Tag: Android

If you want a humongous phone, Asus has you covered.  The company over the weekend launched their new ZenFone 3 series of phones with the top-end Ultra coming to market with a massive 6.8″ display.  All three phones are aimed at meeting consumers where they want on both a performance level and a display size and while no release date was given on the new lineup, you should expect to seem them at some point over the course of this summer.

The entry level ZenFone 3 is powered by Snapdragon 625 processor, has 4GB of RAM, 32GB of Storage and 16MP rear camera.  It also sports a fingerprint scanner and a 5.5″ display that renders at 1920 x 1080.

Today marks the first birthday of Google Photos, the photo backup and sharing service-meets-app.  It was announced at Google I/O 2015 and was officially launched on May 27, 2015 as a website and an app for Android with iOS being added shortly thereafter.  In that year, the service has grown tremendously as have the functionality of the apps and the website.  Today, as part of the celebrations, Google has released some facts and figures on how the service is used and how much it has grown in popularity.  We knew of course that it had grown to over 200 million active monthly users based on comments from I/O this year.  But there are even more interesting figures to discuss.

The Skype team over at Microsoft have released a dramatically improved version of the voice and video communications app for Android.  The new 7.0 version of the app is hitting the Google Play Store now and if you already have it installed, you should see the update hit your device via an OTA over the course of the next few days.  The big improvement in this new update is the new Material Design inspired UI on tablets.

We’ve redesigned the tablet UI from the ground up, bringing a number of material design inspired elements.

The app also has a Floating Action Button (FAB) that makes it much faster to start a conversation or call with Skype app.  That FAB is in both the tablet and phone versions of the app.

The Microsoft Android team has been busy.  Earlier this morning I told you about a major update to the Next Lock Screen app for Android.  Now the Office team has rolled out an update to the Android versions of Excel, PowerPoint and Word.  All three of the updates are now in the Google Play Store and you should be seeing them hit your devices at any point.  The big news in these updates is the addition of the Tell Me feature in the apps.  If you aren’t familiar with Tell Me, you probably have it and don’t know it.  If you run Office 2016 on your PC or Mac, at the top of any of the apps there is a search box titled “Tell me what you want to do”.  Type in what you are wanting to do in any of the apps and it will give you instructions on how to do it.  It is far faster than trying to dumpster dive into the menus of the apps.  That same feature is now available in the Android versions of the apps so you can quickly figure out how to do something without having to search around.

Today, ZTE has announced their all new flagship Android phone, the Axon 7.  This new 5.5″ display device has some serious specifications including a whooping 6GB of RAM on the upper end model and a 20MP rear camera.  The company will be launching the phone in China today but it is expected to hit US shores in the coming months and will be available unlocked.  It is expected that once it does get to the US, it will be in the sub-$500 price range.  If that is indeed the case, it will be a great deal for what it has to offer.

If you have been thinking about trying out YouTube Red, the ad-free version of YouTube, now is a good time to give it a go.  Right now you can sign up for three months for just .99 Cents, giving you full access to the service, and as a bonus, to Google Play Music Unlimited as well.  For those who may not remember, Red is the ad-free version of YouTube which gives you an ad-free experience but also allows you to download videos for offline viewing later on your Android devices.  It also gives you access to original YouTube content.