Author: Clinton

Mobile World Congress, or MWC, kicks off next week in Barcelona, Spain and even though there won’t be as many phone announcements, it doesn’t mean that it won’t be an exciting show.  For their part, Google is going to be going strong at the event with a lot of announcements and products on display.

The company updated their blog earlier today outlining their plans for MWC which includes the first set of Android Oreo Go Edition phones.  By now you are likely familiar with the Android Go apps that are available like Gmail Go, YouTube Go, Maps Go and other.  These lightweight apps are aimed to work on low cost, low memory devices.  We will get our first glimpse of them next week.

After halting the rollout last week due to some boot looping issues, Samsung has re-released the Android Oreo update for the Samsung Galaxy S8.  The new build is version G950FXXU1CRB7 for the S8 and the S8+ is getting build G955XXU1CRB7.  Both builds are just over 500MB in size and it is currently rolling out in Europe.

The South Korean company ended up stopping the update rollout last week due to some users reporting that their phones were boot looping or randomly rebooting.  The company quickly reworked the build which early reports suggest that the issues have been resolved.

In a backwards kind of way, LG has announced that the LG V30 and the LG G6 will both be getting updated to Android Oreo 8.1 and soon.  Why?  Because the company announced that both devices will be a part of the Android Enterprise Recommended program once that update rolls out to them.

The press release from LG made it clear that acceptance of these V30 and the G6 was contingent on the Oreo 8.1 update rolling out to the devices.  While not in the press release, undoubtedly Google put timeframes on the contingency meaning that LG is going to have to get the updates out sooner rather than later.

For the second consecutive week, a new update of Chrome OS is now available to testers in the platform’s beta channel.  Build 65.0.3325.89 (Platform version: 10323.39.0) is rolling out now to those who have their devices in the channel and it marks the second Chrome 65 based build update in the channel.

For those new to Chrome OS, the beta channel is the last channel a new build comes to prior to being released in the Stable channel.  Generally there are anywhere from 2-4 updates to the Beta channel before it makes it out to the general public.

While the company continues to get their Android Oreo build ready for the Essential Phone, Essential has made the process of getting the beta build and updates to it far easier.  They have no enabled a new OTA update mechanism for beta testers meaning that you don’t have to sideload it.

The option for an OTA update is now listed as an option on the Essential Beta Builds site.  Once you select the OTA option, you will need to sign up with your name, email address and your device’s serial number in order to be fully registered and to receive the latest beta build.

One of the challenges for retailers is showing off a product’s capabilities without leaving it unlocked for random interactions from store visitors.  This can lead to anything from malicious code being loaded up to a porn site loaded up in the browser.  That is where a demo mode comes in handy and, to this point, is something that has not been in Chrome OS.  But that looks to be changing.

A new commit found in the Chrome OS review Gerrit shows that a demo mode could be in the works for the platform.  This would make it immeasurably easier for retailers to setup Chromebooks in their stores that highlight what the platform can do but not leave it open to questionable activity.