Author: Clinton

By any measure, Mobile World Congress was a good show for Nokia.  The company announced several new phones including the revamped Nokia 6, the Nokia 7 Plus and the Nokia 8 Sirocco.  But it appears that the HMD Global owned brand is far from done for 2018.  According to an exclusive at Nokia Power User, the company plans to launch two more devices this year:  The Nokia 8 Pro and Nokia 9.

First is the Nokia 8 Pro.  It will be powered by the Snapdragon 845, have a rotating zoom lens, and will feature a double-glass (front and back) design.  It will also be an 18:9 ratio device with a 5.5″ display.  Looking at the design concepts, this device harkens back to Nokia devices when they were making Windows Phone based phones.

Last week at Mobile World Congress, a concept video of the Vivo Apex caught a lot of attention.  The concept phone had a lot of cool tricks, including a pop-up selfie camera.  By building the camera into the chassis like this, it allows for a completely bezel-less design yet also eliminates the much loved or hated “Notch”.  Now it seems we have a bit more clarity on this design from a patent perspective thanks to Essential’s Andy Rubin.

In a Tweet over the weekend, Mr. Rubin pointed to a patent that is in his name, along with others, that is held by Essential.  That patent points out the pop-up selfie camera design and the patent for it was granted on August 15, 2017.

It is looking increasingly likely that we will see the first Developer Preview of Android P this month.  That view comes from the ramp up in activity in the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) Git and code review but also thanks to a Tweet from the awesome Evan Blass.

Android P Developer Preview 1 is targeting a mid-month release.

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) March 3, 2018

If you are not following Evan on Twitter, take the time to do so. He is one of the best connected resources out there when it comes to leaks and rumors about Android. He is also deadly accurate on these leaks too so if he Tweets on it, chances are solid that it will actually happen.  Like 99% solid.

Netgear is rolling out a new update to their Arlo smart cam devices that brings support for Google Assistant to them.  Now you will be able to issue commands like, “Hey Google, show me the front door on the living room tv” and you will be able to see that camera’s view on your Chromecast enabled TV.  You can also view the camera feeds remotely on your phone.

If this functionality sounds familiar, it should.  Essentially it is the exact same way that Google’s own Nest products work and interact with Google Assistant.  Now consumers have a choice in products but don’t sacrifice functionality.

The third Chrome 65 based beta build for Chrome OS has landed in the platforms Beta Channel today.  Build 65.0.3325.107 (Platform version: 10323.46.0) is in the process of rolling out now but those who have a Chromebook in the beta channel can always force the update by typing chrome://help in the omnibar and checking for the update.

For those new to Chrome OS, the beta channel is the last channel a new build comes to prior to being released in the Stable channel.  Generally there are anywhere from 2-4 updates to the Beta channel before it makes it out to the general public.

Today’s poll is for those of you who use a Chromebook.  The question is simple:  Do you use Android apps on your Chromebook?

While the majority of Chrome OS devices can now run Android apps, an informal survey of close friends found that they rarely use Android apps on their Chromebooks.  I, on the other hand, use as many Android apps as possible.  So I’m curious what you readers are doing.

[yop_poll id=”1″]

For those of you who answered yes, after the break I have a second question for you:  How many apps do you use?