Author: Clinton

The Starbucks app for Android has been updated today and with it comes several new features around Mobile Order & Pay.  For those who aren’t familiar with Mobile Order & Pay, as the name suggests, you can pre-order your coffee or food items from your nearest Starbucks location using the app, pay for it using the app, and then just walk in and pick it up at the store.  No more queues waiting for our precious coffee!

One of the new features that has come to the app is travel times to the store at which you made your Mobile Order & Pay order.  The feature requires location services to be enabled and if it is, you will see the travel time from your location to that store so you can plan your journey to pick up your order.

Last night the all new LG V20 was announced and this flagship device has a some serious specs for those looking for a high end, high performing device.  The first phone to run Android Nougat will be hitting the market later this month and will be carried by a few carriers here in the US as well as being available unlocked.  The 5.7″ device is powered by the Snapdragon 820 processor, has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 16MP main shooter and a removable battery.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is great for those who need to pick up some extra storage for their devices.  The entire lineup of MicroSD cards from SanDisk are on sale today with the top-end 200GB MicroSD card down to just $60.  That is the lowest it has been all summer and if you have a phone or tablet that can accept that size storage card, it is a good time to pick one up.  Here is the rundown of all the card sizes and prices today:

• 8GB MicroSD Card – $16.49
• 32GB MicroSD Card – $10.59 (yep, it is cheaper than the 8GB!)
• 64GB MicroSD Card – $19.69
• 128GB MicroSD Card – $39.99
• 200GB MicroSD Card – $59.99

There are, however, other deals from SanDisk today if you need something beyond a MicroSD card.

The Google OnHub app was updated last week and while the official release notes indicated it was primarily around performance fixes and adding support for Phillips Hue lighting, there was another small but important change made to the app.  The OnHub app has always been able to do some network testing and when I initially reviewed the router and app, this was one area that was really in need of improvement.  That improvement has come over the course of the past few updates (I have no hesitation in recommending it now) but the change made to the app last week brings some clarity to those network tests.

To begin, the testing of your Internet connection speed and your Wi-Fi speed are now two separate tests.  You can run both of them or just one of them where as before, they were all lumped in together.  To be clear however, you have to run the Internet test first, every time, to get to the stand alone Wi-Fi test.  Hopefully this will change in the future but for now, it is what it is.

The September 2016 Android security patches have been released for both Android Marshmallow and Nougat today.  This month there are three different patches available, an increase from the two that we have seen over the past few months.  Google has been working to spur on manufactures to get the security updates out quicker and by further subdividing the patches, it is further eliminating reasons on why they aren’t released.

According to the Security Bulletin released by the Android team, the patch 2016-09-01 will primarily deal with remote code execution and elevation of privileges within the Android platform.  This patch contains two critical updates and five high priority updates.

Google has announced that a change is coming to Google Drive to help cut down on duplicate files.  The update is currently in Rapid release mode with a full roll out happening in a few weeks.  Once it does, if you have file that you are trying to upload to your Drive with the same user name, that older version will be made a part of your revision history and not a separate file.

A common use case for Google Drive users is to download a file from their Drive to modify it locally, and then to re-upload the new version. In the past, this would result in duplicate files (the original and the new one), and users would have trouble finding the latest version. That’s why we’re introducing a change in Drive to deduplicate files which were uploaded in this way.

Once launched, when users upload files that have the same filename as an existing file, they’ll be deduplicated, and the old file will be in revision history. This is so that if any mistakes are made, users can get back to the previous version. Similarly, uploaded folders will be merged with folders of the same name.