Author: Clinton

Seeing over 1000 new manufactures since 2012, OpenSignal’s latest report on Android fragmentation is a mixed bag of good and bad news.  The good news is that for consumers, the choices on Android devices is greater than it has ever been.  There are a wide range of devices in various screen sizes to meet your needs.  For developers however, the challenge is that number of choices.  The OpenSignal annual report shows a lot of interesting facts about the Android ecosystem and is well balanced on the good, the not so good and the bad.

UPDATE:  I am updating this post as it is still one of the most read articles on the site.  Please check out the post I made on an update to Gmail.  In that post, I outline the back end changes Google made to Gmail that has fixed this issue for Marshmallow users.

Google Inbox is the new and improved email app for Gmail that been met with mix feelings.  It is certainly a more clean email app that puts your emails into bundles (think categories) automatically to decluter your device.  It works but if you are a hardcore Gmail user on your Android phone or tablet, it will take some time to adjust.  But personally I like it and encourage you to give it a try.  Google Inbox is another app that Google has ported out of their builds of Android as stand alone apps much like Google Calendar.

An reoccurring theme with Google Inbox is the notifications not activating properly.  The Google Play Store have plenty of reviews pointing this out and while Google has updated the app several times, it still is a problem for some.  I was one of those and after a lot of trying to sort it out, I was just about to uninstall the app.  Then I figured it out and since then – over two weeks now – it has worked flawlessly.  In this How To I’m going to show you the way that I disabled Gmail notifications and got Google Inbox notifications working.  It isn’t rocket science and certainly will fall into the “duh” category for some of you but if you are like me, I found it a bit challenging to sort out.

Yesterday HTC announced that starting today the HTC One M9 would start receiving the Lollipop 5.1 update via an OTA (Over-the-air) update starting today.  It looks like they have kept to their word.  Users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have started receiving the update to their devices and all the benefits of the latest version of Android.  It’s good news for owners of the device as it brings them inline with the North America which has already seen the Lollipop rollout start.

Today Google published their latest Android Dashboard and it showed a healthy jump in the adoption of Android Lollipop.  The latest version of Android is now running on 18.1% of all Android devices, up 5.7% over the June report.  This is good news for developers and consumers alike as more devices are seeing updates to Lollipop or are now shipping with it as their installed OS level.  And while many will contend that fragmentation is an issue for Android, the numbers released by Google seem to indicate it isn’t as big a deal as some might think.  Indeed the numbers for versions older than KitKat, the previous version prior to Lollipop, all saw drops in installs.

Following weeks of rumors and speculation, Sony has announced today the new Xperia M5 Android phone.  The newest offering from Sony sports an impressive set of specifications including a 21MP rear camera and a 13MP front camera.  The 5″ display device will be powered by the 64-bit MediaTek Helio X10 Octa-core processor running at 2.0 GHz and will have 3GB of RAM which should make this phone quite snappy. It will also be running Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and interestingly, is waterproof.

While no firm release date was provided, we can expect to see the Xperia M5 hit select markets this month.

Just 72 hours after an impressive Virtual Reality launch, OnePlus has posted on their Google+ page that they have received 1 million reservations for their new “flagship killer” OnePlus 2.  While the OnePlus 2 and the Moto X and Moto G from Motorola have been all the talk this week, it is pretty clear that OnePlus has garnered their fair share of interest with their second phone and there are a few who already have their hands on the new phone.  So far the reviews have been pretty positive.

OnePlus has said that they will have more initial stock of the OnePlus 2 than they did of their first phone, the OnePlus One, simply because they know they will be able to sell them.  As I put in my article on why the OnePlus 2 has to be a success, the company doesn’t have the capital to go into mass production so they are using an invite system.  Clearly, it seems, things are going in the right direction.