Author: Clinton

Microsoft Bing has a new update rolling out for Android users that brings an improved in-app browser experience along with a handful of other tweaks & improvements.  The new build is version 8.1.26158908 for those keeping score at home.

The biggest change in this new build is the improvements around in-app browsing.  Generally the entire experience is better but video and image viewing is better along with easier tab navigation and the ability to find text on a page.

Today’s Deal is on the Essential Phone, the PH-1.  As readers will know, this is the first phone from Andy Rubin’s company and after a few software updates that have come out for it, the PH-1 has proven to be a solid performer.  Right now you can pick on up for $434 on Amazon, a savings of $264.  That price is for either the Black Moon or Pure White colors.

The Essential Phone has a titanium body with a ceramic back, a 5.7″ 2560 x 1320 Quad-HD display, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage built-in.  It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor.  This octa-core processor has four cores running at 2.45GHz and the remaining four clocked at 1.9GHz.

Microsoft’s Sean Lyndersay took to Twitter a couple of days ago to let users of Microsoft Edge, the mobile browser for Android and iOS, has expanded to several new countries as far as availability.

Also, Edge for iOS and Android is released or rolling out in most English- and French-speaking markets, as well as in Germany, Austria, Portugal and Brazil. 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇵🇹🇧🇷

— Sean Lyndersay (@SeanOnTwt) January 24, 2018

The news is great for those who like Edge on their devices, especially those that are using Windows 10 on the desktop where you have cross-platform benefits like bookmark and password syncing.

Today the Android team in Google released a new Android Wear SDK and emulator update for developers.  The new tools bring the SDK to version 2.2.0 and with it come several new watch face elements to the platform.

Those elements are aimed to be in the next consumer version of Wear, version 2.9.  Perhaps the biggest news of those new face elements will be unread notification indicators that can be coded into the watch faces.

Notification is a vital part of the Wear experience. As a result, starting from the next consumer release of Wear (version 2.9.0), a dot-shaped indicator will be displayed by default at the bottom of the watch face if there are new, unread notifications.

Developers of watch faces will have several options on how to implement the new feature.

Google is in the process of rolling out a new Gmail attachment compliance policy to all G Suite customers.  The new settings, which are optional, allow for G Suite administrators to configure scanning of the content of an attachment to prevent corporate data loss.

Previously, G Suite admins could configure attachment scanning but it would only scan the header of the attachment of configured file types (like .docx, .pdf, etc).  The problem is that users could change the file extension to bypass the scanning and thus get the corporate data out of the corporate network.

This one could have passed by you without you noticing because it seems to have passed a lot of people by it seems.  Twitter, sometime late last year, rolled out Notification Channel support for those running the social networking app on Android Oreo.  The problem is, they never announced it or put it in the release notes so it isn’t clear when the new feature came into the app.

Notification Channels, in case you don’t know or remember, allow you to set more granular toggles on the types of notifications you get from an app.  It is supported in Oreo but not every app has support for it yet.  Usually when a developer adds support, they advertise it.  Apparently not Twitter.