Category: Android

One of the more anticipated movies of the year, Rouge One: A Star Wars Story, is hitting theaters this Friday and to get your ready for the event, Google has added a set of Rouge One stickers to Google Allo.  Now when you use the new messaging app, you can add the Rouge One stickers to your sticker options and send them to friends in your messages.  To add them, just open up Allo and when you are in a message, tap the + in the text field.  Now tap the Sticker add-on button, the one in the far right of the bar, and you will see the option to download and add the Rouge One stickers to your account.

In all, there are 23 stickers in the pack, which is free.

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is a great opportunity to pick up a huge external power pack for your phones and tablets without dropping a lot of cash.  The RAVPower 22000mAh Power Pack is available today for $29.99, a savings of 70% off the regular price of $99.99.  The pack, despite its huge battery, is relatively small at roughly the size of an iPhone 7 Plus and has 3 USB ports for charging three devices at the same time.  In fact, you can get 5 charges of your Galaxy S7 out of this RAVPower pack and an amazing 9 charges of an iPhone 6S.  Each port of the pack can output 2.4A of power and uses RAVPower’s iSmart technology for fast, smooth and safe charging of your devices.

As expected, the Android team at Google has released Android Nougat 7.1.1 for a wide range of Nexus and Pixel devices.  The update brings a lot of bug fixes and other features including app shortcuts to apps that support them.  The update was released this morning for the following devices:

• Google Pixel
• Google Pixel XL
• Google Pixel C
• Nexus 6P (except for those on Verizon)
• Nexus 5X
• Nexus Player
• Nexus 9 (Wi-Fi and LTE models)

The factory images for the updates as well as the OTA images have been posted.  The OTA has also been released for these devices but it could be a few days before everyone sees it hit their phones and tablets.

Google has launched an all new personal security app, Google Trusted Contacts.  As the name suggests, Trusted Contacts allows you to designate friends or family contacts as trusted where you can send them your location information or they can request it in case of an emergency.  The app allows your friends or family to see your activity, including your location and online activity, and determine if you are okay.  If they have not heard from you for a while, they can request your location information.  If you reply or deny the request, your contacts are notified that you are okay.  If you don’t respond within 5 minutes however, your location is automatically sent to your designated contacts so they can reach out to you or contact emergency services.

After arriving on iOS a few weeks back, F1 2016 has arrived for Android.  The racing simulator gives you all 21 races of the just concluded 2016 season and allows you to race as your favorite team and driver in one-off races, a season and in weekly challenges.  Codemasters, who has been developing the official F1 games for Xbox, Playstation and PC, fully optimized this build of the game for mobile with mobile friendly touch controls and graphics.  If you have played one of their games in the past on other platforms, you will not be disappointed with what you see in this game.

The game weighs in at a hefty 1.2GB download and you will need at least 2.7GB of storage on your device in order to install it.  Yes it is heavy but all that graphic goodness comes at a cost, mostly the amount of storage required.

The rise, fall, death and now resurrection of Nokia is nearing completion.  Finland based HMD announced today that they have secured the licensing rights to the Nokia brand for the next 10 years and that a new, Android powered smartphone will be hitting the marking in the first half of 2017.  It marks a pretty staggering comeback, if only in name, to a brand that has been in the mobile phone space for decades.  After the company was bought by Microsoft and then subsequently scuttled in the debacle that has been Windows Phone, it appeared that the brand would be gone forever.

HMD is making sure that doesn’t happen.  Comprised of several former Nokia employees, the company will be manufacturing phones under the name of Nokia that will include both feature phones (which are available now) as well as Android-based Smartphones.