Author: Clinton

Like many of you who are reading this, I spend a good portion of my day listening to podcasts.  Whether it is news, information or simply a bit of relaxing fun, podcasts are a part of my routine that I would sorely miss if it were not there.  The challenge is finding a podcast app that works across my devices yet gives me a lot of power to control when content is downloaded, when it is streamed and equally as important, when it is cleaned off my device after I’m done watching or listening.  For me, Pocket Casts from Shifty Jelly is the go-to app.

Featuring a wealth of content, Pocket Casts works on my Android phones and tablets and allows me to synchronize my content so I can keep all of them up-to-date with my latest podcasts.  I can listen or watch podcasts directly from within the app and when I am done, the app has an automatic clean up that deletes it from all of my devices so I’m not taking up storage space on content I’ve consumed.  I have been using the app for about a month now and having tried many of the podcasts apps in the Google Play Store, this is the one that quickly became and continues to be the benchmark for such apps.  At $3.99 for the Android version, it isn’t the cheapest podcast app available but I think it is one of the best and well worth the price.

Pocket Casts – $3.99 – Download Now

Microsoft continues to develop and enhance their Office applications for Android and the updates this week are sure to please users of the apps.  The updates to Word, Excel and PowerPoint are all being released to the Google Play Store and you should see the updates to the apps via an OTA update in the coming days.  With that update come a lot of individual app improvements but also a universally improved sign up process for the apps.

In order to use the apps, you must have a Microsoft account.  While most of us do have one (if you have a Hotmail address then you have a Microsoft account), some don’t and previous to this update, you really couldn’t sign up easily within the apps themselves.  That has changed and now you can sign up for an account quickly and easily in any of the apps so you can get using them quickly.  Remember that to use all of the features of these apps, you will need to have an Office 365 account but can create and edit documents without it on devices 10.1″ and smaller.

For those of you who are LG G4 owners on US Cellular here in the United States, today is a good day!  The 5th largest mobile carrier has released the Android Marshmallow update for the G4 today, bringing with it all of the goodies that it contains.  The update brings your device to v6.0 and follows in a long line of devices and cellular updates to devices over the course of the past few months.

If you by chance have not read anything on Marshmallow, take a look at my review for all the highlights but it is sufficient to say that this update is well worth the time and effort to get on to your phone.

While searching by text has been available to smartphone users for many years now, voice commands to search and do other things is still relatively new.  Sure there have been attempts at it in the past but over the course of the last 18 months with Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft) and Google Now, the ability to do far more than simply search for web content with your voice has grown exponentially.  In fact the challenge now is not so much what you can’t say to your device but remembering what you can say to your device.

This is the first part in a multi-part series on voice commands with Google Now.  I will preface this by saying that this by no means should be considered definitive or final.  Google is continually adding voice commands to the service and while I do plan to update these posts as time goes on, undoubtedly I will miss something.  Your help, of course, is appreciated in finding new commands.  For this first post I am going to focus on commands that you can give to your phone or tablet to perform a function or to get you information.

The way I have structured the information after the break is whatever you find (parenthetically) is the user adjustable command.  For example, “What time is it in (Denver)?”.

One of the more exciting developments out of CES 2016 was from a company by the name of Jide and their Remix OS.  While the company has designed products specifically for this Android Lollipop based OS, the company is also offering you the ability to download Remix OS and install it on an old PC or Mac, turning it into an Android device.  It is a very clever solution and gives you all the ease of Android and benefits (like a great app store) while breathing new life into that old computer you have sitting around the house.

Remix OS is our state of the art Android-based operating system. We mean it when we say you get a PC experience unlike anything on Android and an Android experience unlike anything on a PC.

Today you can now download the OS for PC free of charge from their website and install it on your older computer, effectively turning it into an Android “PC”.  But as you would expect, there are some caveats that you need to be aware of before you take on the task.

Once again the Nexus 6, last year’s flagship Nexus device built by Motorola, is on sale at Amazon.  The 32GB model is available for only $249.99 while the 64GB model is $299.99. That is a savings of $400 from when the phone was first released last year and this phone is still got plenty of swagger when it is compared to phones that are being released today.

I personally use a Nexus 6 as my daily driver and love this phone.  It has outstanding specs and performance and with it being a Nexus device, it already has Android Marshmallow running on it and I can use Project Fi.

• Display: 5.96″ AMOLED, 1440×2560, 16:9 aspect ratio, 493 ppi, Corning Gorilla Glass 3
• Weight: 184 grams (6.49 ounces)
• Battery: 3220 mAh Mixed usage up to 24 hours*
• Processor: 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 with quad-core CPU (APQ 8084-AB), Adreno 420 GPU
• Memory: 3GB
• Camera: 13MP IMX 214 Image Sensor

Nexus 6 32GB – $249.99 – Amazon

Nexus 6 64GB – $299.99 – Amazon