Android 10 is Google’s latest software release which includes features like a system-wide dark mode, a new focus mode, family link, and more. Since its release alongside the Pixel 4 series earlier this year, the software has made its way to several devices including those from OnePlus, Samsung, Essential, Xiaomi, etc. Samsung’s Korean rival LG also launched an Android 10 preview for the LG G8 ThinQ and V50 ThinQ last month and it rolled out a stable update for the G8 earlier this month. Now, the company is rolling out a stable Android 10 update for the LG G7 One — an Android One powered flagship from last year.
As per a recent post on our LG G7 One forums, the stable Android 10 update is now rolling out to users in Canada. The OTA update, which has a package size of 741.9 MB, upgrades the device to Android 10 and brings improvements to the camera functionality and usability. Additionally, the update also packs in the Android security patches for November 2019. The LG G7 One was the company’s first phone to receive the Android 9 Pie update last year and it’s great to see the company maintaining its release cycle this year as well. As of now, we can’t confirm whether the update has started rolling out in other regions as well but we’ll update the article as and when we get the information.
Android 10 is Google’s latest software release which includes features like a system-wide dark mode, a new focus mode, family link, and more. Since its release alongside the Pixel 4 series earlier this year, the software has made its way to several devices including those from OnePlus, Samsung, Essential, Xiaomi, etc. Samsung’s Korean rival LG also launched an Android 10 preview for the LG G8 ThinQ and V50 ThinQ last month and it rolled out a stable update for the G8 earlier this month. Now, the company is rolling out a stable Android 10 update for the LG G7 One — an Android One powered flagship from last year.
As per a recent post on our LG G7 One forums, the stable Android 10 update is now rolling out to users in Canada. The OTA update, which has a package size of 741.9 MB, upgrades the device to Android 10 and brings improvements to the camera functionality and usability. Additionally, the update also packs in the Android security patches for November 2019. The LG G7 One was the company’s first phone to receive the Android 9 Pie update last year and it’s great to see the company maintaining its release cycle this year as well. As of now, we can’t confirm whether the update has started rolling out in other regions as well but we’ll update the article as and when we get the information.
Following the announcement of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 at the Snapdragon Tech Summit earlier this month, manufacturers have started announcing their next-gen flagships powered by the new SoC. Quite recently, Chinese manufacturer OPPO revealed that it will be launching the OPPO Find X2 early next year. The device will be powered by the Snapdragon 865 SoC and will feature dual-mode 5G support. Now, ZTE has joined the brigade and has announced the Axon 10s Pro.
In a recent post on Weibo, ZTE has officially lifted the covers of the Axon 10s Pro revealing its design and a few key specifications. As far as the design is concerned, the Axon 10s Pro is identical to its predecessor — the Axon 10 Pro. The only cosmetic feature differentiating the upcoming device is a new color called “Qiang”, which roughly translates to rust. Much like its predecessor, the Axon 10s Pro will feature a triple camera setup on the back, but we can’t be sure if it will include the same camera hardware.
Internally, the device will feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 with dual-mode 5G support, thanks to the Snapdragon X55 modem. Additionally, ZTE has revealed that the device will also feature WiFi 6 with support for dual-WiFi acceleration, LPDDR5 memory, and UFS 3.0 flash storage. The Axon 10s Pro will also be incredibly thin, measuring in at just 7.9mm, and it will weigh just 175g. On the software front, the device will run ZTE’s recently announced MiFavor 10 OS based on Android 10. As of now, the company hasn’t revealed the launch date or availability for the device.
Following the announcement of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 at the Snapdragon Tech Summit earlier this month, manufacturers have started announcing their next-gen flagships powered by the new SoC. Quite recently, Chinese manufacturer OPPO revealed that it will be launching the OPPO Find X2 early next year. The device will be powered by the Snapdragon 865 SoC and will feature dual-mode 5G support. Now, ZTE has joined the brigade and has announced the Axon 10s Pro.
In a recent post on Weibo, ZTE has officially lifted the covers of the Axon 10s Pro revealing its design and a few key specifications. As far as the design is concerned, the Axon 10s Pro is identical to its predecessor — the Axon 10 Pro. The only cosmetic feature differentiating the upcoming device is a new color called “Qiang”, which roughly translates to rust. Much like its predecessor, the Axon 10s Pro will feature a triple camera setup on the back, but we can’t be sure if it will include the same camera hardware.
