Author: Clinton

With the launch of the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL yesterday, there are still things being uncovered about the new phones and Google’s support of them.  One thing that has come to light is the length of the upgrades and support windows for these new devices.

Traditionally, Google has had their support windows for 2 years.  That meant that you would get two major versions of Android on that device and then another year of security updates.  For example, the Google Pixel XL, my phone, shipped with Android Nougat in 2016.  That means I will get Android Oreo (which I have), and Android P.  That’ll be it for major updates but I’ll get another year of security updates.

For the Pixel 2 lineup, Google is now extending that major update window to three years.  That means that the phones announced yesterday could well see Android R.

Hold on to your wallets folks, a price increase is coming to Netflix.  The company has indicated that the price increase will be announced on October 19th with notifications going out to customers.  The new pricing will go into effect on your next billing cycle after the 19th.

The price increase is not impacting all of the tiers of service with the entry level subscription remaining at its current price of $7.99.  The Standard Plan, Netflix’s most popular and the entry level for HD streaming, will be going up by $1 to $10.99 per month.  For the Premium tier, which gives you 4K HDR streaming, it is going up by $2 to $13.99.

With all of the announcements around Google Home and Google Assistant yesterday at Google’s big product event, it is not surprising that we are starting to see new functionality come into the products.  One of the new functions that you can do with Assistant is send information that you have searched for to your phone so you can get to it while on the go.  It saves you from having to do the search again from your phone.

How it works is pretty straight forward.  On your Google Home, ask Assistant about something and then follow it up with “OK Google, send this to my phone”.  For example, “OK Google, what was the score of the Rockies game?”  Google will give you the sad loss of the Rockies to the Diamondbacks last night.  As soon as Assistant finishes, say “OK Google, send this to my phone” and the results are sent to you phone via a notification.  Tap that notification and you can get that information.

A couple of days ago I told you about an error message that some Project Fi users received erroneously.  The error message indicated that their data usage was being throttled due to high usage and, in some case, users SIMs were disabled for a period of time.  The Fi team indicated that they knew of the issue as it was a test of a new feature that was never intended to leak outside.

Now they are trying to make it up to users who were impacted.  Multiple Project Fi users have reported receiving an email from Google’s MVNO, apologizing for the error and providing them a $10 credit towards their next month’s bill.  It’s a small gesture but one that will likely go a long way for the majority of users out there for the trouble they encountered.

After digging into the specifications of the Google Pixel 2 phones, it was discovered that both devices support eSIM technology.  But Google was quick to point out that the new electronic SIM will only be activated and used for Project Fi customers for now.

eSIM, as the name suggests, is an electronic SIM card.  It replaces the physical plastic card that you get from your carrier, including Project Fi.  It is a reasonably new standard and the first consumer device to leverage it was the Apple Watch series 3.  That hasn’t gone as smoothly as Apple has wanted which is likely one of the reasons that Google is limiting it to just their own service for now.

Now that the dust has settled a bit from yesterday’s massive Google product event, we can start digging into the details.  One of the items in the afterglow that caught a lot of people’s attention has to do with Google Photos and the new Pixel 2 lineup.

As readers are likely aware, with the original Pixel and Pixel XL, users had unlimited uploading of original quality photos to Google Photos.  On every other device out there this counts against your Google Drive quota (remember, Google Photos leverages your Google Drive for storage) so it was a nice perk to have indeed.  Everyone else has to use High Quality, a compression process that allows Google to look at the content of photos to train their AI, in order not to use their Drive quota.  Frankly, I use HQ on my other non-Pixel devices because the compression is pretty lossless, especially if photos are under 16MP.  The original Pixel and the Pixel 2 both have 12MP cameras so technically, there is no reason not to use HQ.

In the fine print yesterday it was discovered that for owners of the new Pixel phones, the Original Quality uploads will be available until 2020.  After that, uploads will start counting against your Drive quota.  This cause a lot of consternation for some but frankly, it isn’t a surprise or a big deal.