Tag Archives: GOOGLE

Living with HUAWEI Mobile Services and AppGallery Part 2: Adjusting Over the Weekend

April 1, 2020 Darwin Sucipto Leave a comment

So last Friday we started on a series to document how we will start living with a HUAWEI smartphone free from the clutches of the evil Google ecosystem. No, they are not really evil; I am just trying to be a bit dramatic here. You get the idea though. Modern HUAWEI smartphones today only come with HUAWEI’s very own Mobile Services and AppGallery; no Google Mobile Services and Play Store. Kind of sad, really.

Last week we managed to download Facebook and WhatsApp. We did not have Instagram, or Netflix, or Telegram. In short, there were plenty of apps we did not have. Did we miss them? Yes, very much, I had Instagram and Netflix, and Prime Video installed in other devices just to scroll through them.

I Still Miss Social Media

In truth though, I am not that big of a social media person. While I do scroll through social media from time to time, I seldom spend more than 15 minutes scrolling through Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, and even Snapchat. I have never logged onto Tik Tok.

That does not mean that I can completely ignore all this social media though. Of course, if I am being honest, I do miss the apps. The idea of just seeing what other people are up to in their own life; that can still be quite fun, and quite traumatising depending on the contents.

Facebook can be quite enough though, especially with Facebook Watch and the countless videos on the platform. That is technically all the entertainment I got from the HUAWEI Nova 7i. To keep in touch with my friends, I have WhatsApp. Then again, I turn on my WhatsApp on desktop barely looked at my smartphone when it comes to messages.

Exploring the AppGallery A Little Deeper

Still, things are not so bad after scrolling through the AppGallery once more. There are apps in the smartphone after all. Social media apps include Snapchat, Tik Tok (of course), and WeChat (of course). Nope, nothing else that I use as far as I can tell. There is even TrueCaller on the AppGallery.

Things are looking a bit up now that I scroll through a little bit more through the AppGallery. You can find Viu, iflix, and some cinema booking apps within the AppGallery to start with. No, no Netflix or even Amazon Video Prime. For now, iflix and Viu would do. I personally don’t have a viu account, so I stick to iflix. We are currently under the Movement Control Order (MCO), so I cannot go for movies.

If not though, I can do some window shopping via Zalora, Lazada, and even Shopee. There are even some games that you might be familiar with. One of them is Cut the Rope 2 within the AppGallery. You can even find Lords Mobile and Fortnite on the device. So to be fair, you are not really getting shorthanded in terms of entertainment here.

For productivity, they have WPS Office on the AppGallery. While some say that WPS Office app is better than the original Microsoft apps, I would respectfully disagree. The modern Microsoft apps are now so much better, and so much more optimised. At the same time, it is easier to sync your Microsoft apps to OneDrive than anything else. This is a problem on the device though; there are almost no Microsoft apps here.

I say almost because there is a particularly useful Microsoft app that we love. That app is Microsoft’s Translation app. In our opinion, this is the best translation app that mankind has ever produced. It is accurate and works with plenty of accents. Still, we are not here for the Microsoft Translate app.

It is Still Android, Just Without Google

The apps that are downloaded are also very similar to the Android apps you find on Google Play Store. The EMUI 10 is based on Android 10 after all. Still, we found these apps. Which are great. If you are worried about bringing them out as your electronic wallet, you would be relieved to find Touch n’ Go app in there and Boost app. Grab is making its way on AppGallery. Still, the two largest e-wallets in Malaysia has a foothold in HUAWEI’s AppGallery. That means the HUAWEI Mobile Services (HMS), and AppGallery cannot be that bad, right? Too early to tell in my opinion.

Still, we are going to dive a little deeper than that. For now, that is all we can walk away with. Stay tuned for the next part.

Android, Editorial, Mobile

Living with HUAWEI Mobile Services and AppGallery Part 1: Starting Life Without Google

March 27, 2020 Darwin Sucipto Leave a comment

Last night we saw a big fan fare of a smartphone launch. It was the very anticipated HUAWEI photography flagship, the HUAWEI P40 series. The ones we are going to see earlier is the HUAWEI P40 and P40 Pro. There is a third model, the P40 Pro+ which will be coming way later. Still, HUAWEI finally announced their first 2020 flagship.

The HUAWEI P40 is really everything that you might want in a HUAWEI flagship photography king. If you owned the P20, it is really the smartphone that you naturally want to upgrade to. There is one thing that it does not come with though: Google.

This means that the HUAWEI P40 series will not have Google’s very handy Play Store and is stuck to the ways of HUAWEI’s own proprietary Mobile Services (HMS) and its AppGallery. We are not saying that it is a terrible thing though. It may sound bad, but you never know until you try right?

