Xiaomi Launches the 6.44″ Mi Max, MIUI 8 Based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow

In an event in China, Xiaomi has launched the physically mammoth Mi Max, its largest smartphone in recent years; and MIUI 8, the next iteration of its home brewed custom OS/skin based on Android.
The first thing that one would notice about the Mi Max is its massive size. Bearing a 6.44″ FHD LCD display, the Mi Max is unapologetic about its size, made for users who want nothing smaller than a phablet in their pocket. The phone itself looks close to the Redmi Note 3, with a metallic back (and likely plastic bits on the top and bottom cover). On the back is a fingerprint sensor, with the rear camera setup on the top left corner.
The first thing that one would notice about the Mi Max is its massive size. Bearing a 6.44″ FHD LCD display, the Mi Max is unapologetic about its size, made for users who want nothing smaller than a phablet in their pocket. The phone itself looks close to the Redmi Note 3, with a metallic back (and likely plastic bits on the top and bottom cover). On the back is a fingerprint sensor, with the rear camera setup on the top left corner.
The Mi Max will be available in Silver, Light Grey and Gold colors, going on sale on May 17 in China. The base variant with SD 650 will cost CNY 1500 ($230), the middle SD 652 + 3GB RAM/64GB storage variant will cost CNY 1700 ($260) while the top variant with SD 652 + 4GB RAM/128GB storage will set you back by CNY 2000 ($300). Availability outside of China is not known, but we expect the device to at least make its way to the Indian market, to compete with local Indian players and their recent phablet devices.
Along with the Mi Max, Xiaomi also took the wraps off MIUI 8, which is based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
Featuring a colorful facelift of several apps, MIUI 8 also adds in new features. The user interface elements change colors based on the weather. Also mentioned on the forum announcement was Multi-Window Support, a feature that is not ready for prime time just yet on stock Android. Multi window makes the Mi Max much more practical, as otherwise the stylus-less phablet would have just been a large phone.
Another notable addition to MIUI 8 is a power saving mode which goes a step ahead by freezing background app activities, suspending app syncs and background tasks. MIUI 8 also limits chain start-ups from unessential apps, further giving you more headroom with processing and battery.

The camera and calculator apps have also received significant rework. The calculator app can now support advanced calculations and conversions, while the camera app can also solve high school level Math problems in Chinese and provide step-by-step answers, which is a very handy addition to a stock app. Further employing image recognition and visual search in the stock camera in other areas, users can snap photos of products and purchase similar items online.

The stock MIUI Gallery app has also received some love. There is a functional image editor with the ability to change filters, doodle on the images and even add stickers. Editing is also being extended to videos as well, as you can now crop videos, add filters, captions and music to videos, without needing any other external app.

MIUI 8 will come as a Developer ROM to all Redmi and Mi Note series devices, as well as the Mi 2, 2S, 3, 4, 4C, 4S and 5. Initially, MIUI 8 will be limited to China ROM during beta, with registrations for China Beta starting on May 16, with beta testing beginning on June 1. MIUI 8 will then roll out to China Developer branch by June 17. The forum announcement does not mention when MIUI 8 will roll out to China Stable, Global Developer, and Global Stable branches of MIUI; though all of these will be after the China Developer branch rollout.

While the Mi Max may fill in a niche role in the market, it is still another area which Xiaomi now competes in. Bearing very good specs for a mid-end phablet, the Mi Max is also budget friendly in the Chinese market, although the price is likely to adjust for Indian/Global availability. Xiaomi did not include any stylus support with the Mi Max, which will likely hurt its competitiveness, and pose a barrier for optimum utilization as a large phablet.

Nonetheless, the Mi Max and MIUI 8 bring a lot to the table. If nothing, they spur other OEMs to make competing products, providing an incentive to introduce innovation if they are to compete with Xiaomi and its price-value ratio.

Google Providing Full OTA Images for Nexus Devices

One of the perks of owning a Nexus or Google device is the ability to manually upgrade or rollback to any version that is officially supported through factory images. Other phones also give you this freedom, but Nexus devices just make it a breeze.

