HoFo Blog

From The Web:

The remarkable resurgence of Nokia phones

Nokia 7+ and Nokia 1 Renders Show Dual Zeiss Cameras, 18:9 Display, and More

CRTC denies PIAC request to look into unsavoury telecom sales practices

German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal

FCC Boss Ajit Pai’s Own Agency Is Investigating Him For Potential Corruption

From The Forums:

Tracfone Chat not available?

Govt warning about Chinese phones!

Windows alerts for missed google voice calls (or voicemail)

Cheap smartphones to use hotspot on Unlimited 2 plan?

TracFone refusing to honor triple minutes???

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There is a new entry in the navigation menu of the Facebook app for smartphones and tablets; clicking through on "Protect" will redirect to a listing for an app called Onavo Protect—which, at first glance, appears to be a VPN client. Except that it's not. Rather than protecting your data from third parties the app will phone home to Facebook and report on what you're doing on your device... whether you're currently using the Facebook app or not.

The proof that this title is basically corporate spyware is hiding in plain sight on its App Store listing:

As TechCrunch reports, the Onavo app has already been used to spy on SnapChat users, and to copy that platform's popular features for Instagram, its Facebook-owned competitor.

Clawing back at least some of your privacy is as easy as uninstalling Onavo Protect—or better yet, never installing it in the first place.

Sources: 9to5Mac via TechCrunch

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From The Web:

Wearable brand Huami goes public; raises $110M

Apple sold more watches than Rolex, Swatch, and the rest of the Swiss watch industry combined

Fossil's big bet on smartwatches is helping turn the company around

The Snapdragon 845 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2018

Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro preview: Possibly the best budget phone of 2018

From The Forums:

MetroPCS giving away iphones to switchers

upgrade to 7.1 ?

Cricket new unlimited plan for $40 per month

Charged Roaming

How Does Freedompop Hotspot Service Work?

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Yesterday this Canadian received his Amazfit Bip from a grey-market reseller. With shipping, taxes and duties the final cost was about $100 CAD—pretty much the same price that I paid Amazon for the Pebble 2 SE on the left. How do the two compare? Let's break it down...

Buttons / UI

Every late model Pebble has four buttons with four programmable long press actions. The Bip has only a single button on its right side. A short press unlocks the screen; a long press can start or stop the workout of your choice, or turn the watch off. The Bip does have a touch screen, though, and while there are no fancy animated transitions it's still likely to be a more intuitive UI for most users.

Advantage: Draw

Notifications

The two devices handle notifications very differently. Once granted access through your phone (on Android anyway) a Pebble will send through all notifications by default, with the option of blocking certain ones through the Pebble app on your phone.

With the Bip notifications are opt-in, meaning that you have to manually enable notifications on a per-app basis through the Mi Fit app on your phone. Perhaps more importantly, you can't take any action when a notification comes through on a Bip. You can't even customize the vibrations on the watch.

Even without the Pebble servers you can still use Gadgetbridge to build a list of customized canned responses for incoming messages. Advantage: Pebble.

Watch Faces



The Bip has 10 built-in watch faces, and room for one more that can be sideloaded from the Mi Fit app—the included selections are shown above. Just don't expect anywhere near the breadth or depth of what's available for download (or to archive) from the Pebble app store. Advantage: Pebble.

Fitness Tracking



Here's where the Bip pulls ahead. With its long battery life, built-in heart rate sensor and GPS, plus an easy shortcut to start and stop your workout, the Bip makes a compelling case for a cheap and cheerful exercise companion. The Mi Fit app is no slouch, either; it was able to chart all the above data from an hour-long walk yesterday afternoon. Advantage: Bip

As a fitness tracker I think the Bip is a fantastic buy. But if it's a Pebble replacement that you were looking for then I'm sorry to say that you might have to keep looking.

Link: Amazfit Bip on geekbuying

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From The Web:

Nokia-Branded Phones Reportedly Outsold Phones from Google, HTC, Sony, Lenovo, and OnePlus in Q4 2017

Google is good at building phones but terrible at selling them

Essential shipped 88,000 phones in 2017: IDC

Huawei solicited 100+ fake Mate 10 Pro reviews on Best Buy to entice ‘beta testers’

Hacker uncovers Freedom Mobile customer login vulnerability

From The Forums:

T-Mobile seeing 5-10x increase in speeds thanks to LAA

MMS downloads won't work

Seeking T-Mo HSPA+ "faux-G" service

Ios 11.3 ui comparison to 10.3.3

Cricket deprioritization confimred

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There's no custom Android ROM out there that's more dependable than LineageOS. It's actually the only custom ROM that I know of with a working built-in updater—flash it once (with the optional root binary) and you can take OTA updates as they come without ever having to flash a full ROM again.

Over the weekend the first page in a Public Charter was published on the LineageOS github, detailing the requirements for device support. The list is long, exhaustive and impressive. Here are a few highlights:

I think it's pretty great to see a custom ROM so dedicated to user experience and transparency. You can read more about the charter—and see the actual document for yourself—at the links immediately below.