Internally, the device will feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 with dual-mode 5G support, thanks to the Snapdragon X55 modem. Additionally, ZTE has revealed that the device will also feature WiFi 6 with support for dual-WiFi acceleration, LPDDR5 memory, and UFS 3.0 flash storage. The Axon 10s Pro will also be incredibly thin, measuring in at just 7.9mm, and it will weigh just 175g. On the software front, the device will run ZTE’s recently announced MiFavor 10 OS based on Android 10. As of now, the company hasn’t revealed the launch date or availability for the device.
OPPO and its offshoot Realme are marking their entry into the truly wireless earphone segment with the launch and unveiling of their respective products. Realme has taken center stage in India for its Realme X2 launch today, and the independent company is also taking this opportunity to announce the Realme Buds Air in the country. Meanwhile, at the APAC Strategy Launch in Malaysia, OPPO took the opportunity to reveal more details about the OPPO Enco Free.
Realme Buds Air
After establishing itself as a noteworthy smartphone company, Realme wants to evolve into a tech lifestyle brand. Today, along with the Realme X2, it launched a pair of truly wireless stereo earbuds. The Realme Buds Air have a striking resemblance to the first-gen Apple Airpods and come with features like touch controls and wireless charging. The Buds Air come with 12mm drivers, largest in the Realme Buds lineup, and a dynamic bass boost sound optimization specially tuned for Bollywood and Indian indie music.
The Buds Air come with smart pause and play which works with the help of optical proximity sensors on each of the earbuds. There’s touch control that works independently on each earpod, with support for play/pause, and forward. The Realme Buds Air come with a low-latency Gaming mode which can be activated by holding down on each of the earbuds. Additionally, the environmental noise-canceling microphones should provide for a clear sound during calls.
Each of the earbuds weighs only 4.2 grams and comes with a claimed battery life of 17 hours. That includes three hours of playback through the earbuds and an additional 14 hours of charge from the case.
Realme Buds Air available in three colors – white, black, and Realme’s iconic yellow. The Realme Buds Air will be priced at ₹3,999 (~$56) and you will also be able to buy a single earbud or the case separately if you lose them. They will be available starting December 23rd via Flipkart.
OPPO recently held the OPPO Inno Day event in China, where the company announced some of its key products coming along in early 2020. These include a new smartwatch, AR glasses, and a 5G CPE Hub. OPPO also mentioned “smart wireless headphones”, but declined to give further information on the same. At the APAC Strategy Launch in Malaysia, OPPO has provided more details, including the name of the product and what it looks like.
The OPPO Enco Free are truly wireless earphones that will use low-latency dual-pass Bluetooth technology for connection and are armed with “ultra-dynamic” speakers. The devices also boast of functions like AI voice noise reduction and sliding touch control.
It isn’t immediately clear if the OPPO Enco Free are identical to the Realme Buds Air, but they do possess similarities. OPPO plans to launch the Enco Free headphones in the APAC region in January 2020 at a price of RM 499 (approximately US $120). The prices in other regions will be announced at a later date. Even comparing from a purely pricing perspective, the Enco Free are about double the converted pricing of the Realme Buds Air, which gives us reason to believe that the Enco Free is likely to come with additional technologies that justify the higher pricing.
OPPO and its offshoot Realme are marking their entry into the truly wireless earphone segment with the launch and unveiling of their respective products. Realme has taken center stage in India for its Realme X2 launch today, and the independent company is also taking this opportunity to announce the Realme Buds Air in the country. Meanwhile, at the APAC Strategy Launch in Malaysia, OPPO took the opportunity to reveal more details about the OPPO Enco Free.
Realme Buds Air
After establishing itself as a noteworthy smartphone company, Realme wants to evolve into a tech lifestyle brand. Today, along with the Realme X2, it launched a pair of truly wireless stereo earbuds. The Realme Buds Air have a striking resemblance to the first-gen Apple Airpods and come with features like touch controls and wireless charging. The Buds Air come with 12mm drivers, largest in the Realme Buds lineup, and a dynamic bass boost sound optimization specially tuned for Bollywood and Indian indie music.
The Buds Air come with smart pause and play which works with the help of optical proximity sensors on each of the earbuds. There’s touch control that works independently on each earpod, with support for play/pause, and forward. The Realme Buds Air come with a low-latency Gaming mode which can be activated by holding down on each of the earbuds. Additionally, the environmental noise-canceling microphones should provide for a clear sound during calls.
Each of the earbuds weighs only 4.2 grams and comes with a claimed battery life of 17 hours. That includes three hours of playback through the earbuds and an additional 14 hours of charge from the case.
Realme Buds Air available in three colors – white, black, and Realme’s iconic yellow. The Realme Buds Air will be priced at ₹3,999 (~$56) and you will also be able to buy a single earbud or the case separately if you lose them. They will be available starting December 23rd via Flipkart.
