Xiaomi Launches Mi 5X with 5.5-inch Full HD Display, Snapdragon 625 SoC, and Dual-cameras

In its launch event in China yesterday, Xiaomi officially launched a new mid-range smartphone, their latest Xiaomi Mi 5X.

The Mi 5X sports a metal unibody design with an anti-fingerprint coating and features rounded corners to make for a comfortable hand grip.

On the front, it has a 5.5-inch Full HD screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 along with capacitive navigation buttons that we have come to expect from Xiaomi devices.

The Mi 5X is fueled by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core SoC coupled with Adreno 506 GPU.

In the camera department, the Mi 5X houses a dual-camera setup on the back, comprising of one 12MP (f/2.2) wide-angle lens and a 12MP (f/2.6) telephoto lens with a dual-tone flash and PDFA. Xiaomi says the dual-camera setup on the Mi 5X is the same as the one used on the Mi 6. Meanwhile, the front camera is a 5MP shooter for selfies.

The Mi 5X comes with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage and supports microSD cards for further storage expansion.

On the software side of things, the Mi 5X comes running Android 7.1 Nougat with Xiaomi's MIUI 9 on top — in fact, the Mi 5X is the first device to ship with MIUI 9 pre-installed.

Additionally, the Mi 5X packs in a 3,080 mAh non-removable battery, a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, a USB Type-C port, an IR blaster and a dedicated audio amplifier for an improved audio experience.

Available in three color variants — black, rose gold, and gold, the Mi 5X will go on sale in China starting 1st August for a price of 1,499 yuan ($222). It's not clear at this point exactly when, if ever, the Mi 5X will make its way outside its home country.

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Source: Xiaomi

What do you think of the Xiaomi MI 5X? Let us know in the comments!

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Huawei Mate 9 and Honor 6X Receive Big Price Cuts on Amazon

Huawei launched the Mate 9 back in November of last year and it's been quite the popular device. It comes equipped with a 5.9″ 1080p display, the Kirin 960 SoC and 4GB of RAM. When launched, the company said that others may be taking risks with innovations, they're happier making iterative improvements year after year. This could result in a company falling behind the competition but it has also been shown to produce familiar and trustworthy designs too.

We used the Huawei Mate 9 to do some early testing and comparisons between the Kirin 960 and Snapdragon 821. Raw performance isn't the only key factor when it comes to smartphones, but the Kirin 960 definitely held its own. Over on Amazon, the Huawei Mate 9 launched with a price tag of $600, but it's already received a hefty discount to the price. Instead of $600, you can order one right now for $460 (an whole $140 off the original retail price).

Honor launched the Honor 6X one month before the Mate 9 and it was a way for the company to compete in the low to mid-range market. It succeeded the Honor 5X and focused on two rear cameras as its big marketing feature. They brought it to the US and Europe a few months later and we went hands on with the device to give you an idea as to what to expect when it came to the software side of things of the Honor 6X.

In May, we saw Honor start rolling out EMUI 5.0 paired with Android 7.0 Nougat to the Honor 6X. This brought a lot of Nougat features people had been asking for as well as some fixes for annoyances such as the background app killing. When the Honor 6X launched here in the United States, Amazon was selling it for $250 but it too has also received a pretty big discount. Right now, the device is being sold for under two hundred dollars ($199), which is $50 off the original retail price.

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Huawei Mate 9 Honor 6X

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YouTube Red and Google Play Music to Merge in the Future

Google is such a huge company and each service/product is run by a different team of people, so it can become difficult to keep things synced together and inline with each other. We see this quite often when application updates including new features get pushed to iOS before they arrive in the Play Store for Android. The same thing happened a couple of years ago when Google launched YouTube Music even though Google Play Music All Access was already a paid service.

Then the launch of YouTube Red confused things even more as it created so much overlap between the different subscription services that Google offered. Google at least attempted to resolve some of this when they confirmed a YouTube Red subscription would include YouTube Music as well as Google Play Music All Access. But this still confuses the average customer as they're paying for one service in order to get access to others.

Google is well aware of the issue and YouTube's head of music just confirmed that both YouTube Red and Google Play Music would be combining into a new service sometime in the future. This is very important to the company and they're actively developing a way of launching it. Which is something that has been rumored for a while as the company had even combined the teams who were working on these two streaming services back in February of this year.

