Author: Clinton

It may sound a little harsh but reality is reality. The Android experience on tablets has been, well, sucky.  The problem for the most part is that Android, when it comes to larger display devices, simply “blows up” the screen to make it work for that form factor. That’s not 100% true to be fair but it is by-and-large and that means that apps, especially under KitKat and Lollipop were ugly at best on Android tablets. Marshmallow improved things a lot and developers were also developing tablet versions of apps which helped at the same time.

The other big issues was productivity. Although you have more screen real estate on a tablet, Android was never really able to take full advantage of it. You could only view one app at a time which meant you were constantly having to use the Recent button on your table to navigate between apps. Productivity, which better than on a phone, was still hamstrung when it came to reaching its full potential.

If there is a banner feature that represents the entire Android Nougat release, it is multi-window viewing. Google, in this case, is very much catching up to Apple’s iOS for iPads as those devices have had the ability to view two apps at once for about a year now. However, what Google has done is fully and properly implemented this for tablets and phones that truly makes productivity much easier than it ever has been on an Android powered tablet.

In this How To, I will show you how to enter into multi-window view in Android Nougat and how to switch between apps once you are in multi-windows mode.  Once you get the hang of it, it is pretty straight forward.

AT&T has announced that the latest update to the DirecTV app for Android (coming soon) and iOS, you will be able to stream content from the AT&T owned satellite television provider to your mobile devices on AT&T without incurring any data usage or charges.

Even better, you can stream video via your DIRECTV or U-verse App without using your mobile data when you’re on the go with Data Free TV on the AT&T mobile wireless network. It’s easy and automatic after registering and it doesn’t count against your AT&T mobile data allotment.

It is great news for those who have both services as you can watch your favorite show, game or movie on your devices over LTE without having to worry about eating up your data plan for the month.

It took a bit longer than expected but Google has finally released the factory image and OTA image for Android Nougat for the Nexus 6P.  With the release of these images, it means that 6P owners can expect to start seeing Nougat drop onto their devices over the course of the next few days and weeks.  The update is a big one at over 900MB so you will want to make sure you phone is connected to Wi-Fi and fully charged before you start the update process.  All in, it will take about 30 minutes from download to install to reboot.

As for why it took this long to get the update out is a point of speculation.

If you are a heavy user of Hangouts and use Chrome or Chrome OS, there is a new extension and app for you to check out.  Last week Google announced that a new, Android-like Chrome extension for Hangouts would be coming out with the aim to improve performance and the overall look and feel of the UI.  Achievement unlocked as both the extension and the app look far better than the old style and both perform exceptionally well.

The new extension can be found in the Chrome Web Store which allows you to run Hangouts while you are using your Chrome browser regardless of platform.  This is what the majority of users will want, especially Chrome OS users, as the browser tends to stay open all the time.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that Wi-Fi Assistant would be coming to all Nexus phones over the course of the coming weeks.  That appears to have started happening.  Several Nexus owners are now seeing the option in their settings and are now able to take advantage of the data saving feature.   Wi-Fi Assistant to this point has been exclusive to Project Fi users which allows their devices to automatically connect to Google approved Wi-Fi hotspots securely and without any user intervention.  It is a huge benefit to Fi frankly as it saves on data plan usage.  It will connect your phone to Wi-Fi without you even knowing it.  Now all Nexus owners will benefit from the feature.  The good news is that it is all a back end change and there is no update required on your phone.

Just two days after their initial release, the Over-the-Air (OTA) updates for the September Android Security Update are starting to hit Nexus devices.  While they are sporadic at this early point, owners of Nexus devices should start looking for the updates to hit their devices over the course of the next week.  In my case, my Nexus 6 (running Marshmallow) was updated while my Nexus 9 (running Nougat) also received its update to the 09-06-2016 patch.

It should be noted that not all Nexus devices have received their Nougat update yet so it is possible that you could get a double OTA update over the course of the next week or two.