OPPO recently held the OPPO Inno Day event in China, where the company announced some of its key products coming along in early 2020. These include a new smartwatch, AR glasses, and a 5G CPE Hub. OPPO also mentioned “smart wireless headphones”, but declined to give further information on the same. At the APAC Strategy Launch in Malaysia, OPPO has provided more details, including the name of the product and what it looks like.
The OPPO Enco Free are truly wireless earphones that will use low-latency dual-pass Bluetooth technology for connection and are armed with “ultra-dynamic” speakers. The devices also boast of functions like AI voice noise reduction and sliding touch control.
It isn’t immediately clear if the OPPO Enco Free are identical to the Realme Buds Air, but they do possess similarities. OPPO plans to launch the Enco Free headphones in the APAC region in January 2020 at a price of RM 499 (approximately US $120). The prices in other regions will be announced at a later date. Even comparing from a purely pricing perspective, the Enco Free are about double the converted pricing of the Realme Buds Air, which gives us reason to believe that the Enco Free is likely to come with additional technologies that justify the higher pricing.
As the ongoing trade debacle between the US and Huawei unfolds rather slowly, Honor has continued to refocus some of its efforts in non-US related tech. That renewed focus has come in the form of an upgraded (and pretty impressive) Honor Band 5, and now a successor to the original Honor Magic Watch which launched late last year. The Honor Magic Watch 2, like its predecessor, runs LiteOS – not WearOS. Other specs include a 454 x 454, 1.39-inch full-color AMOLED display (for the 46mm version that we received), 4GB of onboard storage, and a 455mAh battery that gives up to 2 weeks of battery life.
There’s one severe consequence of LiteOS, and that consequence is that you can’t use WearOS apps here. It’s both as liberating and as restrictive as it sounds. WearOS has its problems, but is a deviation from it entirely a solution? The Honor Magic Watch 2 is a good product, but it’s absolutely not for tech enthusiasts that want to use their smartwatch as more than just a fancy timepiece.
About this review: I received the Honor Magic Watch 2 in Flax Brown from Honor on the 28th of November, 2019. I have used the device every day since receiving it. Honor is a sponsor of XDA, but they did not have any input on the content of this review.
The Honor Magic Watch 2 presents a rather inconspicuous design – at first glance, you wouldn’t pick up on the fact that it’s actually a smartwatch. The metal edges and static always-on display help it retain a real-watch look, along with a relatively classy strap as well. There are two crowns on the side which may seem weird at first, but it’s not too unusual even in real watches. The Flax Brown strap is genuine leather, so it’s not the highest of quality but it gets the job done. It’s comfortable to wear throughout the day which is the main thing.
The watch itself isn’t all too bulky. I’m used to the original Huawei Watch which is a small bit chunkier and definitely heavier, and it’s definitely something that you can forget is on your wrist. On the underside of the watch is a heart rate sensor, along with the charging pins too. As you may be used to with smartwatches, the Honor Magic Watch 2 charges in a small magnetic charging cradle. It’s pretty fast, which we’ll talk more about later.
The Honor Magic Watch 2 doesn’t have the most original design, but it doesn’t need to. Watch designs are inherently personal and subjective, so while I really like its design, you may not.
Charging and battery life
The Honor Magic Watch 2 has a huge focus on battery life, and with good reason. The 46mm version lasts approximately 14 days on a single charge, though around 7 if you have the always-on display enabled. The 42mm version lasts about 7 days from a single charge, with a similar cut down on battery life when always-on is enabled. It can charge in about an hour or so on a magnetic dock that it sits in, though it’s not wireless and connects to two pins on the underside of the watch. The magnetic dock is powered by USB-C. 2-week battery life is great, as I had to charge my OG Huawei Watch pretty much every day.
LiteOS
LiteOS is Huawei and Honor’s answer to WearOS. It’s a whole lot more locked down which means you won’t be able to just download and install Android apps on your watch. In fact, you can’t really download and install anything. You can’t even make custom watch faces – you’re restricted to whatever is in the Huawei Health app. I’ve noticed that new ones are added every few days, but I haven’t come across any that I really like yet. It’s kind of just dumb, to be honest. That’s not even my biggest gripe with how watch faces work at the moment.
On the Honor Magic Watch 2, you can enable an always-on static display, which makes sense for any modern smartwatch. Enabling it will approximately cut your battery life in half (from my admittedly short testing) but that’s worth it, at least to me. What I don’t understand is why the always-on display different from the currently enabled watch face. On WearOS, I’m used to watch faces having a dedicated AMOLED mode so that there isn’t a huge difference between active and standby usage. That’s not the case for the Honor Magic Watch 2, which has a separate standby watch face that can’t be changed. The transition looks pretty dumb as a result.
