Category: Android

Google has started rolling out an update to Android Pay that should hit your device in the next day or two.  The update, version 1.2 for those keeping score at home, is a minor update but it does have one significant feature that you will want to have available to you.  If you recall, back in December I told you about apps you may have on your phone being able to leverage Android Pay for payments.  That list of apps was pretty long and included apps like Lyft, OpenTable and ParkMe Parking.  The update today to Android Pay is important because now you will get receipts in the app for those in-app purchases.

Essentially the receipts act like the do if you use Android Pay at a physical store.  When you make a purchase using it within an app, a receipt for that transaction is associated with the credit or debit card that you used to pay for it.  The idea of course is you have one place to go to see a history of all your transactions.  There is nothing you as a user need to do other than update to this latest version to enable this feature.  It is a back end change along with the app.

Android Pay – Free – Download Now

There are a lot of cool changes coming to the next update of Google Plus for Android which should be rolling out this week.  Google’s Luke Wroblewski posted on his Google+ profile some of the changes that are coming in version 7.0.0 of the app.  As he put in his post, this includes two of the most requested Android fixes so he and the team are certainly listening to users of the new-and-improved Google+.

Specific to what is being addressed in the update, Luke outlines them in his post and provided a great infographic which I have linked to after the break.

• 69 bugs fixed
• 14 accessibility issues addressed
• Automatically hide the bottom tab bar when scrolling (note: not on Notifications screen yet)
• The home stream now remembers your position when you return to it (after going to a different screen like Notifications)
• Search now displays autocomplete suggestions as you type
• If you have no Collections or Communities visible on your profile, we include a prompt for you to add one

That’s a huge number of fixes and improvements that users can expect to see when the update comes out via an OTA update.

Microsoft continues to develop and enhance their Office applications for Android and the updates this week are sure to please users of the apps.  The updates to Word, Excel and PowerPoint are all being released to the Google Play Store and you should see the updates to the apps via an OTA update in the coming days.  With that update come a lot of individual app improvements but also a universally improved sign up process for the apps.

In order to use the apps, you must have a Microsoft account.  While most of us do have one (if you have a Hotmail address then you have a Microsoft account), some don’t and previous to this update, you really couldn’t sign up easily within the apps themselves.  That has changed and now you can sign up for an account quickly and easily in any of the apps so you can get using them quickly.  Remember that to use all of the features of these apps, you will need to have an Office 365 account but can create and edit documents without it on devices 10.1″ and smaller.

Google has dropped the price of the Nexus 5X by $30 at the Google Store, bringing the mid-market phone down to $349 for the 16GB model.  The 32GB model also dropped by $30 to $399.  The price change is a permanent change.

When the 5X was released back in September, many question the price point of the device for the specs it offered.  Google, it would seem, has heard this and had introduced this price reduction.  At this new price point, the Nexus 5X is really hard to beat and it comes with Android Marshmallow already installed so there are no upgrade challenges for this device.

Nexus 5X – Starting at $349 – Google Store

While searching by text has been available to smartphone users for many years now, voice commands to search and do other things is still relatively new.  Sure there have been attempts at it in the past but over the course of the last 18 months with Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft) and Google Now, the ability to do far more than simply search for web content with your voice has grown exponentially.  In fact the challenge now is not so much what you can’t say to your device but remembering what you can say to your device.

This is the first part in a multi-part series on voice commands with Google Now.  I will preface this by saying that this by no means should be considered definitive or final.  Google is continually adding voice commands to the service and while I do plan to update these posts as time goes on, undoubtedly I will miss something.  Your help, of course, is appreciated in finding new commands.  For this first post I am going to focus on commands that you can give to your phone or tablet to perform a function or to get you information.

The way I have structured the information after the break is whatever you find (parenthetically) is the user adjustable command.  For example, “What time is it in (Denver)?”.

One of the more exciting developments out of CES 2016 was from a company by the name of Jide and their Remix OS.  While the company has designed products specifically for this Android Lollipop based OS, the company is also offering you the ability to download Remix OS and install it on an old PC or Mac, turning it into an Android device.  It is a very clever solution and gives you all the ease of Android and benefits (like a great app store) while breathing new life into that old computer you have sitting around the house.

Remix OS is our state of the art Android-based operating system. We mean it when we say you get a PC experience unlike anything on Android and an Android experience unlike anything on a PC.

Today you can now download the OS for PC free of charge from their website and install it on your older computer, effectively turning it into an Android “PC”.  But as you would expect, there are some caveats that you need to be aware of before you take on the task.