Author: Clinton

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is on a 5-pack of AUKEY USB-C cables for $14.99.  The pack contains one 1′ cable, three 3′ cables, and one 6′ cable so you will have plenty of options for getting your phone charged in various locations.  Equally as important, on the USB-A side, they are USB 3.0 standard.  That means you will get up to 5GB/sec of transfer speed.  That makes this particular deal especially good given most of the time these cables are the slower USB 2.0 standard.

These cables from AUKEY are compatible with any USB-C device:  Phones, Tablets and MacBooks which have the port.  As you likely know, USB-C is reversible so it doesn’t matter how you insert the cable into your device, it works and charges your devices or can transfer data between them.

Although it is still an exclusive for iOS users, Super Mario Run looks to be coming to Android soon.  In the Google Play Store you will now find a listing for the new game as well as the ability to pre-register for it.  Pre-registering will assure that you get a notification on your phone when the game is available, likely sometime this quarter.  You will then be able to go to the store to purchase it and install it.

As for the game itself, Nintendo describes game play as…

In this game, Mario constantly moves forward through the courses while you use a variety of jumps to navigate. Mario will behave differently depending on the timing of your taps, so it’s up to you to show off particularly smooth moves, gather coins, and reach the goal.

The announcement of the game back in October at an Apple event was one of the highlights for that event and one that got a lot of people excited to see a classic video game, at least in character, come to mobile devices.

If you pay for Google Drive storage, there are some changes rolling out that you need to be aware of going forward.  From now on your Drive subscription will be managed within the Google Play Store like your other subscription apps.  Gone will be the separate purchasing and process for adding storage to your account.  Instead, for Android users, it will all roll up into the Play Store where you can manage all of your subscriptions (like Google Play Music) from one place.

The new process won’t effect anything you have to do as an end user.  Google is migrating accounts to Google Play Store and you should have received an email on this in December.  Once your account is converted over, you will see it as part of your subscriptions in the store.

Keeping with their self imposed end-of-2016 deadline, OnePlus has released the Android Nougat based OxygenOS 4.0 update for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T.  The update was released very late on December 31st, hitting the deadline and the update is now making its way out to all owners of the 3 and 3T.  While it still may take a few days for your phone to see it, it is out and it is only a matter of time.

The update is all focused on Android Nougat.  The release notes in the OnePlus forums essentially highlight all of the features of Nougat and speak very little of any other changes that the company has made in their custom version of Android.

It has been a good week for Google Home users.  First came the integration with Netflix and Google Photos earlier in the week.  Second, and just yesterday, a slew of new bots were added to Google Home to help you get news, information, how to’s and even play games, all from voice commands to your Home.  The new bots, 34 of them in all, are available under the Services section of the app on your Android phone.  I’m referring to them as bots because you have to specifically tell Home which service to talk to and you get automated information back from that service.  It is much like a chat bot – just using your voice instead.

The list of services is pretty impressive and all of them are enabled by default.  You just have to tell Home which one you want to access.  This is done by saying “Hey Google, let me talk to about ”.  As an example, you can talk to Dominos and track your order or, equally as important, order your saved Easy Order.  Yes the fact you have to tell Home to which service to use is a bit awkward but I suspect that this will improve over time just as Home in general has improved.

Snapseed has an update rolling out for both Android and iOS that brings several tweaks and improvements to the popular photo editing app.  The update, version 2.14 for those keeping score at home, refines the Face filter which was introduced a couple of releases ago, making it smoother and giving users a bit more control over how it is applied.  The Face filter is a powerful feature of the app and the new tweaks to it are excellent based on my testing this morning.

For Android users, the Perspective tool brings back the horizontal and vertical adjustment modes.  These went away a few revs ago and many users (Clinton raises his hand) asked for it back as it was a super handy tool.  Google, who owns Snapseed, listened and it has returned.