Category: Android

Fall Fashion Week is nearly here and Google Search is making it easier than ever to follow the events, fashion houses, designers and, of course, the fashions during the events.  Across the world starting next week and with events in New York, Milan, Paris and London (to name a few), keeping up with all of it can be challenging.  Google Search is aiming to make it just a bit easier.  Starting now you can type in “Fashion Week” in Search and it will bring you designers, top stories and links to information from these events from around the world.

And this year in Google Search on your mobile phone, you can see the latest styles straight from the runway, hear directly from the designers, shop your favorite looks, see the schedule of events, find related news and follow the action like you’re sitting in the front row — or even backstage.

Google has partnered with BFA and firstVIEW to give you a wealth of information about what is going on not only on the runway but behind the scenes, the parties and of course the celebrity sightings. For Search users, you get the benefit of just being able to go one place to get all the information you want on the events around the globe.

The Skype app for Android has been update with full support for Android Nougat as well as a host of other fixes and improvements.  The updated build is version 7.14 for those keeping score at home and if you have the messaging app installed already, you should see the OTA update come to your phone or tablet over the course of the next few days.  While support for the latest version of Android is great, that really isn’t the banner item in this update.  Rather, it is a number of user related issues that the team addressed as well as cross-app suggested contacts.

The suggested contacts gives you suggestions on contacts you can reach through Skype from other Skype apps.  For example, if you have Skype for Business installed on your phone, you can now see suggested contacts for your business contacts in Skype.  You can have this setting set to automatically add your contacts or you can manually add them.

The development team at Primate Labs has released the latest edition of the Geekbench app for Android.  Geekbench 4 comes with some new CPU and GPU testing models to give you an accurate representation of how your device performs against other devices out there.  One of the big benefits of Geekbench is that it is cross platform so you get a bigger swath of data in the testing results.

Geekbench 4 includes updated CPU tests that model real-world tasks and applications. These tests are designed to quickly and accurately measure mobile CPU performance. Every Geekbench 4 CPU test is multi-core aware, allowing Geekbench 4 to measure the full potential of your device’s CPU.

In addition to the new CPU tests, there is also a new GPU test to measure the graphics performance of your device too.

One big change in Android Nougat is the ability to adjust the urgency of notification.  In Android Marshmallow, you can you somewhat have a binary decision when it came to notifications.  With Nougat, you have far more granular controls around notifications and, in fact, have six levels of notifications that you can set for applications.  The nice thing is that you can set this for each and every app on your device should you want to go through that process.

In this How To I will show you how to access the Power Notifications Controls and how to configure them for applications.

Microsoft has rolled out a nice update to the Microsoft Office suite of apps for Android.  Excel, PowerPoint and Word for Android have all been updated to build 16.0.7301.1013 for those keeping score at home and bring with it some improvements around file sharing and collaboration.  In fact, in the release notes for each of the apps, Microsoft points out that collaboration is now “front and center” for each of the apps.  So what does that mean?  It means that you can now easily and quickly find documents that have been shared with you in the new “Shared with me” section of the menu.  Here you can see files others have shared with you from their PC, Mac, iOS device or Office online when they used the “invite people” option on a document.  It is a faster way of finding those files without having to search through the app to find that document. This collaboration also means that you can quickly share a document and have the ability to see who is working on it in the Android apps.

Google has rolled out a nice improvement to the search functionality in the Google Inbox app.  This latest update builds on the 1.30 update that rolled out last week and is a behind-the-scenes update.  So long as you have the latest version of the app, this feature will roll out to you over the course of the next few days.  Essentially, this new search function makes it far easier and faster to search for an email message.  By tapping the search function, you will see a quick list of the contacts you email with often, the businesses you email with often and a refinements section that allows you to search for messages that have attachments, photos or are from last week to name a few.  You can, of course, still search for any word, date or topic within the search function as you have always been able to do.