Category: Android

A new update to Google’s Gboard is rolling out in the Play Store that brings a big jump in support of Indic languages.  With this update, 22 new languages are supported and through the use of Machine Learning and working with natural speakers of the languages throughout India, transliteration and keyboard layouts are included for all of the languages.  The update now brings the total number of languages supported up to 185.

The new languages supported include: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo (Devanagari, Bengali), Dogri (Devanagari, Arabic), Gujarati, Hindi (Devanagari, Hinglish), Kannada, Kashmiri (Devanagari, Arabic), Konkani (Devanagari, Latin), Maithili (Devanagari), Malayalam, Manipuri (Bengali), Marathi (Devanagari), Nepali (Devanagari), Odia, Punjabi (Gurmukhi, Arabic), Sanskrit (Devanagari), Santali (Ol chiki, Latin), Sindhi (Devanagari, Arabic), Tamil, Telugu, Urdu (Arabic).

For those who have one of these as their mother language, this update will make it much easier to communicate with others, especially with the transliteration feature.

The Chromium team within Google has updated the list of Chrome OS devices that can or will have support for Android apps.  The update is a significant improvement over the laundry list of devices that they had released last year as this update now lists the devices that have the ability to run Android apps, in which channel, and which ones have support planned.  Right now, the list of devices that support apps in the Stable channel (the main production channel) is pretty limited.  That list is:

• Acer Chromebook R11  (CB5-132T and C738T)
• AOpen Chromebox Mini
• AOpen Chromebase Mini
• Chromebook Flip C100PA
• Google Pixel (2015)
• Samsung Chromebook Plus

The list of Chrome OS devices that support Android apps in the Beta channel are even fewer:

• Acer Chromebook R13 (CB5-312T)
• Asus Chromebook Flip C302

It isn’t hard to figure out that the vast majority of devices out there are still listed as Planned.

The new Sony Xperia XA1, which was announced back in February at Mobile World Congress, is now available to pre-order.  The XA1 will be $299 and you can place your order over at Amazon.  The phone won’t ship until May 1st and you won’t be charged until it does ship.  But for a Sony device at this price point and an impressive 23MP camera, they are likely going to sell well.  The 5″ phone has Full HD resolution at 1280 x 720 and is powered by the MediaTek P20 octa-core processor.  That processor has four cores running at 2.3GHz and four running at 1.6GHz which should provide excellent performance.  The processor is coupled with 3GB of RAM and it the phone has 32GB of internal storage.  That storage can be expanded up to 256GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

As I mentioned, the Xperia XA1 has a 23MP rear camera with hybrid autofocus and an 8MP selfie camera.  Powering all of this is a 2300mAh battery with adaptive charging support.

The phone is sold unlocked and works with GSM carriers here in the United States like AT&T and T-Mobile.  Unfortunately it isn’t an option for Sprint and Verizon customers as CDMA isn’t supported.

The first significant update to the popular Super Mario Run game is now rolling out to Android players.  The update ups the version to 2.1 and brings several improvements and additions to the game.  For those who haven’t kept up, in the game, you are the ever popular Mario and you are doing what you do best:  Collecting coins and progressing your way through six worlds in the game.  The way gameplay works is that you can only move forward, up or down so no going back to get coins you missed for example.  The object of the game is to collect as many coins as you can before get to the flagpole at the end of the level before time runs out.  Sound familiar? Oh, and yes you still can save Princess Peach and defeat Bowser too.  There are two other game play modes as well to keep you entertained.

With this update, the number of toads (which you collect through Toad Rally playing in the game) has now increased to 99,999.  This should make it limitless for casual players.  You can now also use your customized Mii character as your player icon that you have created in Miitomo.  Finding friends also got easier with this update as you can now find them with your associated Nintendo account in the game.

Google has begun rolling out an update to their text messaging client, Android Messages.  The update, version 2.2 for those keeping score at home, has a few minor UI tweaks but the big news is around group messaging.  With this new update, when you are in a conversation with someone via SMS, you can add another person quickly and easily to the conversation.  To do this, while you are in a conversation, go to the overflow menu (the three vertical dots) then tap on People & Options.  At the bottom of this page there is a button which you can tap to open up your contacts and add them to the conversation.  This is a big improvement over the previous build which essentially required you to start an entirely new conversation for group messaging.

This update also has added the ability to create a group message from the FAB (Floating Action Button) from which you can add your contacts to the conversation.  Both of these improvements lower the number of taps required to start a group MMS.

Good news this morning for those of you who have the Sony Xperia XZ or the Xperia X Performance.  Sony has released the Android Nougat 7.1.1 update for both of these phones and it is already rolling out to users.  The updated build is 41.2.A.2.199 for both devices and along with the improvements that come with 7.1.1, the April Android Security patch is also in this build.

The big change with 7.1.1 is the support for app shortcuts.  This allows you to long press an icon and be able to get to a particular part of an app (for example, in Gmail you can tap-and-hold to start composing an email in a particular account).  The problem is that the Sony launcher doesn’t support app shortcuts, at least not yet.  If you are using a launcher that does support them on either of these phones (like Nova Launcher), then you will get to use the new feature.  Also, the 7.1.1 update brings Unicode v9 emoji to these devices.