Posts by Etoniru Chibueze- XDA Developers

Debate: Modular Smartphones, Are we Ready for Them? Are They Ready for Us?

Etoniru Chibueze May 27, 2016

Google's Project Ara is the first major move towards achieving consistent, thoughtful and standardized modularity on smartphones. Announced in October 2013, Google envisioned a phone that can be torn apart and brought back together again. The idea is brilliant; think of the possibilities, users can piece together the ideal smartphone to perfectly meet their needs. On...

How do YOU Define Smartphone Brackets (Mid-range, etc)? Price, or Specs?

Etoniru Chibueze May 16, 2016

The open nature of Android has led to many things. While the fragmentation experienced in the ecosystem can be frustrating due to slow updates, developers also have similar headaches to developing an Android app and having to work across different software versions and hardware configurations. The differentiation has also become notable due to thousands of manufacturers, as devices...

UX Before Specs: The Transition We Needed

Etoniru Chibueze April 25, 2016

Once upon a time, when a new flagship device was to be released, we would be anticipating a big bump in specs. Those days, we all would salivate at the thought of using that phone with higher RAM's, more cores, more megapixels and all that good stuff. A very good depiction of this trend is the transition...

What Encryption Means For WhatsApp And Its 1 Billion Users

Etoniru Chibueze April 18, 2016

Some days ago, WhatsApp introduced the long awaited end-to-end encryption to all users. We heard the process has been going on for a while now , with Android-to-Android messages encrypted; now the encryption feature has reached almost every WhatsApp user out there, regardless of their mobile platform though one has to be running the latest version of...

Opinion: Smaller Brands Might Offer Clones, but They also Maximize Niches

Etoniru Chibueze March 30, 2016

When you hear names such as Elephone, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Gionee, Infinix, TECNO, Meizu, Oppo etc. What is the first thing that comes to your mind? Do you see them as those Chinese phone brands that make low priced smartphones? Do you see them as "experts" at cloning (a dubious virtue, admittedly) smartphones from the more-popular...

What Made Choosing Your Smartphone so Hard?

Etoniru Chibueze March 27, 2016

The smartphone ecosystem has changed so much in the past five years, and we have come to point where mobile devices have become so unique and differentiated. Today there are so many varieties of smart phones one can ever think of. There are thousands of manufacturers churning out devices, and almost on a daily basis, new...

Intel Chips on Android: What are the Prospects? Can They Ever Get to the Top?

Etoniru Chibueze March 18, 2016

For every smartphone out there, there is a processors or SoC (System-on-a-Chip) powering it. Most of us here already know what it means, but to fulfill all righteousness, know that SoCs are synonymous with our heart beat. There are whole lot of mobile SoC's out there made by different manufacturers, though most them are unheard of,...

Microsoft Universal Apps & Continuum: Why Did Microsoft Not Squeeze their Potential?

Etoniru Chibueze March 11, 2016

Microsoft is one company that has hands on many, many things. To an extent, this has worked for them, but then, on some other fronts they have failed so woefully. The list of failed projects from Microsoft are endless, only rivaled by Google's -- on PC, mobile, and the list of failed startups under their belt Its...

Has Google Failed with Android One?

Etoniru Chibueze March 6, 2016

It was the summer of 2014, when Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, thought of ways to bring the internet (and most importantly, Google services) to developing countries using his home country India as a springboard before spreading to other parts of the world. That need to "enlighten" the majorly untapped parts of the world -- this...