Author: Clinton

For those enrolled in the beta testing program for the Essential Phone, it is time to check for a system update.  The first beta of the company’s Android Oreo 8.1 build has been released and testers will be receiving the update via an OTA download.  As you may recall, Essential pulled the Oreo 8.0 build last month, citing issue with stability in the build, and decided to scrap it to move straight to 8.1.

The build has the February Android Security Update patch included and also has a fix for a common problem for users of the Essential Phone:  Slow scroll jitter.  Users have complained that the phone has a lot of jitter when slowly scrolling up or down a patch.  This beta has a fix for it and appears to be working well.  All in, the OTA update is just over 500MB in size so WiFi downloading is a must.

Starting today, the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux will start blocking intrusive adverts on sites to give a better user experience.  Google had announced that these types of ads would be blocked back in December starting today after announcing their agreement with the Coalition for Better Ads last summer.

If you don’t remember, for desktops, ads that do the following risk being blocked:

• pop-up ads
• auto-play video ads with sound
• prestitial ads with countdown
• large sticky ads

For those who have the ad blocker enabled in Chrome on their desktop, you will no longer see these ads.

In an unexpected move, it looks like Samsung has pulled their Android Oreo update for the Samsung Galaxy S8 lineup.  The update to the latest version of Android began rolling out to beta testers in Europe last week but according to SamMobile, the build has been pulled from Samsung’s update servers.

The news likely means that a show stopping bug or other install issues was discovered after the limited rollout began, forcing the South Korean company to halt the updates to prepare a new build to address the issue.

The Beta Channel for Chrome OS has a new update rolling out this morning that takes it onto the Chrome 65 train of the platform.  The new build is 65.0.3325.65 (Platform version: 10323.30.0) for those keeping score at home and if you are in the Beta Channel, type chrome://help in the omnibar of the browser to force the update.

This is the first build in the Beta Channel based on Chrome 65, following up on three different Chrome 64 builds over the last half of January through the beginning of this month.  Those with a keen eye will note that the build number is the same as the last Dev Channel build of the platform, which was released just yesterday.

A new build of Google Photos is now rolling out into the Google Play Store and while it doesn’t bring any new features, it does raise the oldest supported version of Android.  The new Photos build is version 3.14 and with it, API level 19 is the oldest supported level.  That, for those who don’t recall, is Android KitKat.

The dropping of the now five year old Android Jelly Bean in this update to Google Photos isn’t a surprise.  Google has been slowly, and mostly quietly, moving the minimum supported API level up on their apps over the past year.  It is all in an effort to keep their development activities focused more on current versions of Android where they can offer more features.

A new update to the Evernote app for Android is rolling out today in the Google Play Store.  While the version 7.17 of the productivity and note taking app is mostly a bug fix release, there is a new feature showing up for some users, Collect.

Collect, according to the release notes, allows you to save images containing text that you want to remember later.  Evernote will save it then you can search for it, and presumably the text inside the image, later in the app or online.  The release notes indicate that the feature works with whiteboards, receipts, document and anything with text.