Tag: Android

The team at LineageOS continues to shine with more new devices added to their supported device list this week.  The headliner of those new devices are the Google Pixel C tablet and the GSM unlocked and Sprint variants of the LG V20.  On the latter, with these two added, it means that the company now supports all US-based variants of the V20, a first for them.

The ROM builds for the Pixel C will be available starting on Monday, June 5th while the other ROMs for the other devices are now available.  The new devices include the BQ Aquaris U Plus and the Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus while owners of the Motorola Photon Q and eEco Le Max 2 are now on the Android Nougat based 14.1 train.

Artist Hampus Olsson has released a set of six new wallpapers in support of the latest update to Paranoid Android.  For those who may not know Olsson’s work, he is the artist behind the colorful and creative wallpapers for OnePlus and Paranoid Android.  Chances are you have seen them, you just may not know the creator behind them.

The new wallpapers are available on his site and you can download them directly from there for all your devices, even if you aren’t running Paranoid Android.  He also has other artwork and wallpapers available on his site and a bit of history on his creative works.  You will also see the extensive list of clients he has who use his artwork.

Honor, the junior brand of Huawei, have teamed up with Target to start selling the Honor 6X.  The 6X has been in the United States since January but was only really available from Honor directly or through their Amazon store front.  With the phone now becoming available in over 400 Target locations, both companies are expected the $249 phone to sell.

I reviewed the Honor 6X back in March and it is a solid performer at an excellent price point.  That $249 price gets you the 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage configuration of the phone, with that storage expandable thanks to the MicroSD card slot.  Through Target stores, you can get the phone in Silver, Gold and Gray (the Gray is only available in stores, not online).

Just a day after launching in Canada, Android Pay has expanded to another new country today.  Taiwan has now been added to the list of 13 countries where you can use your phone to tap-and-pay for products & services.  While it is good news for Taiwanese and for Android Pay in general, it does have some pretty significant limitations in the country.  Namely, at launch, the support of only two banks.

CTBC and First Bank are the only two banks that are supporting the service today but Google indicates in their post that other banks like EnTie, Hua Nan and Shin Kong are coming soon to the service.  Adding those three major banks would bring the service to a significantly larger number of users.  This limited bank support also puts them behind Apple Pay which is currently supported by 7 banks in country.

The Google Play Newsstand, Google’s news curation and information app, has an update rolling out in the Play Store.  The update, version 4.5 for those keeping score at home, improves browsing within the app and also improves the handling of photos with improved zooming in on photos.  If you have the app installed, you can expect the OTA update to the new version over the course of the next few days.

While the Newsstand app relies heavily on AMP pages, there are still plenty of sites that it leverages that don’t use or fully use it.  That can make browsing slower which is something Google addressed in this build.  Browsing of these non-AMP sources is much faster within the app now with far less loading time.  I tested this on both LTE and Wi-Fi connections and in both cases, they content loaded noticeably quicker.

The OneDrive app for Android has a new update rolling out in the Play Store.  The update, version 4.13 for those keeping score at home, brings a new offline folder feature and an improved Discover view for corporate and education Office 365 subscribers.  The new offline folder feature, however, is only for individual users.

In the last update to the app, users were able to select individual files that they wanted to keep offline.  The idea was to give users the ability to work on a file while they did not have Internet access then, when a connection was restored, the updated file would be uploaded to the cloud storage service automatically.  This is the exact same way it works in this update, only you can select an entire folder and all of its contents to be available offline.