Author: Clinton

The lock screen app, Next Lock Screen from Microsoft, has been updated today with several big improvements.  The biggest change in the new build, version 3.9 for those keeping score at home, has to do with improved notifications and weather on the lock screen of your Android phone.  In this new build, these two features have been significantly improved and are, well, reliable.  In the previous build the weather updates in particular were haphazard at best.  This new 3.9 build is much better at updating both notifications and weather updates in a timely fashion.

A pretty nice little feature has been turned on in Google Search for Android, mini widgets.  These new semi-transparent widgets appear just below the search bar to give you quick information like weather, commute information, local information and so forth.  As I have been traveling this week and have enabled this feature, it is actually very handy and I’d encourage readers to enable it on their phones.  Keep in mind it doesn’t show up all the time so even if you have it enabled, you may not see it immediately.

If the streaming music options available to you weren’t enough, Amazon has decided to jump into the game.  The company announced their new Music Unlimited service, a streaming service that gives you access to millions of songs that you can stream from your computer, Android or iOS device.  Like many other services, you can download the music to your device for playing offline.  There are, however, some uniquely Amazon elements to the service which could make it an attractive alternative for some, especially those who are deep within the Amazon services ecosystem.

It has taken a while but Google’s MVNO, Project Fi, has finally added group plans to the service.  Now you can add lines to a Fi user’s account for $15 per month and use a shared pool of data that will all be on one bill.  To this point, if multiple family members wanted to use Fi, each one had to sign up for their own account.  The good thing is that fundamentally, the service isn’t changing for this new option.  You can still add and remove members of the plan at any time without penalty and your data is still billed at $10 per Gigabit.

The first maintenance update to Android Nougat will be hitting devices by the end of this year.  The update, Nougat 7.1, is scheduled to be released as a technical preview later this month with a final release coming in December according to a post on the Android Developer site.

Initially, we’ll offer the Developer Preview for Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, and Pixel C devices, extending to other supported devices by the end of the preview. At the final release of the Android 7.1.x platform, due in early December, we’ll roll out updates to the full lineup of supported devices — Nexus 6, 5X, 6P, 9, Player, Pixel C, and supported Android One devices — as well as Pixel and Pixel XL devices.

Google announced earlier this year that they would be moving into a more consistent maintenance cycle with Android which will over new features, security and other fixes with each release.  With the new Pixel line up running Nougat 7.1 out-of-the-box, it was just a matter of when other devices would start seeing the update.  Now we have a rough timeline from the company.

The long, painful and expensive saga of the Galaxy Note7 is over.  Samsung today has halted all sales and production of the beleaguered device, citing safe concerns over batteries catching fire.  The Korean manufacture has requested all consumers power down the devices and return them to the retailer or carrier from which it was purchased for a refund or exchange for another device.  The news comes just a day after all the major carriers here in the United States along with retailer Best Buy announcing they were no longer selling the phablet.