Author: Clinton

The 7th season of Game of Thrones starts on July 16th and I, like many, can’t wait!  The HBO series based on the books series, A Song of Ice and Fire from author George R.R. Martin and is one of the most acclaimed television series in history.  If you haven’t been watching GoT to this point, now is your chance to get caught up.

In the Google Play Store, you can now get all six of the first seasons on sale to get your binge watching in before next weekend.  The prices vary per season:  Season 1-2 are $18.99, Seasons 3-4 are $19.99 and Seasons 5-6 are $22.99.  There is also an option to buy all six seasons at once for $99.99.  Normally these seasons range from $28.99-$38.99 so the savings are signifiant.  The 6-season bundle is normally $139.99 so you are saving $40 during this sale.

There are no coupon codes are anything like that required.  Just go over to the Play Store and buy the seasons you want or need or get the entire series.  And binge away!

Winter is coming….

Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides all have an update rolling out in the Play Store for Android.  The update brings the normal raft of bug fixes and performance improvements but also has some new editing tools.

There are new toolbar items will allow you to more easily format tables, images and drawings within your Docs, Sheets or Slide documents.  The editing features are tools that have been on the web-based versions of the apps so these updates bring feature parity between the platforms.

Google has announced on the Google France blog that Google Home will be coming to the country starting August 3rd.  Initially it will be available online but will be followed up with in-store purchase options.  The price of the Google Assistant enabled smart speaker will be a maximum of €149, roughly $170.  That is substantially more than the current $129 price here in the United States.

Interestingly, Google Assistant is referred to as “Google Wizard” in the announcement.

Google has released the July Android Distribution Report for the 7 day period ending July 6, 2017.  The report shows that Android Nougat has finally broken through the 10% install base on devices that hit the Play Store during the week, topping out at 11.5%.  That is up 2% from the June report.  While good news, Nougat still lags far behind the top installed version, Marshmallow.  The report shows that Android 6.x was on 31.8% of devices hitting the store, up .6% over the June report.

All other previous versions of Android in the report saw declines in install base month-over month.

• Android Lollipop:  -.7%
• Android KitKat:  -.1%
• Android Jelly Bean:  -.7%
• Android Ice Cream Sandwich:  -.1%
• Android Gingerbread:  -.1%

In the case of Android Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread, both sit at .7% of install base.  Generally, Google stops counting it when it hits .1% or less so we will likely see these in the next few Android Distribution Reports.

The Google News & Weather app for Android has an update rolling out that brings some tweaks to the overall layout of the app as well as a new, bottom tab style navigation.  The update is version 3.3.1 for those keeping score at home and it is in the Play Store now.  For those who have it installed, expect to see the OTA update over the course of the next few days.

The overall layout of the app has subtile changes and brings the app a bit more inline with the web version of the service that was updated a couple of weeks ago.  You still have the top carousel that allows you to select topics of interest and the articles presented are heavily dependent upon AMP for quick opening.

The bottom navigation has changed however in Google News & Weather significantly – as in, it’s there now.

Yesterday, T-Mobile started rolling out the June Android Security update to the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge on their network.  Today, Sprint has followed suit.  The update is build G930PVPU4BQF3 for the Galaxy S7 while the S7 Edge will be getting build G935PVPU4BQF3.  The update for either device comes in at just under 300MB in size and it is recommended that it be downloaded via Wi-Fi and that you have at 50% of battery left prior to trying to install it.

The release notes for the updates are somewhat generic in describing what is addressed.  The security is improved thank to the new Android Security patch level but there are also “device stability & improvements”.  There are also performance improvements but again, not specific is called out.  This is similar to the T-Mobile release yesterday which just indicated “various system improvements”.