However, one of the downsides of factory images, if you could actually call them a legitimate downside, is that you need an unlocked bootloader in order to flash the factory images. Keeping the bootloader unlocked poses security risks, and is not really recommended unconditionally for the general public. So when one does need to flash a factory image, they will have to unlock that moment, and also deal with their data being wiped in the process of unlocking.

Now, there’s one less thorn in the road if you did wish to flash a different system, but had a locked bootloader. Google is now posting full OTA images for supported devices for Android 6.0 builds. These are different from incremental OTAs as these are full images which can be sideloaded with adb. You do not need an unlocked bootloader for adb sideloading, so this works for both locked as well as unlocked bootloader.

So, now if you would like to upgrade or downgrade your system on a Nexus device, but would rather keep your bootloader locked and data intact, head on over to the official download page and download the requisite file for your device. Even though your data will not be wiped, it is always a good idea to back it up if it is important to you. Afterall, that is the whole point of a backup.

The Best File Managers for Android

The saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Apparently ES File Explorer has never heard that saying, or they chose to ignore it. After updates late last year brought harsh criticism for their inclusion of invasive and annoying popups and advertisements, ES has seemed to be on a steady decline. What first started as memory cleanup notifications have blossomed into a full blown lockscreen replacement application that brings with it, you guessed it, advertisements to your lockscreen. ES was powerful, bringing with it a host of cloud connections, local LAN/FTP support and even a browser making it a great all-in-one solution and one that many of us still used despite its lackluster UI.

With so many of us not wanting to subject ourselves to a bombardment of useless junk, it brings us to the question, what good, powerful, beautiful file managers are out there currently? There is no lack of available apps on the Google Play Store.  So the choice of a file manager largely depends on what you plan on doing with it and if you want your tool to be form or function focused or some sort of balance between the two. Do you want or need LAN, Cloud or Root abilities? Do you demand material design with theming options, or will yolo-holo do? We looked at quite a few of the applications you said were your favorites on Twitter and rounded the list to the top three, plus a few honorable mentions:

#1 Solid Explorer – $1.99 (14 day trial) – Root: Yes

By far one of the top responses from both the XDA Writers team and Twitter was Solid Explorer, and it is not difficult to see why. Personally I have never used it before today, but I am hooked. Solid Explorer is a surprisingly robust explorer with an astonishing amount of plugins and external storage support. All your favorite cloud storage service hooks are here including Dropbox, OneDrive, Box along with local solutions like LAN/SMB and FTP support and even more can be added through plugins like Amazon and Mega. The application also looks fantastic. Beautiful theming, colors, (limited) icon support, and a healthy dose of material design sprinkled throughout really do the almost impossible, combine power and beauty. If I had to nitpick a little it would be that the application canhave a few too many IAP’s. Some color schemes and plugins cost money on top of the $1.99 price of the application itself and I found myself wishing I could just purchase everything in one shot. An important note though is that this never gets in the way of using the application. I am all for an app developer making money without selling themselves out to advertisements or restricting basic features, so if this is how they found to keep the lights on and bills paid then keep on going guys. For $1.99 Solid Explorer is a… solid buy…. 

#2 FX File Explorer – Free/$2.99 – Root: Yes

If you liked the look of ES File Explorer you will feel somewhat right at home on FX. It follows a similar tile arrangement that while functional, can be a little cluttered. When it comes to displaying its capabilities, FX is quite a bit better for discovery than Solid or Root Explorer since it places almost all available features front and center. Colors are bright, iconography is nice and they help distinguish different features instead of being a singular mess of things to do. FX also goes further by trying to be a jack of all trades by offering a gallery, file sharing manager, as well as a music and video player. You know what they say about a jack of all trades though and FX is no different, in most cases you’re better off going for a dedicated application for these features as FX doesn’t do any of them especially well, but for some users it may be nice to have. One of FX’s best features though is its split view multi-window mode (Solid has this as well but only in landscape mode). Dragging files from one directory into another is simple and painless and this is a nifty feature, but one many people won’t need to use often. When all is said and done though, FX File Explorer is a fully featured file manager that has many tricks up its sleeve and is a good purchase if you just have to have that tiled home 

#3 Explorer/Root Explorer – Free/$3.99 – Root: Yes (Paid)

