Author: Clinton

If there is any doubt that Razer has intended their first smartphone, the Razer Phone, to be a premium gaming and entertainment experience for their customers, you can put them to rest.  Today’s announcement around Netflix will end all doubt of the company’s intention.

Today at CES, the company announced that the Razer Phone will be the first smartphone to deliver Netflix content in both HDR video as well as Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio.

“We engineered the Razer Phone to handle HDR video and sound like no other phone on the market,” says Min-Liang Tan, Razer co-founder and CEO. “We are incredibly excited to deliver Netflix entertainment on a smartphone like never before, enabling us to take full measure of the Razer Phone’s HDR10-enabled display and dual-firing, front-facing Dolby-optimized speakers and THX-certified headphone connectivity.”

The phone joins several other devices in the market that already provide Netflix in HDR video including the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel 2 series.  But Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio is a different and more difficult matter.

Google is in the process of rolling out a new folder specific search function for Google Drive online.  The new feature will allow you to right-click a folder stored on your Drive and search only within that folder, not your entire cloud storage.

The idea of course it give you quicker search results if you have a lot of content stored in Google Drive or on Team Drives if you are a G Suite domain utilizing that feature.  It is a feature that has been sorely missed by many, especially customers who are utilizing Team Drives in their organization.

As Google Assistant has grown in capabilities, both natively as well as integration from developer and manufactures, sorting out what Assistant can do has become increasingly challenging.  I have several friends who have Google Home and when they ask me if Assistant can do this or that, my default answer to this point has been, “I don’t know.  Just ask it and let’s see if it can do it.”  Now that is going to change.

Google has turned on a new Google Assistant actions page which, in one location, shows you all of the actions that Assistant can perform.  You will see the over 1 million actions that can be done natively or through 3rd party integrations.

Google Text-to-Speech is an underlying app that your Android phone and apps on your phone leverages to read text on your screen.  It is mostly used for those who need to enable accessibility for vision challenges and is generally one of those “set it and forget it” type apps.

That doesn’t mean Google isn’t keeping things up to day with it however.  A new build, version 3.14.9 for those keeping score at home, is rolling out with support for three new languages.  Those new languages are Estonian, Romanian and Slovak, further expanding the global reach of the app.

File this one under the “yeah, that makes sense” category.  Google has made a slew of announcements regarding Google Assistant today at CES 2018.  A lot of new products are coming out with Assistant support and with the AI-driven Assistant on over 400 million devices already, it is getting close being everywhere.

Now Google has decided to call your requests of Google Assistant what they really are:  Actions.  Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana have skills.  Assistant has Actions.  Google is referring to anything Assistant can do natively or through a third party integration as an Action going forward.

Google has released the December 2017 Android Distribution Report this week.  The report reflects the version of Android on devices that visited the Google Play Store for the 7 day period ending January 8, 2018 and it shows that while Android Oreo was only one of two versions that saw growth for the reporting period, that growth is anemic.  And that is putting it nicely.

Oreo gained just .2% in this month’s report, with both 8.0 and 8.1 accounting for a total of just .7% of device share.  The only other gainer in the report, Android Nougat, gained 3% and now sits at 26.3% for device share.  That moves Nougat into second behind Android Marshmallow as the most widely used version of the platform.