When Samsung announced its Galaxy Note 8, probably a lot of people got intimidated by its supposed price range and so have decided not to buy it for now. But they were probably interested in the built-in apps that they saw for the phablet. Some industrious folks over at XDA Developers have now managed to port some of these apps so that people who have Samsung devices running on Nougat will be able to use the apps, provided they have a rooted device.
This is pretty cool as they were able to extract, port, and then bundle these apps into a custom firmware file, all within four days of the launch of the Note 8. Included in this are:
• Phone and Contacts
• Incall UI
• Browser
• Clock
• Calendar
• TouchWiz Home
• Edge Lightning
• Task Edge
• People Edge
• S Finder
• Samsung Themes Store
• Smart Manager
• Keyboard
• Gallery
• Calculator
• Weather
The pre-requisites before you can install the firmware is that the phone has to be a Samsung device running on Android 7.0 Nougat and above, and you have to be on TWRP recovery and root. Download the ZIP file and then uninstall your current Samsung Browser and Calculator. You would have to boot your device into recovery and then press on Install. Select the zip file that was downloaded and then flash it. Restart your phone to complete installation.
In theory, having this firmware installed should make you feel like you have a Galaxy Note 8, but without the S Pen and the other features that the apps couldn’t capture. Oh, and you didn’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on it.
SOURCE: XDA Developers
