Author: Clinton

Google Photos, the photo and video storage app-meets-service for Android and iOS, has hit an important milestone in the Google Play Store.  The app has now been downloaded an eye watering 500 million times, putting it in very rarefied air in the Play Store.  To put this into perspective, Snapchat is only in the 100 million download range along with Pokemon Go.  Yep, the app that has been the craze for the last month hasn’t come close to where Photos is when it comes to downloads.  Even Netflix is only at 100 million.  You get the idea:  500 million is a big deal.

For those of you who haven’t tried Google Photos, is stores all of your photos online (which you can get to via https://photos.google.com) so your photos are stored not only on your phone but in the cloud.  When you use the Free Up Space feature (which was highlighted in adverts during the Olympics), the photos are deleted from your phone but kept safe online.  Even better, if you store photos in High Quality, it doesn’t count against your Google Drive storage.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai took to Twitter last night and provided an important update to everyone:  Google Duo has hit the 5 million download mark.  The new video calling app was released the same day as Android Nougat and frankly is a pretty refined experience versus other video calling solutions.  Duo gives you a preview of who is calling before you even accept the call.

Google Duo now over 5M Android downloads in a week! https://t.co/ctwn131gYq

— sundarpichai (@sundarpichai) August 25, 2016

While 5 million isn’t exactly huge when you compare it to the hundreds of millions of Android phones and iPhones out there, it is significant in that there is some excitement around this new video app.

Earlier this week I told you about a great deal running on eBay for the Nexus 5X.  That deal is still going and available in Quartz (white) for just $199.  That’s a savings of $150 off the regular price that you get from Google direct.  The phone is brand new, unlocked and is the 16GB model from a storage perspective.  While the price itself is outstanding, even better is that this device will see the Android Nougat update that was released earlier this week and is a bit future proof in that it will see Android O (yes, I went there) when it is released next year.

Today’s deal over at Amazon is on a great little Chromebook.  The Asus C201 has an 11.6″ display, 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage and is currently down to $159.99 for the Navy Blue model.  Equally as important, when the Chrome OS 53 build is made public, the C201 is going to be able to take full advantage of it and run Android apps.  That makes this deal a bit sweeter.

The C201 is powered by the Rockchip rk3288 processor that runs at 1.8GHz and the 11.6″ display renders at 1366×768 and is an LED display.  Like most other Chromebooks, you have 3 USB ports (2x USB 2.0 and 1 USB 3.0), an HDMI port, a SD Card Reader and a 3.5mm headphone jack.  Overall, a solid package.

While Android devices have quick and easy access to Google search, having alternatives on your phone is never a bad thing.  The Bing search app from Microsoft has been available for Android for a while now and it, like many of the Microsoft apps for Android, continues to grow and mature nicely.  The latest update to the search app brings a music discovery feature that allows you to find the song you hear in your local coffee shop or other location.  Like other apps, you simply turn on the app, hit the Music button and have Bing listen to the song.  Within a few seconds it will return the result, giving you the song title and artist.  You can then tap on that information at the bottom of the screen and get more details about the song, artist and albums that are available from that artist.  On most songs you will also get the lyrics for the song.

With Android Nougat out and already hitting Nexus devices, the big question everyone now wants an answer for is when their particular manufacture will be rolling it out to their devices.  For their part, Sony has published a list of no less than nine Xperia devices that will see the Nougat update, which will great to see, will leave some disappointed.  Missing from the list is the super popular Xperia Z3 as well as the entire Xperia C, E and M lineup.  To be fair, the Z3 missing from the list isn’t that shocking given that it was released in September 2014.  That’s right at the cusp of when a manufacture would consider an update.  For the newer C, E and M lineups however, that is a big disappointment.