Source: LineageOS Charter via XDA

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From The Web:

Google’s Next Android Overhaul Will Embrace iPhone’s ‘Notch’

Verizon to stop honoring FCC restriction on not SIM-locking phones because nothing matters anymore

Canada Testing ‘Digital ID’ Border Security App for Screening Travellers

Smartphone data tracking is even creepier than you think

‘I Lived a Nightmare:’ SIM Hijacking Victims Share Their Stories

From The Forums:

Verizon locking phones this spring

Verizon promotion and coverage question

Anyone still successfully receiving AT&T's "4G"?

Dominican Republic (Punta Cana)

WWOR TV My9 (NYC) to move March 5, 2018. Hello Band 71 in NYC

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While out for dinner with my brother and his family over the weekend I got to play HQ Trivia for the first time. To call HQ a phenomenon is no lie—at 8:55pm our party of seven looked like any other large group in a busy uptown restaurant; five minutes later every iPhone at the table was connected to a headset and playing the game.

Plus one Android phone.

If you've been to a trivia night at your local pub then you've already got the gist of HQ—just imagine that experience scaled up to reach a global (English-speaking) audience through their smartphones. What pulls it all together is an entertaining video-streamed host, powered by the same technology behind Vine, Twitter's failed attempt at a new six-second video format.

HQ's official Android app had, until very recently, been listed in the Play Store as an unreleased beta. I'd love to tell you that you'll get the exact same experience on Android as on iOS, but on my OnePlus 5T the 1.0 release still looks very much like a beta product. The gameplay is the same but the video streaming quality is just bad.

I guess it's much harder for software developers to fully support the multitude of screen sizes and resolutions available on the Android platform. In the case of HQ trivia it certainly doesn't seem like a lot of effort was put in. If you've yet to experience the game my advice would be to check it out on somebody's iPhone. HQ doesn't care about us.

If you still want to be disappointed, here's the link: HQ Trivia on Google Play

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From The Web:

Qualcomm is killing the Android smartwatch market by not updating chips

Google isn’t honoring Pixel’s warranty, so we’re suing, customers say

Samsung releases Oreo kernel source code for the Galaxy S8/S8+

British Columbia Pushing Ride-Sharing Services in the Province

Ajit Pai's FCC Can't Stop Lying About Net Neutrality

From The Forums:

Rootmetrics: And 4th Place Goes To..............

Targeting 325 Million People Covered with LTE in 2018

Best alternative to Verizon prepaid? Pathetic speeds.

Cricket Wirless HD voice or wifi calling from Unlocked devices?

T-Mobile Reports Record Financial Results FY 2017

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All through Android's early years, old guard smartphone enthusiasts like myself secretly dreamed of a Nokia-powered Android phone. And in 2017 that dream came true; HMD Global resurrected the brand and gave the world a range of devices running pure Android. The best part is that I can even buy one of them right now from Amazon. Amazon Canada. On Prime.

So why haven't I? For the simple reason that the new Nokia does not appear to be in the business of selling modding-friendly hardware.

In a September 29th tweet an HMD exec seemed open to the idea of shipping a phone with an unlockable bootloader; more than four months later this basic requirement for flashing a custom recovery and gaining root access is still nowhere in sight for any North American Nokia device. HMD has also failed to release any kernel sources for their Android builds—which aids in the development of custom ROMs, but more importantly is a legal obligation under the GPL v2.

The company did a brisk business in 2017, in Asia and Europe at least. Tomi Ahonen estimates year-end handset sales to be around 8.5 million units, or 1% of the global smartphone market. But to win the hearts and minds of the XDA crowd—and for basic compliance with Android's open source license—HMD clearly needs to do better.

Sources: Tomi Ahonen, XDA

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Watch for the bonus HoFo shout-out...!

From The Web:

Galaxy S8 Android 8.0 Oreo update now rolling out

Key iPhone Source Code Gets Posted Online in 'Biggest Leak in History'

Bell won the $60/10GB promo pricing wars

RootMetrics Ranks Verizon Wireless the Top Network (Again)

Mysterious missed calls on cellphones part of worldwide scam

From The Forums:

What to do with Old TracFones? Unlock-able?

New Cricket Breeze-thru setup

Tracfone Newbie- looking for help

Sprint VoLTE active in Mobile, Alabama.

Telus tops Bell and Rogers in LTE speed, says OpenSignal report

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Yesterday OpenSignal released a new State of Mobile Networks Report: Canada, for the testing period from October 1st to December 30th, 2017. Telus is the big winner overall, with the best scores in three of OpenSignal's six categories, and tying the other Big Three carriers in the remaining three.