I have been a long time user of Root Explorer so placing it in third hurt a little. Whenever I reset a device it is one of the first apps installed because of its sheer ability to do exactly what I want it to do without getting in the way. Recently receiving a fresh coat of material design and a splash of color didn’t hurt either and the app looks better than it has in years. However, comparing Root Explorer to Solid Explorer or FX isn’t an easy or even fair task. Solid Explorer is almost like Root Explorers faster, slicker, more capable brother. Both handle cloud accounts, but Solid allows for more. Both use material design, but Solid’s implementation is better. Both do many of the same things and both do them capably, Solid just does more and most times it does it better. If you already own Root Explorer and love what it does, great. But if you want something that does a whole lot more and does it for cheaper, then head for Solid Explorer. I’d just wish the Root Explorer developers would fix that application icon…

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As I mentioned in the beginning, there is no shortage file managers on Google Play so here are a few honorable mentions. Total Commander (Link) is a very powerful application but suffers from a horribly confusing interface. MK Explorer and Documents Beta (Link and Link) are both great beautifully material designed explorers that are simple with very little fluff and some tricks of their own. They are quick, simple, easy to use, and perfect to move a file from point A to B without needing to include all of the cloud features others have.

The truth is that even though ES File Explorer has turned its back on the Android faithful by resorting to some rather distasteful tactics, there are a lot of excellent file managers for Android. With so much choice one is guaranteed to fit your needs and look great at the same time, all without pushing annoying advertisements in your face.

FlashFire v0.33 Update Brings Ability to Backup and Restore via ADB over WiFi

FlashFire, for the uninitiated, is the work of XDA Recognized Developer Chainfire, a man who needs no introduction to an Android enthusiast. FlashFire is the successor of Mobile Odin, an application that aids in flashing Android devices on-the-go.

The latest update to FlashFire has brought the ability to backup and restore your phone partitions through ADB. These are full backups of your device, but you do have the ability to choose which parts of your phone you want to back up. As an added bonus, the backup and restore options also works wirelessly through ADB over Wi-Fi. However, Chainfire notes that the backups are created and wrapped in a ZIP file in a specific order, which means that you cannot zip existing backed up partitions created on your phone and restore them through adb.

Along with this, FlashFire is also changing a few things related to how it handles Adopted Storage on newer Android versions. To note, FlashFire will always treat your Internal Storage as Internal Storage, and your Adopted Storage as Adopted Storage; this works like this even if you have migrated or swapped the two on your device.

There are a host of other changes too. Some of the notable ones include better startup performance for users with many backups, improvements to back key behaviour in-app, improvements in display of progress information, support for additional partition types and more. The full changelog can be viewed below:

Changelog

• Add support for backing up to and restoring from ADB, through USB or Wi-Fi (special ZIP format)
• Completely reworked progress code, more info is shown in more places now (current file, speed, progress)
• Improved back key handling
• Improved app startup performance
• If sdcard is adopted, reflect that in location display name
• Fix adopted SD card sometimes not showing up in mixed partition mode
• Attempt to identify external sdcard (rather than calling it USB)
• Adjust storage location display order
• Add warning when using adopted storage
• Rewrote file creation routines to cope better with adopted storages
• Fix reboot card popup title
• Refactor shell commands as root
• Change install location to internal-only
• Fix backup of internal storage not skipping backups in some cases
• Adjust ZIP parser so it can cope with Samsung FOTA ZIPs
• Added warning for Huawei users about brickability
• Add OEM partition to TWRP emergency restore
• Fix backup/restore per-file progress freezing
• Archives: Add suppport for Huawei’s UPDATE.APP format
• OTA: Add detection for Samsung, Huawei, HTC, Letv
• OTA: Add multi-zip-file capability
• Partitions: Add various Tegra-specific partitions
• Partitions: Add various Mtk64-specific partitions
• Partitions: Add various Huawei-specific partitions
• Partitions: Add various Pixel-C-specific partitions
• Partitions: Add generic Factory Reset Protection partition
• Partitions: Add support for eMMC boot and general purpose partitions
• Partitions: Attempt r/w unlock before writing
• EverRoot: Updated embedded SuperSU to v2.72 BETA
• EverRoot: Use LESSLOGGING mode, reduces SuperSU output

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