Earlier today, Xiaomi unveiled its latest entry in the ultra-popular Mi Note series: the Xiaomi Mi Note 10. There are actually two phones in this series, the standard Note 10 and the Mi Note 10 Pro. These devices are destined to be very popular, so we’ve opened up the forums for users to jump in.
The main difference between the two phones is that the non-Pro model has a 7 piece lens setup, while the Pro model uses 8. The Pro model also has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Otherwise, you’re looking at two phones with 6.47-inch OLED displays, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G, 5260 mAh batteries, and a bunch of cameras. The Mi Note 10 has been priced at €549 (~$608) for the 6GB/128GB variant, while the Mi Note 10 Pro has been priced at €649 (~$719) for the 8GB/256GB variant.
Check out the forum link below to get started and read up on the full specifications in the chart underneath.
Earlier today, Xiaomi unveiled its latest entry in the ultra-popular Mi Note series: the Xiaomi Mi Note 10. There are actually two phones in this series, the standard Note 10 and the Mi Note 10 Pro. These devices are destined to be very popular, so we’ve opened up the forums for users to jump in.
The main difference between the two phones is that the non-Pro model has a 7 piece lens setup, while the Pro model uses 8. The Pro model also has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Otherwise, you’re looking at two phones with 6.47-inch OLED displays, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G, 5260 mAh batteries, and a bunch of cameras. The Mi Note 10 has been priced at €549 (~$608) for the 6GB/128GB variant, while the Mi Note 10 Pro has been priced at €649 (~$719) for the 8GB/256GB variant.
Check out the forum link below to get started and read up on the full specifications in the chart underneath.
Like the 2017 and 2018 Pixels, the 2019 Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL have different display manufacturers, display resolutions, and display sizes. While the displays on both Pixel smartphones are certainly high-quality, their maximum brightness levels leave a lot to be desired. In our preliminary testing, the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL reach a maximum luminance of ~450 nits at 100% screen brightness. This is far below what other competing flagship smartphone displays are capable of. Fortunately, there’s a way to improve the maximum brightness using the hidden High Brightness Mode, but you’ll need root access to enable it.
If you’ve used the Pixel 4 while under direct sunlight, you probably struggled to see the screen because the display simply couldn’t get bright enough. Pixel smartphones have always suffered from dim displays while outdoors, so this isn’t a new problem for Google. Nowadays, though, smartphones that cost hundreds of dollars less have much brighter displays, so there’s little excuse for Google to fall short of the competition here.
Brightness reference chart
Using the hidden High Brightness Mode, however, you can bump the peak luminance of the Google Pixel 4’s display from about ~450 nits to about ~610 nits. This is a major bump in display brightness, and in my experience, actually makes the Google Pixel 4 readable outdoors. For whatever reason, Google decided not to use High Brightness Mode in normal use. You can’t trigger it manually anywhere in Settings nor can you trigger it with Adaptive Brightness enabled while you’re outside. We don’t know why Google isn’t using this hidden display mode, and we’ve been asking ourselves this question since we reviewed the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL displays.
In any case, we’re glad that Google left access to High Brightness Mode in the kernel since it’s easy to manually toggle it with root access. After rooting your Google Pixel 4 or Pixel 4 XL, all you have to do is enter the following shell commands:
su
echo on >> /sys/class/backlight/panel0-backlight/hbm_mode
If you’re wondering whether it’s safe to leave this on, you probably don’t have to worry. In our testing, it looks like High Brightness Mode only kicks in when the screen is basically at maximum UI brightness levels. The only thing you’ll really have to worry about is the effect on battery life. Since the display is already the largest contributor to battery drain on a smartphone and the display is drawing more power to run at a higher brightness level, the battery life of your Pixel 4 will suffer the longer High Brightness Mode is active.
If you want to disable it just to be safe, just replace “on” with “off” in the above echo command. With an app like Tasker, you can even automate toggling High Brightness Mode so it’ll only turn on when the ambient or UI brightness level is above a certain point.
Like the 2017 and 2018 Pixels, the 2019 Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL have different display manufacturers, display resolutions, and display sizes. While the displays on both Pixel smartphones are certainly high-quality, their maximum brightness levels leave a lot to be desired. In our preliminary testing, the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL reach a maximum luminance of ~450 nits at 100% screen brightness. This is far below what other competing flagship smartphone displays are capable of. Fortunately, there’s a way to improve the maximum brightness using the hidden High Brightness Mode, but you’ll need root access to enable it.
If you’ve used the Pixel 4 while under direct sunlight, you probably struggled to see the screen because the display simply couldn’t get bright enough. Pixel smartphones have always suffered from dim displays while outdoors, so this isn’t a new problem for Google. Nowadays, though, smartphones that cost hundreds of dollars less have much brighter displays, so there’s little excuse for Google to fall short of the competition here.
Brightness reference chart
Using the hidden High Brightness Mode, however, you can bump the peak luminance of the Google Pixel 4’s display from about ~450 nits to about ~610 nits. This is a major bump in display brightness, and in my experience, actually makes the Google Pixel 4 readable outdoors. For whatever reason, Google decided not to use High Brightness Mode in normal use. You can’t trigger it manually anywhere in Settings nor can you trigger it with Adaptive Brightness enabled while you’re outside. We don’t know why Google isn’t using this hidden display mode, and we’ve been asking ourselves this question since we reviewed the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL displays.
