Category: Android

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.

After being in beta for the last couple of months, the EMUI 8 update for the Huawei P10 and P10 Plus is now rolling out globally.  EMUI is Huawei’s own variant of Android and the version 8 build is based on Android Oreo.  The release has started but it appears that Huawei is slow rolling it for now.  It could be several weeks before the update gets to everyone.

The update for the Huawei P10 and the P10 Plus is build 8.0.0.360(C636) and this build appears to be for all variants of the devices (single-SIM, dual-SIM).  The update also comes with the February 2018 Android Security Update patch.

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.

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.

A new update to Pocket for Android is rolling out in the Play Store and it brings a long requested feature to the read it later app.  Now when you look at your list of articles you have saved, you will see an estimated reading or viewing time for that article.

For those who aren’t familiar with Pocket, it is an app that allows you to save content to read later.  It is aimed to simplified your life by having one repository for your content so you are not having to create a bunch of bookmarks.

After finding indicators in the latest beta of Google Play Services, it looks like the branding of Android Wear has officially moved to Wear OS.  Google launched a new site this morning for the platform, removing the Android Wear name in favor of the new one.

Wear OS by Google Site

As indicated before, this rebranding makes a lot of sense.  Google has been slowly separating things from the Android name, instead making them Google branded or generic.  The best example of this is the recent change from Android Pay to Google Pay.  For Android Wear, this makes sense because Wear devices have long been compatible with iPhones thanks to the Wear app.