After an excruciatingly long wait, filled with teasers and speculations, the eagerly-anticipated OnePlus 2 was made official last week. The handset has already gathered a lot of interest and with limited availability, the OnePlus team has put up an invitation system for buying the phone, just like it did with the OnePlus One.

This is certainly not an ideal way of selling hardware, but the company clearly lacks the potential to cope with the demand for units. An initial batch of 30,000 phones was just snatched up from China in 64 seconds and it will take another week for more units to arrive.

However, there is another new addition to the invite system, put in place to encourage even more user involvement. If you refer a friend to the invite queue than you can bump yourself up in the list. This sounds exciting, but sadly has a major loophole that one eager OnePlus fan (and presumably others as well) managed to exploit. It lets you cheat the system and climb higher on the invite list by running a simple script.

Here is the rundown of what the hacker did. OnePlus has a simple endpoint set up to handle referrals. You just pass a friend's email address and your unique invite URL and if the other person signs up as well, then you go further up the list. This allows you to list random emails and theoretically boost your points in the system, but you can also go one step beyond.

Temporary email services such as mailinator allow you to not only setup an email address, but also access it from apps via an API. This allowed the hacker to write a script that first sends out referral links to randomly generated email addresses then simply open these emails and visit the included links, thus completing the referral.

This seems to be yielding major results, proving that the new invite system is quite fragile. The hacker even managed to DDOS endpoint by accident, so the whole thing seems to be really flimsy. There are fixes that could be implemented fairly easily, but the OnePlus team is yet to respond to the tweet by the guy who found the vulnerability, let alone take action.

Hopefully, the situation will be resolved soon and the queue flushed of fake referrals. We will keep you updated if more information on the story becomes available….

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Motorola has announced a new service in India called Moto Xpress. With this service, customers can get a Motorola representative at their doorstep in case there is any issue with their phone.

With Moto Xpress, all the customer has to do is call the Moto Xpress Service Booking number 011-41717124 and register the complaint, at which point a person will be dispatched to their address. Motorola claims that software and accessory related issues will be sorted on the spot and hardware issues will be fixed in up to 5 working days. Once the issue is fixed, the phone will be delivered back to the customer.

The service is currently only available in Delhi, Gurgaon, and NOIDA in India. Customers in these areas can available this service for Rs. 199 ($3) per…

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Gionee has announced the new Marathon M4 in India. The phones comes with a 5000mAh that claims to provide 50 hours of talk time and 440 hours of standby time.

The M4 has a 5.0-inch 720p AMOLED display, 1.3GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB storage with microSD support, 8 megapixel rear camera, 5 megapixel front camera, dual SIM, LTE, and Android 5.0.

The phone is priced at Rs. 15,499 ($243) and will be available in black and…

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MIUI's current sixth version has been around for about a year now and Xiaomi is already gearing up for the next major release.

Today the company teased an upcoming launch event for MIUI 7 with a set of posters and photos of a peculiar and quite elaborate invitation to the venue. The OS will be unveiled on August 13 in Beijing and sadly, that is all we currently know about MIUI 7.

The current version 6 is based on Android 5.0, so 5.1.1 is a good guess for the core of MIUI 7. Also, previous rumors have speculated that Xiaomi's next flagship device – the Mi 5 will be the first to run the new OS out of the box, so our first encounter with MIUI 7 is shaping up to be on a powerhouse platform, allegedly employing Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 820 chip.

Needless to say, Xiaomi's loyal online community is already keeping busy with speculations on upcoming features. If you are interested in pitching in some guesses, you can check the source link below and we will have more details from the event itself next week.

Source |…

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Google has released this month's Android platform distribution numbers, revealing that Lollipop – which is the latest iteration of its mobile operating system – is now powering 18.1% of all active Android devices worldwide. That is up from 12.4% in June, when the numbers were last reported.

Leading the pack, however, is KitKat, which is currently installed on 39.3% of the devices, marginally up from the 39.2% figure that was reported in month of June. Jelly Bean's share, on the other hand, has fallen significantly, with 33.6% Android devices currently running it, down from 37.4% reported the last time.

Other Android versions, including Ice Cream Sandwich, Gingerbread, and Froyo are currently powering 4.1%, 4.6%, and 0.3% of all active Android devices, respectively.

Source |…

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San Jose-based start-up Matchstick has announced that its $25 Firefox OS-powered HDMI dongle, which was announced back in September last year, has been cancelled. The company cited its struggle with the DRM development as the reason behind the move.

"After struggling with the DRM development based on Firefox OS for most of this year, we realize continued development of DRM, though showing early signs of promise, will be a long and difficult road," the start-up said in a blog post announcing the news.

"We have come to the conclusion that we will not be able to reliably predict the completion date of the DRM development without significantly more research, development and integration."

It's worth mentioning that Matchstick had raised nearly half-a-million dollars for the project through its Kickstarter campaign. Those who backed the project will receive 100% refund, although the process may take up to 60 days, the company…

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HTC's One M9 has already received its update to Android 5.1 Lollipop in the US – whether from AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, or even HTC itself for the developer edition of the phone.

And thankfully it's now set to become available in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa as well. The rollout for the new software will commence in these regions tomorrow, according to Graham Wheeler, HTC's Product and Service Director.

He just excitedly tweeted the news, letting all One M9 owners in the aforementioned regions prepare for the big day tomorrow. There have been no additional details made public about the update at this time, but at least we now know it's close.

We assume that Android 5.1 will reach HTC One M9 units sold in other regions too at some point in the future, but it's still unclear when that will…

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