Telus users are welcome to gloat in this thread. What I'd like to draw your attention to are some regional results, where you'll find the only mention of this country's upstart operators:

In my own informal testing using my dual-SIM phone I've come to the same conclusion. There are, of course, some caveats with Freedom's service (like the outage earlier this week), but I don't think FM could have bested Rogers in anything a year or two ago; I say we take whatever small victories we can get!

Source: OpenSignal

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From The Web:

Snap Spectacles are dead

Nest is being swallowed up by Google's hardware team

Xiaomi grew more in 2017 than Apple, Samsung and Huawei combined

Nokia HMD Comeback? First Year Finishes with 8.5 Million Smartphones Shipped and 1.0% Market Share by Year-End

Why a Non-Smartwatch May Be the Smart Choice

From The Forums:

What does this mean?

Looking for your thoughts on mvno and device carrier

New Cricket Breeze-thru setup

Red Pocket - Any issues if using an AT&T phone on AT&T Red Pocket? (Samsung S4)

Why are the majority of metro stores so shady?

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With the Pebble apocalypse looming in the distance—June 30th, to be exact—r/pebble on reddit has become an especially interesting destination on the web. Some Pebblers are resigning themselves to jump ship to either Android Wear or Apple Watch, depending on their smartphone. Some are looking to Garmin devices for their long battery life. And at least one of the 35,000+ subscribers there has committed to the watch you see above, the Amazfit Bip.

Chinese? You bet it is... Amazfit branded wearables are made and marketed by Huami, a sub-brand of Xiaomi. What makes the Bip so intriguing for Pebblers is its always-on colour display and the promise of up to 30 days of battery life. Here's the entire spec sheet from the Bip's US product page:

Always-on reflective 1.28 inch color touch display
2.5D Corning gorilla glass generation 3 + AF coating
Optical heart rate sensor for heart rate zones
Geomagnetic sensor (compass)
Air pressure sensor (barometer) for elevation
GPS + GLONASS for route tracking
20 mm standard width changeable watch band
IP 68 rating - resistant to dust, rain and splashing
190 mAh Li-Polymer Battery
1.1 ounces (31 grams) total weight

While Americans can order straight from the source, the best option for Canadians seems to be a grey market importer, like this one. With a price tag of less than $80 CAD I might just have to try one out... for science!

More coverage of the Amazfit Bip here: GSM Arena, SlashGear, The Verge

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From The Web:

Apple Considering Offering Rebates to Customers Who Purchased Full-Price iPhone Batteries

The Google App’s Removal of its Useful Shortcuts is Intentional

Amazon Prime Exclusive Smartphones will no longer have Lockscreen Ads

CRTC upholds current net neutrality framework at House committee meeting

Trump's FCC Pats Itself On The Back For A Historically Stupid Year

From The Forums:

Safelink Sim Card Fiasco

Freedom Mobile outage

Samsung galaxy s9 and s9 Plus

Are there any FREE VOIP vendors with FREE porting? RingTo 3/31/2018 Deadline

Amazon Removeing Lockscreen Ads From All Amazon Prime Exclusive Devices!

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After yesterday's Freedom Mobile outage I thought it might be useful to provide some tips for where to go if you suspect that your carrier's mobile network is down.

When I realized that I couldn't send or receive text messages my first thought was that it must be a billing issue; because of this I wasted almost half an hour on hold with Freedom (using a SIP line) and trying to log into my account on their site. Here's how I eventually found out what was really going on:

1) Howard Forums. This was the first place I went (obviously), but there weren't yet any threads suggesting an outage. I would have started one myself but I was still thinking at this point that I had forgotten to pay my bill and my service was suspended.

2) Social media. Confirming Freedom's network issues was as easy as entering #freedommobile on Twitter. If your city or town has a subreddit, that might be a good place to look, too; unfortunately my own query on r/Toronto quickly devolved into an FM-bashing session, which of course would never happen here.

3) Downdetector. This is a new one for me. By simply Googling "is Freedom Mobile down?" I was directed to a site called Canadian Outages, where you can actually search for carrier outages by city. And if you're so inclined, you can download their Android or iOS app, and/or their plugin for Amazon Alexa. They even have a Twitter feed for outages across various networks and services—one each for Canada and the USA.

Hopefully no one reading this will ever experience another carrier outage. But in case you do, now you know where you can go to confirm it.

Link: Freedom Mobile on CanadianOutages.com

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From The Web:

Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ leaks reveal colours and camera setup

LG is officially leaving the Chinese smartphone market

OnePlus brings the limited edition Lava Red 5T to the U.S. and Europe just in time for Valentine's Day

Freedom Mobile customers experience intermittent outages

T-Mobile Is Sending a Mass Text Warning of ‘Industry-Wide’ Phone Hijacking Scam

From The Forums:

What Makes You Stay With AT&T?

WiFi calling in Mexico on plan that doesn’t have Mexico/Canada calling

Red Pocket: Is this info posted on reddit correct?

Verizon prepaid Moto E4 from Walmart not displaying unlock screen

Away Data Everywhere Canada 60

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