It'spossible that the two individual applications will merge, but they want to educate the customers better so they're able to advertise to the music market more efficiently. This is the entire goal here too, to make services like YouTube Red more popular within the music community. Google says music is an important service to offer and they feel combining these two services into a new single brand will help spread awareness instead of having them divided.

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Source: The Verge

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Unofficial LineageOS for the Honor 8 Pro

The development community is starting to pump out some ROMs for the Honor 8 Pro. This unofficial OpenKirin LineageOS ROM is a great way to replace the EMUI stock system. This custom ROM is pretty bare bones and it doesn't come with many mods baked in. Everything is very stable and performance is great.

Not Working:

• Encryption
• Rear camera only shoots video with OpenCamera when FPS is set to 15

While most people will be able to live without encryption, but the inability to shoot video means this ROM is not daily driver ready. Follow the development of this ROM in the XDA forums so you can check out future updates.

OpenKirin LineageOS 14.1 is based on Android Nougat 7.1.2. Stayed updated with the built-in OTA update manager.

This custom ROM runs very smooth on the Honor 8 Pro. The Kirin 960 paired with 6GB of RAM makes this an incredibly fast device.

Get this ROM

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OnePlus is Rumored to Use Energy Aware Scheduling in a Future OnePlus 5 Update

A lot about how our smartphone performs in regards to both battery life and performance is a consequence of the phone's kernel. This is a big reason why custom kernels are so popular on XDA, as they can be optimized toward battery life, performance or a balance of both. While the ROM itself and apps you use do have a hand in this as well, it's the kernel that does a lot of the heavy lifting on our smartphones.

Aspects of such as the CPU/GPU governor, frequencies, I/O scheduler, voltages and more are all handled by the kernel and they all contribute to how the device performs and how much battery life you can get out of it. OEMs do attempt to make the kernel run as efficiently as possible on a smartphone (to meet their specified target) even though things weren't created with smartphones in mind. For example, with your typical schedulers, the cpufreq and cpuidle subsystems work in isolation.

This is fine on a desktop PC when battery life isn't a big deal, but there can be better alternatives. This is where the Energy-Aware Scheduling (EAS) Project comes into play as it tries to resolve this design limitation by coordinating the two key power-management subsystems (CPUFreq and CPUIdle). This is a relatively new project though and this is why we don't see many OEMs implementing it in the stable build of their kernel code.

OnePlus isn't afraid to experiment, however. We've seen this with the company using the F2FS filesystem on the OnePlus 3T, and they even experimented with turning the display panel upside down in the OnePlus 5. A new rumor from FrAndroid says OnePlus will be updating the OnePlus 5 so it can use Energy Aware Scheduling. This rumor does say that it would enable the device to get 7 hours of screen on time with only using 50% of the battery too, though, which actually sounds quite implausible.

So while the overall rumor may be correct, we think it's best to take that screen on time claim with a grain of salt.

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Source: FrAndroid

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Slim7 from SlimROMs is Now Available for the OnePlus 5

OnePlus devices have a lot of community developer activity here at XDA and the OnePlus 5 custom ROM scene isn't any different. Slim7 from SlimROMs is now available on the device thanks to XDA Recognized Developer martinusbe and the entire SlimROMs team. This OnePlus 5 custom ROM is based on Android 7.1 Nougat and comes with the SlimROM features that you've come to know such as the nav bar and hardware key rebinding, a custom recent apps screen, SlimActions, and more. See the below thread for more details, flashing instructions, and how to report any bugs that you encounter.

Check out Slim7 in our OnePlus 5 forum

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BeHe Keyboard is an Open Source Keyboard with a Programming Face

XDA Member Vlath has a previously released application called BeHe Explorer that is known within the community. Earlier this month, they released a new application called BeHe Keyboard that attempts to offer something more to programmers. It is an open source keyboard app and it comes with three different faces to switch through. There is one for regular typing, another with arrow and function keys, and then a third for programming. You can find the GitHub page for the project here and the application itself is in the Play Store.

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Check out BeHe Keyboard in our Apps and Game forum

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