The Test Bed – The HUAWEI Nova 7i

Our test bed is a HUAWEI Nova 7i. In some markets, they know it as the HUAWEI P40 Lite. We do not understand that half the time, so we will just stick to Malaysia’s official name for it, we guess; the HUAWEI Nova 7i.

If you really have to know the specs of this MYR 1,099 device, it is is a mid-range smartphone that packs a relatively punchy HiSilicon Kirin 810 system on a chip (SoC) and supported by 8GB of RAM and you get 128GB of storage with that. The internals push EMUI 10.0.1.108 that is also based on Android 10. So, when we say that it comes completely devoid of Google stuff, I did not forget that this is still an Android device. We just mean that the HUAWEI Nova 7i comes devoid of Google’s important frameworks that includes the Google Play Store.

We are not focusing on the hardware capabilities of the device, though. So, it does not really matter if the HUAWEI Nova 7i comes with a 48-Megapixel camera and a Full HD display. What matters is that it represents the collective of modern HUAWEI devices that are in the market right now, starting with the era of the HUAWEI Mate 30 series. They all have one thing in common, and that is HMS and AppGallery.

The focus of this write-up then, is what we can do with HMS and what AppGallery can offer us. On paper, it does not look too good for the write-up. The HUAWEI AppGallery is the third largest app marketplace behind Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Which may not sound like much, because there are not many major app marketplaces in the market. Since there are two major camps of smartphone Operating Systems (OS) in the market, the two largest ones are quite a given.

Starting-up HUAWEI’s EMUI 10.0.1

Let us still give this a chance though. We fire up the device and everything feels just like a regular Android smartphone at first. It is an Android 10 based system after all, so it starts up very similar to any Android. Except, you do not sign in with your Google account. You sign in with or sign up for a HUAWEI ID account. We had one, so that was simple.

If you are familiar with an EMUI device that has Google Play Store installed on it, like the HUAWEI P30 series, navigating the smartphone should be nothing new really. It is still a very familiar EMUI to the EMUI’s of the past; in that, there is no difference in experience at all. You cannot see Google’s Play Store on the home screen though. So far, so good; familiarity with the interface saves the face.

First set-up

No Play Store, no problem. There the HUAWEI AppGallery. First thing I usually do with a new smartphone is download all the essential apps I need. Those apps are Whatsapp, Telegram, Slack, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Out of all those apps listed, I only found two – Facebook and Whatsapp. They are not loaded into the AppGallery though.

What happens is that the HUAWEI AppGallery will lead you to a third-party site to download the apk files of Facebook and Whatsapp. These are the only two I found so far. Not looking good now. When we checked in, HUAWEI says that these two sideloaded apps are safe because the AppGallery is the one that leads us to the site.

That is not to say that you cannot sideload the rest of the apps that I listed down though. You can still download the apk files from other sites, no problem. Just be wary of the sources though.

Still, we worked with the two apps that we just downloaded. They both work just like the Android version app should work. They look the same too. The only question now is whether we can keep up with the most current update packages or not.

Day 0 Wrap-up

We wrap the test up with that for now. We got our smartphone running with the most essential WhatsApp up. Even Facebook is there, so far that is the entertainment we are getting for the night.

Still, we are going to try to live through the HMS and AppGallery as long as we can and go in-depth. The HMS is available on every new HUAWEI smartphone you buy today. Yes, they are all running on EMUI 10 now too.

Still, the HUAWEI P40 that was announced last night is not just that. When you buy a new HUAWEI smartphone today, you get a free 50GB HUAWEI Cloud Storage subscription for the next year. If you already own a HUAWEI smartphone device, you already have 5GB of HUAWEI Cloud Storage for free anyway.

We will be looking to more apps next week with the HUAWEI Nova 7i. Until then, stay safe during this whole Movement Control Order period. To the ones outside of Malaysia, you stay safe too.

Computers, Health, Mobile, News

COVID-19 Hits Google Hard – Google Next Cloud Goes Completely Online and I/O is Cancelled

March 4, 2020 Darwin Sucipto Leave a comment

At this point of time, COVID-19 has claimed over 3,000 lives globally. These are known deaths caused by COVID-19 and there may be more than that. To be honest too, this is a very difficult write-up. Not because there is very little information to work with. It is just the fact that COVID-19 news are not getting any better. There is a glimmer of hope though; WHO claims that COVID-19 containment and treatment is very viable.

Still, COVID-19, or more commonly known as Coronavirus at this point has claimed more than just lives. It is affecting communities and commerce as well. Of course it would, people run these businesses and communities, people are getting infected and therefore sick; conducting business activities then is difficult.

