Author: Clinton

When it comes to video calls on any app, the question for many is just how much data is this app consuming?  In the case of Google Duo, it isn’t much for what you are getting.  Google’s Justin Uberti, a principle engineer with the company and the technical lead on Duo, Tweeted that in the case of the video calling app, it consumes about 8MB per minute.

Current usage for video calls when on cell data is about 8 MB/min, similar to Netflix ‘medium’ quality.

— Justin Uberti (@juberti) July 22, 2017

That means that a 5 minute call is going to consume roughly 40MB of your data plan while an hour long call would be roughly 480MB.  So is that a lot?  Well, not really for the quality of the calls that Duo produces.

Today’s Deal is on a great accessory for those who don’t like having your phone laying on your desk or nightstand.  The Lamicall S1 Phone Stand is made of aluminum, has cushioning to protect your phone and comes in four different colors for $9.99 today on Amazon.  The stand is designed to hold any Android device or iPhone as the padded cradle is 15mm in depth.  This means it will fit a Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S6, S7 or S8 and an iPhone.  In fact, most of these devices will fit on the cradle in their cases.

The Lamicall stand is designed to give you a great viewing angle for your video calls or for watching streaming content.  It is also compact.  It stands only 3.35″ tall and has a base of 2.95″ x 3.94″ so it won’t take up a lot of space on your desk.  The bottom of the stand has four anti-skid pads on it to keep it from moving around and from scratching up your desk.

While overall a minor update, the latest build of Google Calendar for Android brings a long desired feature by users:  Drag & Drop moving of events.  The new feature is in version 5.7.29 and that update is now rolling out into the Play Store.  Expect the update to hit your phones and tablets over the course of the next few days.

With this new feature, when you are in any view except monthly, you can now tap & hold then move an event on your calendar to a new time or day.  No more having to go into the event and manually edit the times or day.  Once you have moved it, anyone who is associated with that event will automatically get an update emailed to them of the day and/or time change.

Good news this morning for those of you who have a Samsung Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge on T-Mobile.  The carrier is now rolling out the July Android Security Update to these devices and it should be hitting yours sometime this week.  The updates are small, just over 50MB for each of the devices, and mostly focus on brining the July 2017 update to the devices.  There are a few minor fixes and improvements too but the security patch is the big news.

For those with a Galaxy S6, you are looking for version G920TUVS5FQG1 while the S6 Edge will be getting version G925TUVS5FQG1.  Both of these devices received the Android Nougat 7.0 update from the carrier last month.

Google’s consumer messaging app, Google Allo, has another update rolling out that brings the ability to uplift your chat conversation to a video call with a single tap.  The update, version 14.0.037 for those keeping score, now has a button in the upper-right corner in the messaging screen that to launch Google Duo.  So if text-based messaging isn’t getting the conversation done, you can now place a Duo video call without having to launch it separately.  The new feature is aimed to bring the two apps more closely together but also to make communication more frictionless.

For those new to Android, Google Allo is Google’s text-based messaging app while Google Duo is their video calling app.  Both are focused on the consumer market while Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Video, the completely revamped versions of what is now known as Hangouts Classic, is for the enterprise space.

After a delay of 3 months, Samsung Bixby is finally rolling out to the Galaxy S8 here in the United States and in South Korea.  The update to bring Bixby to the S8 devices and brings along all of the normal features of a personal assistant along with a few Samsung features too.

Bixby was heavily touted in the lead up to the launch of the Galaxy S8 but expectations fell well short when the device shipped without the assistant.  Indeed, the dedicated hardware button on the S8 phones for Bixby couldn’t even be remapped initially although some developers found ways around it – which Samsung kept knocking down.  Without remapping, you pretty much had a useless button on your phone until now.