for their home Chinese market. A few months later, the company announced that it would be the first Honor branded smartphone to launch in the United States, and we were first given access to the phone during Honor’s launch event in Las Vegas. With the Honor 5X the company is hoping to bring a great smartphone experience with capable specifications to a relatively low $199 price point, delivering a phone at the tail-end of the mid-range category that should be able to punch above its weight.
At the 2015 BUILD developer Conference Microsoft demoed four application bridges that they hoped would improve the number of applications available for Windows 10 Mobile, which would benefit the Windows platform as a whole. The two most interesting showcases were Project Islandwood, which helps developers to port their Objective-C applications to Windows, and Project Astoria, a subsystem for running existing Android applications right on a Windows smartphone. Today it looks like the latter of those projects has officially met its end.
The death of Project Astoria won’t come as a big surprise to those who have been keeping track of Windows 10 Mobile’s development process since BUILD. Back in October of last year, preview builds of Windows 10 Mobile stopped including the Android runtime and there wasn’t really any explanation as to why. Since that time, Project Islandwood has continued to be promoted by Microsoft while there hasn’t been much news about Astoria. This led many in the development community to suspect that Microsoft had decided to kill the project, although there was no official confirmation until today.
In my view, the death of Project Astoria has both good and bad elements. Since it was essentially packaging Android applications to run on Windows 10 Mobile, the applications never fit in with the rest of the platform and so the question then became why you wouldn’t just go buy an actual Android device. On the other hand, it did provide an easy way for developers and users to bundle up applications that didn’t exist at all on Windows 10 Mobile, which would help fill the app gap in a less than optimal but usable manner.
According to Microsoft, the official reason for the death of Astoria is that developers felt that having two bridges from mobile operating systems was mostly redundant when their applications likely existed on both Android and iOS. With Microsoft’s recent purchase of Xamarin, they may also be betting on developers creating applications in C# that can be deployed across Android, Windows, and iOS. In any case, Microsoft’s bridges for Objective-C, JavaScript, and Win32 apps are still very much alive, but the prospect of easily bringing over Android applications to Windows 10 Mobile is gone.
It’s been over 18 months since Xiaomi announced the Mi 4 back in June 2014, and today the company is finally ready to release the predecessor in the form of the Mi 5. The western launch here in Barcelona was presented by VP of Global, Hugo Barra and we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to live-blog the event and get a more in-depth hands-on later in the day. The Mi 5 is Xiaomi’s 5”-range form-factor flagship device and will be one of the main devices competing for buyer’s attention this generation.
In a fashion that is very popular with Chinese vendors, Xiaomi was eager to talk about the detailed specifications of the Mi 5 during its presentation, so without much ado, let’s go hands-on with Xiaomi’s latest phone.: