Author: Clinton

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has released their Q2 2017 financial report and it is, in a word, impressive.  The company had earning of $26.01 billion US for the quarter, up some 21% over the same quarter in 2016.  This beat analyst expectations which had pegged earnings at just over $25 billion.

Operating income was down to $4.132 billion with an overall operating income margin of 16%.  Both of these were down from the same quarter in 2016.  Net Income was down to $3.54 billion for the quarter.

Ah yes, a fresh new Easter Egg!  If you have Developer Preview 4 of Android O on your device, you have a new Easter Egg to find in the Settings.  For the first three DPs there was a cat emoji but that is now replaced with an octopus that you can interact with on your phone.

For those who don’t know how to get to it, it is easy.  In Settings go to System>About Phone then tap on the Android Version 3-4 time really fast.  This will bring up an Android O logo.  Now tap on that 5 times real fast then hold it.  It will disappear and bada-bing, you have the octopus floating on your screen.

The final beta build of Android O has been released today by the Android team to those in the Android Beta Program.  Build OPP4.170623.014 is rolling out to devices now with it having the final API levels (API level 26) along with finishing touches on the platform overall.

In a post on the Android Developer blog, Vice President of Engineering David Burke indicated that this is being considered by Google as a Release Candidate.  That means that it is both very stable and very little, barring a major bug being found, will stop it from being released in short order.

Developer Preview 4 is a release candidate build of Android O that you can use to complete your development and testing in time for the upcoming official release. It includes the final system behaviors, the latest bug fixes and optimizations, and the final APIs (API level 26)

To be clear, the new APIs were introduced in Developer Preview 3 so this confirms that they are indeed final.

If you are a T-Mobile subscriber and have a Samsung Galaxy Note 5, there is a minor update rolling out that should hit your phone this week.  The update is build N920TUVS4EQG1 for those keeping score and weighs in at only 25MB.  The hint of the type of update is in the size of the install package.  At 25MB, this is addressing minor bugs and issues with the phone and isn’t going to be uplifting big changes.

This is also backed up by the vague release notes from T-Mobile on the update.  They only list “various system improvements” in those notes.

For those of you who have the LG V10 on the T-Mobile network here in the US, today’s a good day.  The Android Nougat 7.0 update is finally rolling out to your device and it should be hitting everyone’s V10 over the course of the next week.  The update is build H90130b for those keeping score at home and it weighs in at 1.38GB in size.  You will have to download it via Wi-Fi and you need to have at least 50% battery remaining in order to install it.

The update brings Nougat to the phone and all of the goodness that the update brings to any Android phone.  Those features include things like improved Doze, split-screen viewing and a host of other visual and performance changes.  You can read my review of it to get all the details.  You can get all of the details on this particular software release from the T-Mobile site.

For those of you who have the Samsung Chromebook Pro, today’s a good day.  After a wait of some six weeks, Chrome OS 59 is finally shipping to your devices.  Build 59 was released back on June 12th and it was widely available for the majority of devices.  The Chromebook Pro was not on that list which, at the time, wasn’t a big shocker.  It, after all, is one of a handful of Chromebooks that runs Android apps natively and it was assumed the build would come for it in a week or two.  But it took a lot longer.

There is no official reason for why the delay happened but the update is now rolling out to these devices.  The team over at Chrome Unboxed have confirmed they received the update on their Samsung Chromebook Pro.  If you have the Chromebook Pro, just type chrome://help in the browser and check for the update to install it.