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With the 2015-2016 National Hockey League season starting this week here in the US and Canada, you can get ready to keep up with your favorite teams and players with the official NHL for Android app.  The app is full of news, video highlights, social network feeds, stats and standings from across the league and you can configure the app to focus just on your favorite team – because really? As a Colorado Avalanche fan do I care about what’s going on with the Dallas Stars?  No, not really. 🙂

The NHL for Android app runs on Android phones and tablets and if you are a NHL Gamecenter subscriber, you can watch live action from across the league right on your devices.  I’ve often said that the best sports league app in my opinion is the MLB At Bat app for Major League Baseball but the NHL for Android app is undoubtedly just as good.  If you love stick & puck, you need to have this app on your phone or tablet.

Official NHL for Android App – 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.

Like many of you who have Nexus devices, I have spent this past week putting the release build of Android Marshmallow through its paces.  As I noted in my review of Android Marshmallow, I’ve had it up and running on one of my Nexus 6 for the past few weeks with the Preview 3 and now running it on my daily driver Nexus 6 and my Nexus 7 tablet.  One of the key features that I mentioned in my review was Doze and App Standby. In Android Marshmallow, when your device is sitting idle, the OS will shut down apps to a very lower power state but will stay alive enough for you to get updates and notifications.  When you pick your device back up, everything comes back to life as normal and you won’t have any lag or delay when you open up an app.  This is the Doze part of the equation. What makes this really impressive is Marshmallow learns your habits and the apps that you use most and which ones you don’t so much.  On these apps it dramatically restricts the amount of power used by the apps for maximum battery efficiency.  This is the App Standby functionality.

I have spent the last couple of nights testing the Doze functionality and the results are dramatic.  This could well prove to be the killer feature of the release and based on what others are reporting, I’m not along in the battery savings I’m seeing on my devices.

[UPDATE] This is why I love the Android community.  After posting this, several people responded over on Google+ that this is indeed a feature, not a bug.  In fact the team over at Droid Life reported on this back in May… and I just missed it.

Like many of you who have Nexus devices, I’ve upgraded both my Nexus 6 and my Nexus 7 (2013) to Android Marshmallow and so far I’ve been pretty pleased (let me know how it has gone for you by taking my site poll).  However I have noted a strange behavior with the Notification Drawer and my Nexus 7.  Before I go through the bug report process I want to see if anyone else has seen this behavior and I reserve the right to get smarter:  Did I miss a feature in Marshmallow that would cause this behavior?  Further, for you Nexus 9 owners, are you seeing the same thing too?