Tag: Android

On the heels of Google I/O, the Mountain View company has been pumping out a lot of updates over the past few days.  Google Assistant was front-and-center for a lot of I/O last week and the company is continuing to push the information that you have in the app on Android and iOS devices.

A new addition has popped up in the Assistant app on Android, showing you a new Your Actions section.  It is found on the Explore tab of Assistant and is located at the very bottom of that tab.  Tapping the link for Your Actions will show you a list of actions that you frequently use and will include things that are a part of routines for Assistant.

If you are a PUBG Mobile player and have a high end Chromebook, today is a good day.  The latest update to the mobile version of PUBG for Android can now run on a Chromebook but there are a few catches that you need to be aware of before getting overly excited.  The cool thing is that it is there.

First, make no mistake:  You need a high end Chromebook for this to work.  The game defaults into low graphics mode even on my i5 Intel Pixelbook and while it looks great, it still isn’t a sweet looking as it is on my Pixel XL phone.  ARM-based Chromebooks are going to struggle mightily with the game.  If you load it up on an ARM model, be prepared for a fair amount of lag.

After being announced last week at Google I/O, the new Google News app is now available in both the Google Play Store for Android users as well as Apple’s App Store for iPhone users.  While the app makes the AI-driven news app available, the Google News site is still hasn’t been updated at the time of this posting.

As you may recall, the new Google News app has an entirely new look and feel, drawing heavily on Material Design for its overall look with lots of visual content for news articles.  It is a far cry from the nearly all text-based version of the old News app.

Somethings things just don’t go as planned and Chrome 66 could fall into that category.  The update to the browser for MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome OS rolled out progressively starting in late April up through last week depending on the platform.  It came with an autoplay blocking feature that would prevent most websites from autoplaying audio and video content.  The problem is, it broke things.

Specifically, multiple reports came to the Chromium team about web games being broken after the update to Chrome 66 as well as some corporate web-based demos.  In response, Google has partially rolled back the feature with plans to reintroduce it later.

It looks like that Android app access to USB drives in Chrome OS is a little bit closer than anticipated.  When I wrote about this feature coming to Chrome OS back in April, it looked like the feature would land in the Chrome 68 build which isn’t due until July.  However, in the latest Chrome 67 build for the Chrome OS Beta Channel, the feature is available and SD cards or USB drives show up as a storage option.

The feature is a big deal for those who use Android apps in Chrome OS.  It means that you can store documents, music or videos on an external drive and not eat up what is often a small amount of built-in storage on your Chromebook.

The new Color Pop feature that was highlighted this past week at Google I/O in Google Photos is now starting to roll out to users.  The feature takes an image in your photos library that has a bright colored subject and then turns the background black & white.

The feature, at least right now, is 100% driving by Google Assistant, the AI built into Google Photos.  That means you can’t force the issue.  If the AI finds a photo in your library that meets its criteria, it will provide you the photo in the Assistant tab where you can save it to your library.