Google Releases List of Watches That Will Be Updated to Wear OS

With all of the rebranding efforts of Android Wear to Wear OS by Google, and an update to the Wear OS app for Android, the next question is which watches will get updated to reflect the new branding.  Well, it seems, a fair number of them.

Google has taken to the renamed Android Wear forum to announce which watches will get updated.  While the time frame of a “the coming weeks” was provided, there was no further timeline provided or which watch will receive the update first.

Google Pay Adds 61 New Financial Institutions

The start to 2018 has been busy for the Google Pay team and today is another example of it.  61 new financial institutions have added support for the tap-to-pay service, bringing to total number of banks and credit unions supporting it to just shy of 1200 (1193 to be exact).

As has become the norm over the past several months, these new institutions are smaller, regional ones.  At this point, it is more of a question of which banks are not supporting Google Pay as that number would be significantly smaller.

Google Assistant Now Supports Hindi

Making good on its promise at Mobile World Congress, Google has rolled out Hindi language support in Google Assistant.  The announcement came from the Google Blog in India with support initially rolling out to Android devices running Marshmallow (6.0) or higher.  Support for Lollipop (5.0) will be coming shortly.

The BBC estimates that some 425 million people speak Hindi as their first language with an addition 125 million as their second language.  That is a significant number of people who will now be able to use Google Assistant to help them with tasks for gather information.

Wear OS App Update Brings A Much Improved User Experience

With Android Wear being rebranded Wear OS today, Google has taken the opportunity to update the Android Wear app for Android.  The app update, however, is not just a rebranding exercise.  The company took the opportunity to revamp the user experience of the app and make it far more friendly than previous iterations.

The new app build is version 2.10.0.188560295 for those keeping score at home and has been released to the Play Store.  It may take a few days to get to everyone.  Once it does, you will find that settings for your watch are not front-and-center on the home page of the app.

Fifth Chrome 66 Build Comes to the Chrome OS Dev Channel

The fifth and likely the last Chrome 66 build for the Chrome OS Dev Channel has arrived.  The new build is version 66.0.3359.31 (Platform version: 10452.11.0) and contains a number of bug fixes and other stability improvements as the Chromium team prepares to move it up to the Beta Channel.

With the release of this build, the Chromium team has released a Dev build for the last five consecutive weeks and based on past history, there is very rarely a sixth update in this channel.

As always, those who have devices in the Dev Channel can type chrome://help in the omnibar of the browser to force their devices to download the update.  As a gentle reminder, the Dev Channel is not recommended to be run on production Chromebooks as it is unstable and you will likely run into bugs or issues.

%d bloggers like this: