Tag: Android

Sony introduced their new flagship Android phone, the Xperia XZ, at IFA 2016 and it is impressive.  The 5.2″ Full HD display device comes with just about everything you would want in a phone including an astonishing 23MP camera.  That’s right:  23 Megapixels.  Powering the XZ is the Snapdragon 820 processor and it is coupled with the Adreno 530 GPU.  It has 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and that storage can be expanded up to an additional 256GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

The cameras however somewhat steal the show.

Huawei took the stage at IFA 2016 in Berlin this morning and announced two new mid-market phones, the Nova and Nova Plus.  Both devices will be making their debut in European markets in October while the larger global release will happen later in the year.  Overall, both devices are nicely appointed and similar in most areas outside of the screen size.  The Nova will be around $440 when it hits the US and comes with a 5″ Full HD display.  It is powered by the Snapdragon 625 SoC processor, has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage.  That storage can be expanded via a MicroSD slot.  The main camera is a 12MP shooter while the front camera is 8MP.  It supports USB-C and has a 3025mAh battery.

The Skype app for Android has been update with full support for Android Nougat as well as a host of other fixes and improvements.  The updated build is version 7.14 for those keeping score at home and if you have the messaging app installed already, you should see the OTA update come to your phone or tablet over the course of the next few days.  While support for the latest version of Android is great, that really isn’t the banner item in this update.  Rather, it is a number of user related issues that the team addressed as well as cross-app suggested contacts.

The suggested contacts gives you suggestions on contacts you can reach through Skype from other Skype apps.  For example, if you have Skype for Business installed on your phone, you can now see suggested contacts for your business contacts in Skype.  You can have this setting set to automatically add your contacts or you can manually add them.

Today marks the first anniversary of the release of OnHub, the home router that aimed at making Wi-Fi connectivity easy.  Beyond this though, OnHub was positioned with its antenna array and other features as being a potential hub for home automation and Internet of Things (IoT) integration.  To date, that promise has gone largely unfulfilled with the exception of IFTTT support a few months ago.  That is changing today with an announcement from the team at Google that OnHub is now partnered with Phillips so you can control your Hue lights with your OnHub.

Today, we’re celebrating OnHub’s first birthday and announcing a new partnership with Philips Lighting, the first connected home device you can control directly with OnHub. We know people don’t like having too many apps on their phones, so we made it possible to control your home’s Philips Hue lights without downloading an app. Now anyone connected to your OnHub can type “On.Here” in a computer, tablet, or mobile browser and control the most popular features of your Philips Hue lights from there. Crank up the party lights!

It’s is a great addition to see to the router and hopefully is a sign of things to come.

One big change in Android Nougat is the ability to adjust the urgency of notification.  In Android Marshmallow, you can you somewhat have a binary decision when it came to notifications.  With Nougat, you have far more granular controls around notifications and, in fact, have six levels of notifications that you can set for applications.  The nice thing is that you can set this for each and every app on your device should you want to go through that process.

In this How To I will show you how to access the Power Notifications Controls and how to configure them for applications.

Google Search on your Android device just got a whole lot more powerful.  The Search team announced that a new feature named In Apps is now rolling out to the app on Android devices that will allow you to search content within apps installed on your phone.  Now you can search for a contact for example and find that contact along with being able to see all the messages that you have had with that contact in the various apps you have used to contact them.  Perhaps even more useful, you can search for a subject from an email and Search will interrogate Gmail to find that email.  Essentially this new feature eliminates the need to do per-app searching (if that is possible) and takes it to the system level.