Category: Google

Good news for those of you who have ordered the new Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P as it looks like your phones could ship as early as this week.  Multiple people have reported that their orders for the new Android Marshmallow-based phones have moved from “Preorder” to “Pending”, an indicator that Google is preparing to start shipping the devices.  While Google has not confirmed this in any way, other leaks report to internal documents indicating an October 13th ship date for the Nexus 5X.  That’s tomorrow peeps.

We are currently in the Great Google Disruption of 2015.  Well, okay, that’s a bit of drama but there are several service from the company that are degraded.  The most notable is Google Drive where people are able to log in but they don’t see any files or folders.  Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides are also impacted by the outage which started at 10:55 AM Pacific.  There is no word on what the issue is or when it will be resolved.

For those who want to keep up with such outages or other service impacting things from Google, there is a single site that is the place to go for information:  The App Status Dashboard.

Google is rolling out a new update to the Google Drive for Android app that will add the ability for users to request permission to access a file or folder on your Drive account.  Today you can easily share content on your Drive by sending a link to someone via email, Hangouts, etc.  As Google puts it, “This release adds the ability for people using the Drive Android app to request access to Drive content links―received via email, Hangouts, etc―to which they don’t already have access.”

Google Drive for Android – Free – Download Now

Google has released an important update to the Project Fi app for Android that expands the devices that can run the app.  Previously you could only run the Project Fi app and manage your account from a Nexus 6, the first device that could run on the Project Fi network.  Now with the addition of the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P, not only can you manage your account from those two new devices but from any Android device running Android Lollipop or higher.

The updated version of the Project Fi app is version F.1.5.10 for those keeping score at home and it is rolling out to the Google Play Store now.  If you are a Project Fi customer you should see the update hit your device any time between now and the next day or two.  If you are not a Project Fi customer you can still download the app to get an idea of how the mobile plans from Google work but obviously it doesn’t do a lot for you without being on the plan.

Project Fi – Free – Download Now

For those of you who use WhatsApp for your voice and messaging needs, backup up those chats is going to be a lot easier in the coming weeks.  Google announced that an update to WhatsApp is going to allow users to back up their content to their Google Drive account, making sure those important chats, messages, videos and images shared on the app are not lost.  The update is rolling out over the course of the next few weeks so if you don’t see the option in your WhatsApp settings, it will be there soon.

WhatsApp for Android – Free – Download Now

Google has announced a new open source initiative aimed at bringing speed while maintaining content richness to the mobile web.  The project, Accelerated Mobile Pages, builds on existing web technologies and relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built from those technologies.

Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.

The good news is that Google already has a lot of other companies signed up to help drive the project forward.