LiteOS does have some pretty neat features, but none that put it above WearOS for me. Raise to wake works as you’d expect, and when you feel a notification buzz, you can raise your wrist to view it. Because of how this feature works, whenever you raise your wrist you’ll be shown your most recent notification that you hadn’t looked at yet. The second crown button can also be bound to access any of LiteOS’s options. LiteOS has some nice ideas, but they’re all executed pretty poorly. The watch itself lags quite heavily at the best of times – trying to wake it from its static, always-on mode can take a second or two after pressing the crown, for example.
Workout mode
One of the Honor Magic Watch 2’s greatest selling points is its workout mode, which aims to entirely replace your smartphone for going on walks, running, and other fitness exercises too. It can get a GPS lock in about 30 seconds while entirely disconnected from your phone. It will then save the route that you take, along with pace information, heart rate statistics, and more. It will also alert you with average statistics thus far after every kilometer over the watch’s speaker, though I switched this off straight away. It’s pretty annoying and, in my opinion, not hugely useful. You can take a look at my stats below, where I left my phone to charge at a friend’s house on my university campus while walking around with a few friends and stopping off for a coffee.
There are also cycling modes, elliptical modes, hiking modes, triathlon, and more. What’s more, you can even copy music to the internal storage of your watch and pair a Bluetooth device to it to listen. If you want, either, you can also just use the built-in speaker to listen to music… though it’s really, really bad. I wouldn’t recommend using it for any music listening at all, you should just bring your phone with you or pair a set of Bluetooth earphones to your watch before heading out. The audio controls aren’t great though. The workout mode seems very well fleshed out, but its surrounding features are lacking. You can’t play music that isn’t in MP3 format, which means you can’t sync any songs from your Spotify library either, though that’s to be expected.
Heart rate monitoring
Just like on the Honor Band 5, the Honor Magic Watch 2 has a pretty well-built heart-rate monitor. While I obviously don’t have the professional equipment to check, it seems accurate. Health and fitness are both big focuses of the Honor Magic Watch 2, which we’ll show in some later sections as well. It tracks heart rate 24/7 unless you disable it, and it doesn’t seem to drain the battery all that much. The layout of the data in the Huawei Health app is easy to understand and doesn’t really leave any room for ambiguity.
Stress meter
A seemingly useless feature, the Honor Magic Watch 2 has a feature to tell you just how stressed you are. It calibrates based on a set of 12 (some pretty… personal) questions, to ascertain your typical stress level and outlook on life.
From there, it claims to understand when you are at your most stressed based on movement and heart rate. The scaling it uses appears quite arbitrary, as it uses a numbering system from 0 to 100 to determine your stress levels. Anything below 29 is considered “relaxed”, while a high of 54 is comfortably in the “normal” stage. Even as I write this review, it says that my stress level has spiked to 57 – whatever that means. That sounds even worse when, right before an exam that I had this morning, I was sitting at a consistent stress level of 15 for several hours.
Sleep
Just like Honor’s other wearable products, the Honor Magic Watch 2 can track your sleep and give you detailed information such as deep sleep, light sleep, and heart rate. It can also make suggestions as to how to improve your sleep, though none of them are really particularly tailored to you as an individual. Still, they might help someone. It can even detect naps as well, with seemingly reasonable accuracy.
Other features
The Honor Magic Watch 2 has a few other features too, including breathing exercises, a compass, and a weather app. The weather app pulls in information based on your current location, while the compass requires calibrating first. I didn’t have an actual compass on me to compare the output, but it did reasonably match what my phone said. The breathing exercises are exactly as they sound, and can be used to help with anxiety as a small animation also takes place on the display that you can focus on. Finally, there’s also a “Find my phone” feature, which does exactly what it says. Selecting it will make your phone begin to shout loudly “I’m heeeere” and ring until you pick it up or cancel it from your watch.
Conclusion
The Honor Magic Watch 2 is an interesting purchase. At a price of €179 for the 42mm and €189 for the 46mm though, it’s a tall order. It looks nice, but the software makes it unusable for anyone who wants a smartwatch that’s actually, well, smart. Coming from the OG Huawei Watch, it’s certainly been a change of pace. The bottom line is that if you’re looking for a nice looking watch with a heavy focus on fitness, then the Honor Magic Watch 2 might be worth checking out. The Magic Watch 2 is on sale in a few countries like Russia and Malaysia, through local partners. In the UK, you can get the Charcoal Black color variant on Amazon for £159.99 from December 20, 2019.