Today marks the first birthday of Project Fi, Google’s MVNO solution supported by T-Mobile and Sprint. A year ago today the company announced the carrier solution that at the time was only supported by the then new Nexus 6. Since then, the service has grown to support the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X and has added a data-only service for certain tablets.
One of the accessories that really makes the Nexus 9 a productivity powerhouse is the Folio Keyboard for the tablet. Priced at $60, nearly $100 less than what it was a debut, this magnetically attaching keyboard and cover gives you a great feeling and functional keyboard while providing protection for your tablet at the same time. I have been using the Folio Keyboard over the course of the last several weeks and I have to say that I am impressed with the performance and ease-of-use. While not everyone needs a keyboard for their tablet, if you have a Nexus 9 and need one, this is not a bad option to consider.
The Bank of America app for Android has been updated and with it comes support for fingerprint support for sign in. Now if you have an Android phone running Android Marshmallow that has a fingerprint scanner, you can now use it to sign into the app to get to your accounts. The update takes advantage of Marshmallow’s fingerprint API and adds to the app’s already support of Samsung’s fingerprint API.
Project Fi users, there is an update to the app for your Android phone that will bring you a long requested feature: A Home Screen widget. The updated version is rolling out to the Google Play Store now and you should have the update come to you via an OTA update over the course of the next few days. The widget, which is a dial that shows you how much you data you have used for your current billing cycle and will show you how may days you have left in the cycle.
Good news this morning for owners of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge on the AT&T network. There is a new update to Android Marshmallow available for each device that among other things brings you the April Security Update for Android. The update has been released by the carrier and it will take a few days for the update to come to everyone on the network but when it does, you’ll have the latest update from Google along with a few other tweaks from AT&T themselves.
Just a day after releasing the Android Marshmallow update for the Xperia Z3, Sony has announced that owners of select models of the phone can download and test the Android N Technical Preview on their devices now, months ahead of its official release. The news means that Google has expanded the boarders of the Android N preview far wider than any other previous beta of the Operating System and Sony could well be the first of many manufactures who open up a similar program.
Google has released an important update to the Google News & Weather app for Android that brings support for AMP pages. Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, are pages designed in a more lightweight fashion that provide you the content of a web page much faster than traditional HTML. It is a project that Google has been working on for months and the adoption and integration of AMP has been progressing steadily over that time. For the record, ClintonFitch.com is 100% AMP compliant.
Google has released an update to Google Sheets for Android that brings some much needed improvements around charts in the spreadsheet app. Right now you can insert a chart into a sheet on your Android phone or tablet with no problem but manipulating that chart is pretty limited. For things like changing simple things like the legend location, you have to go to the file in your browser. That, fortunately, is changing.