Category: Android Marshmallow

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is on the powerful but friendly priced BLU VIVO 5.  Right now the 5.5″ device with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage is down to $199.99 in either Gold or Silver.  BLU has made a name for themselves by having low cost devices that pack a fair amount of punch for the price.  The VIVO 5 is no different.  It is a full metal body design with a 5.5″ AMOLED display that gives you full HD quality, it has 3GB of RAM and has 32GB of storage built into it. You can expanded that up to an additional 64GB of storage (96GB total) thanks to the MicroSD slot in the chassis.  The phone is powered by the MediaTek 6753 processor which is a 1.3GHz octa-core processor so you should find it nicely responsive, especially coupled with the 3GB or RAM.

Back in May I posted that Samsung had released their Android Marshmallow update for the Galaxy S5.  AT&T, it seems, just now got around to releasing it.  During the same week that Google released Nougat, the US carrier released Marshmallow for the S5 and S5 Active on their network.  That’s a full three months after Samsung released and just shy of three months since Verizon released it for S5’s on their network.

Come on AT&T, get with the program.

If you have a Galaxy S5 or S5 Active, you should be seeing the update come to you via an OTA update.  The update is about 940MB so you will certainly want to be on Wi-Fi to download it.  Once you have it downloaded, the install including reboots should take about 30 minutes.  So all in, likely 45 minute to an hour to upgrade completely.

After a couple of months of guessing and speculation, Samsung has pulled back the cover on the latest version of their phablet device, the Galaxy Note 7.  The Note 7 is, as you would expect, a well appointed device with more-or-less the same innards of the Galaxy S7 Edge.  That means you are going to get some top end performance in a 5.7″ displayed device that is waterproof and is the first device to hit the market with Gorilla Glass 5.

The Note 7 has a 5.7″ dual edge screen that supports a resolution of 2560×1440.  It is powered by a Quad-core Snapdragon 820 processor (in the United States.  International models will be powered by the Octa-core Exynos processor).  It comes standard with 64GB of storage but can be expanded up to an additional 256GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.  Coupled with the processor is 4GB of RAM so you have plenty of power under-the-hood.

Like clockwork, with the change of the calendar to August, the Android team has just released the Android Security update for the month.  The new update patches are going to be hitting the AOSP over the course of the next 48 hours with the OTA updates for Nexus devices likely coming at the end of the week or early next week.  Like the Android team did in July, the August security updates are coming in two patches.  The first is the August 1st patch which has 1 critical update and 4 high priority updates out of the 14 total updates in the patch.  This patch is more generic in nature and applies to Android in general.  The Google team is trying to get these high priority updates out to their manufacturing partners faster so updates are done faster by them.  Those well versed in Android lore know that patches and updates are, um, lacking in some cases.

The OnePlus team has begun rolling out an OTA update to the OnePlus 3 that brings a sizable number of improvements to the device.  OxygenOS 3.2.2 is being rolled out to users in phases as the company continues to tweak and improve their homebrew version of Android Marshmallow for the flagship phone.  One of the big changes is the improvement of notification management in Doze, the battery saving feature of Marshmallow while your phone is unplugged and idle.  Another big improvement is the alert slide/silent mode issue where some users were accidentally turning on their phones while dropping it into their pockets.  This, appears at least, to have been fixed with this update.

Back at the end of June, I started an experiment on my Nexus 6P.  Like many of you, I have dozens of apps installed on my Android phone with the vast majority of them being accessed just a handful of times per week or month.  Yet, with those apps installed and with them organized on my various home screens, I still found myself doing a lot of swipes and taps to get to things.  Personally, I found that frustrating so I took a drastic step and eliminated all of my home screens except one.  Admittedly, the first couple of days were rough.  But as I got use to using the power that is in the Google Now Launcher, I can honestly say that life in one screen works for me.

But at the time I started this little experiment, it wasn’t just me who tried it.  Fellow tech enthusiast Kyle Reddoch (You can find him on Google+ and on Twitter) tried the experiment too.  During these last few weeks, while we’ve had plenty of Hangouts discussions, we’ve not talked about life on one screen until earlier this week.  The result?  Both of us don’t plan on going back to multiple screens any time soon.

I’ve outlined in this post the thought process behind this little experiment and how we went about it.   I’ll cover the tools we are using that have made this transition much easier than expected but frankly, it all comes down to the Google Now Launcher and our voices.  If there is one thing this experiment will teach you, it is the power of voice commands.