In any case, we’re glad that Google left access to High Brightness Mode in the kernel since it’s easy to manually toggle it with root access. After rooting your Google Pixel 4 or Pixel 4 XL, all you have to do is enter the following shell commands:
su
echo on >> /sys/class/backlight/panel0-backlight/hbm_mode
If you’re wondering whether it’s safe to leave this on, you probably don’t have to worry. In our testing, it looks like High Brightness Mode only kicks in when the screen is basically at maximum UI brightness levels. The only thing you’ll really have to worry about is the effect on battery life. Since the display is already the largest contributor to battery drain on a smartphone and the display is drawing more power to run at a higher brightness level, the battery life of your Pixel 4 will suffer the longer High Brightness Mode is active.
If you want to disable it just to be safe, just replace “on” with “off” in the above echo command. With an app like Tasker, you can even automate toggling High Brightness Mode so it’ll only turn on when the ambient or UI brightness level is above a certain point.
At Google I/O earlier this year, Google introduced a redesigned version of the Android Auto car interface with a dark theme and simplified controls. Many users felt that Google went a bit too far in simplifying the UI, however. For example, the new interface doesn’t show you any weather information at a glance, requiring you to talk to Google Assistant or launch the weather shortcut to get that info. That can be annoying when you’re driving and want to check what the weather conditions are. Thankfully, it seems that Google will be adding weather information to the car screen once again, as we spotted a new toggle in the Android Auto app for showing the weather info on the status bar.
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
Android Auto 4.8 rolled out today on the Google Play Store, and it’s already available on APKMirror. New strings in the update show that the app will add a setting to show weather information on the status bar of the car screen. The weather information is obtained from the location of the connected phone.
<string name="settings_weather_summary">Show weather information on the car screen status bar, obtained using your phone location</string>
<string name="settings_weather_title">Weather</string>
Once the feature goes live for all, it’ll appear in the Settings page of the Android app as shown below:
I don’t have an Android Auto-compatible vehicle or head unit, but we’ll update this article with images of the new feature once we get them. We’ll also keep an eye out on this feature to inform you when it goes live.
At Google I/O earlier this year, Google introduced a redesigned version of the Android Auto car interface with a dark theme and simplified controls. Many users felt that Google went a bit too far in simplifying the UI, however. For example, the new interface doesn’t show you any weather information at a glance, requiring you to talk to Google Assistant or launch the weather shortcut to get that info. That can be annoying when you’re driving and want to check what the weather conditions are. Thankfully, it seems that Google will be adding weather information to the car screen once again, as we spotted a new toggle in the Android Auto app for showing the weather info on the status bar.
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
Android Auto 4.8 rolled out today on the Google Play Store, and it’s already available on APKMirror. New strings in the update show that the app will add a setting to show weather information on the status bar of the car screen. The weather information is obtained from the location of the connected phone.
<string name="settings_weather_summary">Show weather information on the car screen status bar, obtained using your phone location</string>
<string name="settings_weather_title">Weather</string>
Once the feature goes live for all, it’ll appear in the Settings page of the Android app as shown below:
I don’t have an Android Auto-compatible vehicle or head unit, but we’ll update this article with images of the new feature once we get them. We’ll also keep an eye out on this feature to inform you when it goes live.
For power users who want to customize every part of their phone, there are a few must-have apps. Apps like MacroDroid, Automate, and Llama all provide automation features, but in my view, none of them hold a candle to Tasker. While it might not have the best UI, Tasker is my personal favorite automation app because of how active the developer is, how many plugins are available for it, and how active the community is. Even though Android APIs are becoming more and more restricted with each new release, the Tasker developer and community have found ways around the restrictions. The latest v5.9.beta.8 release, for example, has added a new feature that opens up a whole new realm of possible automation use cases: logcat detection.
Logcat Detection
Last month, the developer of Tasker released a new beta that enabled clipboard monitoring on Android 10. Since Android 10 prevents background apps from reading the clipboard, you might be wondering how this was possible. The answer is through reading the logcat. Logcat is a shell tool that pulls a log of all system events and other events contributed by apps. Whenever a new clipboard entry is written, the corresponding system log will contain the clipboard text. By reading this log, Tasker is able to detect what the current clipboard entry is.
Normally, apps aren’t allowed to read system logs, and they also can’t ask the user to grant them permission to do so. That’s because sensitive data may exist in the log, and allowing any app the ability to read logs opens up a whole can of worms related to privacy and security. However, it’s possible for a user to manually grant an app permission to read logs. If an app like Tasker declares the READ_LOGS permission, then the user can grant this permission manually via ADB. When you install the latest Tasker beta, it’ll ask you to do just that.
So what can you do with the new Logcat Entry event in Tasker? The developer himself gives you a few examples:
Do different stuff for when you unlock your device with your finger or with a pattern
React to the Back button being held for 1 second in any app
React to the software keyboard being shown/hidden
Do different actions on Samsung devices depending on if the power button was double-clicked or the Bixby button was pressed
These are all just different use cases that the developer thought up, but this is far from a comprehensive list of things you can do with logcat detection.
Here’s a video demonstrating how to use Tasker to capture and filter the logcat for a desired entry:
The two issues with logcat detection are that setting it up is far from user-friendly and it’s subject to change at any time if developers tweak the logs their apps send. Getting this set up will require a bit of trial and error, but once you’ve set something up, you probably won’t have to make changes to your configuration that often.
New Shortcut Action
The current developer of Tasker is actually not the original developer of the app. The current dev used to primarily work on a suite of Tasker plugins called AutoApps, so when he took over development work on Tasker, he started migrating the functionality of some of his plugins into the main Tasker app. The latest Tasker beta release essentially deprecates the AutoShortcut plugin by adding a new Shortcut action.
The new logcat entry detection and shortcut action are the two biggest changes in the latest beta release, but there are other minor changes such as an improved Get Location action, variable previewing, and bug fixes for two long-standing bugs. You can read the full changelog here. You can sign up for the Tasker beta on Google Play or download the APK right now.
