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Last May at Google I/O, the company announced a new video calling app, Google Duo.  That app was promised at some point this summer and today it has hit the Play Store as a free download.  The app lets you place a video call to any of your contacts who have Duo and provides a seamless and great video experience.  One of the key features of the app is that it gives a video preview of the person who is calling or you are calling so you can see who it is and what they may be wanting to have a video call with you about before you answer.

The utilitarian app Google Calculator has been updated for Android and while it is certainly a small update, it does have one nice new creature comfort feature and an underlying more important one.  First, the update is build is version 7.0.1 for those keeping score at home and it is rolling out in the Google Play Store now.  You should see the OTA in a day or two.  As for the creature comfort feature, the app now groups large numbers.  In other words, here in the US, you will see a comma between each group of numbers such as 123,456,789.  Previously you would just see 123456789.  Again, not a big deal but it does make it easier if you are using the app for computing large numbers.

An important update is in the process or rolling out in the Google Play Store for Google Maps.  The update, version 9.33.1 for those keeping score at home, brings a new Wi-Fi only mode to the navigation app.  In this mode, Maps will not consume any data and will give you navigation information in areas that you have downloaded to your device.  Once you are connected again to a wireless network, you have full functionality of the app.  The idea behind this new feature is two-fold:  First, if you are traveling abroad, you can save on high data usage charges while you navigate in that foreign country.  Second, there are plenty of rural areas here in the United States were data from carriers is just not available.  Either way, you can use this new Wi-Fi mode and keep navigating.

Last week I posted about an ongoing issue that Windows Phone users have had with adding a Gmail account to their devices.  The issue was that when a user opened up Outlook Mail and attempted to add a Google account, it would give an error indicating that the browser of the device was not supported.  This on again-off again problem has been going on for several weeks but it appears, finally, that it has been addressed.  Google indicated in a forum post that the error was not intentional on the part of the company which I personally think is the case.  To me, this feels like simple inattentiveness on the part of the Mountain View company.