We saw Apple getting affected earlier on with their China stores temporarily closing. Foxconn, their manufacturing plant had also stopped operating at some point. Mobile World Congress 2020 has been cancelled; Geneva Motorshow is also being torn down as we speak because they cancelled the event at the very last minute. Even Formula 1 is being heavily affected; they lost China GP this year and who knows which other GP is being cancelled due to the global emergency that is COVID-19.

Plenty are hopeful that the disease will be contained and cured by June or July. That is why some events has been postponed to then. Even Computex 2020 seems to be happening still. The situation now is not very encouraging though.

This week alone we see more victims to COVID-19. On top of new confirmed deaths around the world we see Microsoft’s MVP physical event going completely digital. Facebook is also cancelling the F8 summit. Even Adobe is not spared; Adobe is having their Summit announcements completely online too. The hardest of all is Google having to cancel both their big conferences.

Google has cancelled their Cloud Next event earlier on this week. They announced thought that the conference will be a completely online affair. There was also a sort of expectation that some of the things that would be covered on Cloud Next would appear in Google’s I/O which was still reported to be happening. This morning proved our optimism wrong though. Google is cancelling the Google I/O conference; their biggest developer conference of the year has been cancelled.

If we are right, we are seeing Google’s latest Android 11 on the big stage of Google I/O. It looks like we are going to have to see it on an online stage instead; they show must go on, as they say. There is no final confirmation yet on the online streaming of Google I/O yet though. We are expecting them to go online because Google is completely equipped to livestream all their conferences, which they have done before anyway. Of course, it helps that they own YouTube anyway.

Google is not the first to be hit strongly by COVID-19. We highly doubt that Google will be the last one. We are expecting the Olympics committee to make an announcement soon regarding the Summer Olympics 2020 in Japan. For all you know, Japan might be the one that makes the announcement of a border containment. Still, these are just speculations; take it with a pinch of salt. Not Google’s cancellations though, those are confirmed.

Source: Google, Tech Crunch, 9to5 Google

News

HUAWEI Mobile Services Teased For HONOR 9X Pro Global Launch

February 24, 2020 Jonathan Tay Leave a comment

The HONOR 9X Pro has already been lauched in the Chinese domestic market and was expected to make its international debut at MWC2020; Wait didn’t MWC 2020 get cancelled? Unfortunately, yes it has been officially cancelled due to safety concerns over the ongoing COVID-19 virus outbreak.

In light of these developments, HUAWEI and HONOR are going to be launching their products via a live stream. HONOR’s launching will be on February 24 at 6:30PM CET (11pm IST) with not one but two products. The live stream of their launch can be found on their Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even on their global website.

HONOR 9X Pro will be launched together with HONOR’s laptop, the MagicBook. Even though the HONOR 9X Pro is not a new phone, it is will be coming the latest HUAWEI Mobile Services (HMS). This phone is also the first phone for HONOR to launch with HMS.

The HUAWEI Mate 30 had a taste of HMS in countries such as Spain, Indonesia and Malaysia but the HONOR 9X Pro will feature a revamped version of the HMS. HUAWEI has been working tirelessly on the HMS ecosystem as it has to replace Google’s apps and services in hopes to keep existing users and hopefully attract new users too.

The phone itself was released in August of 2019. The 9X Pro runs on the Kirin 810 processor which is touted to offer the ultimate gaming experience, backed up powerful performance. Even though the processor launched back in August, it has only just made its debut in HUAWEI’s line up with the launch of the Nova 7i.

Other than the phone, let’s not forget that they will also be launching the HONOR MagicBook that will also play its role in the while HMS ecosystem. Even though it will be in the HMS ecosystem, the MagicBook will be the first device by HONOR to run Windows 10.

Editorial, News, techENT Download, Video

techENT Download | Coronavirus hits Apple, Windows Gets a Makeover and more

Video February 24, 2020 Darwin Sucipto Leave a comment

We wrap up the third week of #February 2020 in this #techENT #techENTDownload #techenttv! Boy, hasn’t it been a little quiet in tech this wee?. No matter though, we still bring you the latest things you need to know for the week starting with #Google banning over 600 apps in their #PlayStore to #Cadillac launching their brand new and first even electric vehicle for the world to see; Malaysia might not get it though. Still, at least we are definitely getting into the #Samsung #GalaxyZFlip!

We’ve started a new #Podcast #techntonic #techntonicpodcast and its available on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Breaker, and other podcasting host channels! If we are not yet on your favourite channel yet, let us know in the comments so that we can work our way there!

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