Author: Clinton

Today’s Deal is on the Sony Xperia XA2.  The XA2 is one of the newest phones in Sony’s lineup, having just been announced in January at CES.  Right now at Amazon, you can pick up the 5.2″ mid-range phone for $319 in black.  That’s a savings of $31 off the regular price.  The special pricing is only one the black model.

The Xperia XA2 is powered by the Snapdragon 630 SoC, has 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.  That storage can be expanded thanks to the MicroSD card slot built into it.  It renders a FHD 1920 x 1080 on the 5.2″ IPS LCD display. The XA2 has a 3300mAh battery and runs Android Oreo out-of-the-box.

A surprising fifth beta build of Chrome 65 has landed in the Chrome OS Beta Channel today.  It is surprising in that Chrome 65 was slated to land in the Stable Channel three days ago on March 13.  With this new beta build released, it would seem the Chromium team has found some issues they want to resolve prior to releasing it to everyone.

The new build is 65.0.3325.167 (Platform version: 10323.58.0), incrementing significantly from the fourth beta build of last week.  That build was .148.  That large of a jump in just six days is another indicator that a lot of work has been going on within the Chromium team to get the build ready for the Stable Channel.

The Google Camera app for the Google Pixel lineup of phones has a new update rolling out that brings some UI changes as well as some new features.  The update is version 5.2 for those keeping score at home and has been released to the Play Store.  You should see the update over the course of the next few days.

From a UI perspective, the top menu bar has been cleaned up with the grid control settings moved to the menu in the app as a setting.  Given that the grid view is normally something you set and forget, this makes sense and makes the upper bar in the app a bit less cluttered.

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.

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.

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.