Category: Android

Earlier this week at Mobile World Congress, we got our first glimpse at the completely redesigned Sony Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact.  Generally speaking, the reception for both phones has been great with Sony finally ditching their massive bezel design.  A key question remained however:  How much will they cost?

Thanks to Sony Mobile’s German site, we now have an idea.  The Xperia XZ2 will be €799 which roughly breaks down to $977 US.  The European price is a full €100 more than last year’s Xperia XZ1.

Another flagship phone was announced today at Mobile World Congress and stop me if you have seen it before – because if you’ve seen an iPhone X, you’ve essentially seen the Asus ZenFone 5Z.

The latest flagship in a trio of phones announced today by Asus is as blatant a copy of the Apple flagship as you will find but that may not be all that bad.  THe ZenFone 5Z isn’t a cheap knock-off.  It is a flagship with flagship specs.  The 6.2″ FullHD IPS display renders at 1080 x 2246 pixels and is a 18.5:9 ratio.  That gives you a very comfortable ~402 ppi density.  It is powered by the Snapdragon 845 SoC which is coupled with the Adreno 630 GPU.  It has 4GB of RAM and comes standard with 64GB of storage which can be expanded thanks to the MicroSD slot.  Battery wise, you have a 3300mAh battery.

Today at Mobile World Congress, Google introduced Flutter, their new cross platform mobile SDK.  The new development tool will allow for developers to create native UI frameworks for both Android and iOS that are native to each platform.

The beauty of Flutter is that it comes packing its own rendering engine and framework which, in essence, bypasses the native UI frameworks in both platforms.  This is not something new for developers, especially game developers who have used different rendering engines.  This allows for significant performance increases (particularly on Android).  When you compile the app with the available Android and iOS SDKs, you get the appropriate app & framework for the respective platform.

The Google Phone app has a new update rolling out that brings voicemail transcription to T-Mobile subscribers.  The update to the app is version 17.0.186697879 for those keeping score at home and it brings those who use T-Mobile on par with Verizon and Project Fi customers who use the app.

Like with the other carriers, when you get a voicemail on your T-Mobile number, you will not get an artificial intelligence created transcription of that voicemail, allowing to quickly read it instead of having to listen to it.

The latest Android Go series phone has been announced at Mobile World Congress, the ZTE Tempo GO.  The Tempo Go is a 5″ FWVGA display device that has all of the basics covered for one of these low cost devices running Android Oreo.  Better yet, ZTE has priced it at just $79.99.

As for specs, the display renders at 480×854 and the phone is powered by the Snapdragon 210 quad-core SoC.  It has 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage but that storage can be expanded by an additional 32GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.  Powering all of this is a 2200mAh battery that is recharged via the MicroUSB port.

A minor update to Google Play Music has been released in the Play Store, bringing a long requested feature to the app.  With the new 8.7.6773 version of the app now allows you to disable album art on your lock screen.

Users have long requested this feature more for privacy concerns than anything.  If you are listening to music and a NSFW album art is displayed on your phone, it could be embarrassing for you or be something that is inappropriate for minors.  Now you have a bit more control over it.