A friendly reminder to readers who may still be thinking about picking up a Google Pixelbook. The $100 discount on all models at Amazon and the Google Store will be ending tomorrow.
At Amazon, you can pick up the entry level Google Pixelbook for $899, a savings of $100 off the regular price. In fact, you can pick up the Pixelbook and the Pixelbook Pen together for $997, which is less than the normal price of the Chromebook itself.
August, the company behind some of the best smart locks on the market, have announced a deeper, more direct integration with Google Assistant. Now owners of the smart locks will be able to directly interact with them from Assistant.
To be clear, August has worked with Google Assistant for about a year ago and to access your locks, you had to say, “Hey Google, talk to August”. Now you can simply say, “Hey Google, is the front door locked?” and Assistant will interact with your August lock directly to determine if it is locked or not.
Dropbox has announced a major integration plan with Google Cloud that ultimately will result in users of the cloud storage service to be able to access their G Suite files from it. The news essentially means that Dropbox would replace Google Drive as the storage location for these files and access to them.
In the announcement, the San Francisco based Dropbox outlined a series of integrations that will be happening this year. There were no specific timelines announced other than later in 2018.
The fourth and like the last Chrome 65 based beta build is now available for Chrome for Android testers. The update is based on build 65.0.3325.109 and is rolling out to the Play Store this morning.
Unlike other beta programs in the Play Store, there is no sign up to get the Chrome beta for Android. You can download it here and install it on your compatible devices. Like all beta software however, its not recommended to run it as your daily browser or deploy it into production as there are likely still bugs to be found and there could be performance issues.
Although we are still weeks away from the first Developer Preview of Android P, more details of what will be in the next major release of the platform continue to come to light. The latest is native support for iris scanning for biometric security.
A new commit points to iris identification to be supported within P, something that manufactures like Samsung have added to their devices. This change should make it much easier for manufactures to add iris security support to their devices and it should be more reliable.
For the third consecutive week, a new Chrome 66 build is now available in the Chrome OS Dev Channel. The new update is build 66.0.3356.0 (Platform version: 10443.0.0) and for those with devices in what is essentially the Alpha testing channel for the platform, should have the update soon if not already.
As always, those who have devices in the Dev Channel can type chrome://help in the omnibar of the browser to force their devices to download the update. As a gentle reminder, the Dev Channel is not recommended to be run on production Chromebooks as it is unstable and you will likely run into bugs or issues.
While everyone’s attention this week has been focused on the events at Mobile World Congress, Verizon rolled out a bunch of updates to Samsung devices and a few Moto devices on their network. The majority of the updates are focused on bringing the February Android Security Update to the Samsung devices as well as other minor tweaks and updates. The Moto Z devices are getting the December patch.
Here is the rundown of the phones that Verizon updated this week along with the new build numbers. I’ve linked to the release notes for each build that the carrier has published.
In all cases, the updates have been released and should be landing on their respective devices via an OTA update this week.
Android’s gaming hub app, Google Play Games, has a new update rolling out that brings a new Arcade tab to help you discover new games to play. The update follows on from the major update that that app received in January. That update brought a completely new look to the app along with some built-in games but there was no way to discover new games from within it.
This new 5.5 version of Google Play Games addresses that issue. Now you have a new tab where you can find games to play and can filter your results based on what is new, kids games, premium games as well as genres like Action, Adventure, Board games, Racing, and RPG to name but a few.