Tag: Android

Today’s Deal is on the powerful yet budget friendly Honor 6X.  Honor is the sub-brand of Huawei and the 6X is one of their late-2016 models.  I reviewed the phone back in March and it was the first Honor product I’ve reviewed.  I was impressed, especially for the price point.  That price has gone down to $149 on Amazon and that makes it an even better deal.

The Honor 6X measures 150.9 x 76.2 x 8.2 mm or 5.94 x 3.00 x 0.32 inches in old money.  It weighs 162g or 5.71 ounces.  The display on the phone measures 5.5″ and renders a Full HD resolution of 1080 x 1920.  That gives you an approximate pixel-per-inch count of 403.  It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, which can be expanded thanks to the MicroSD slot.

The main camera configuration of the 6X consists of dual-cameras rated at 12MP and 2MP.  The Sony built sensor has a 1.25µm pixel size and has phase detection autofocus.  It has an LED flash for low light photography.  On the front, the selfie camera is an 8MP shooter.  Both the front and the rear cameras are capable of shooting HD video at 1080p at 30fps.

Google PhotoScan, the app for scanning older photos to save digitally, has a new update rolling out that brings several improvements.  The new build is version 1.5 for those keeping score at home and is rolling out into the Play Store today.

The first change that users of PhotoScan will likely appreciate the most is the automatic saving of scanned photos to your Google Photos account.  Previously, when you scanned a photo, it was saved to its own library on your phone and you had to then manually sync that library with Photos.  Now when you scan a photo, it is automatically saved to your Google Photos library, eliminating the manual step.

Microsoft has rolled out a significant update to their collaboration app & service for enterprises, Microsoft Teams.  The update adds call functionality to the service and could allow an enterprise to completely move away from Skype as a calling and collaboration solution.

You may recall that Microsoft is positioning teams as a replacement for Skype for Business and their roadmap for that transition included the addition of calling functionality to Teams.

With these new features, you can now have full dialing capabilities.  This includes things like call history, the ability to put calls on hold, speed dials, transfers, forward, caller ID (and masking), extension dialing, voicemail and TTY to name just a few features.  In other words, this update allows Microsoft Teams to become a complete cloud-based PBX solution.

Google+ has a new update rolling out for the community network on both Android and iOS.  The update brings a new advanced search function to the apps, much like the search functionality of Google Search itself.  In this new update, you will be able to use search operators to do specific searches within Google+

Google has already built a guide for these new search functions on the support site which will outline in detail how they can be used.  Some of these new functions include:

• From:  To identify a post from a G+ users
• Has:  Has an attachment such as an image or Google Doc file
• Before:  Before a specific date
• After:  After a specific date
• Commenter:  Search for a specific commenter on a specific post

As you can see, you can get quite specific in your searching to pinpoint a specific post or person.

Today’s Deal is on the fantastic phablet from Huawei, the Huawei Mate 9.  Today on Amazon you can pick up the 5.9″ phone with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for $399.  That’s $200 off the original $599 price tag ($100 its regular price now) and is the same price that Huawei was selling it back on Black Friday and Cyber Monday The price is available on either the Moonlight Silver or Space Grey colors available for the phone.  I reviewed the Mate 9 earlier this year and it is an outstanding device with an awesome display, great battery life and excellent cameras.  At this price, it is well worth considering.

So what does $399 get you in the Huawei Mate 9?  A lot frankly.  It is a 5.9″ phone running Android Nougat, an octa-core processor running at 2.4GHz and Leica optics dual-camera setup shooting at 20MP and 12MP respectively with OIS.  The front facing selfie camera is 8MP shooter.  You also have 64GB of built-in storage that can be expanded up to an additional  256GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.  Finally, it comes with a US warranty so you are not buying an international version of the phone.

Another key consideration is that Huawei is in the process of rolling out the Android Oreo update (their EMUI 8.0 variant) to the phone.  While it will ship with Nougat, you should be able to upgrade to Oreo more-or-less right out of the box.

While it won’t fall in the “most exciting” app category, the Google Phone app is a solid performer and Google, like so many of their other apps, continues to make improvements to it.  The latest update to the dialer is rolling out in the Google Play Store now, bringing with it a few new features along with the normal smattering of bug fixes & performance updates.

The new build is version 15 for those keeping score at home.

Borrowing a feature from the Google Contacts app, this new version of the Phone app now has a contact clean up feature.  Now when you go to the Contacts tab within the app, a bottom pop-up will display to show you which contacts you have that are duplicated.  You can then choose to clean those contacts up by merging them.  The feature is not as robust as the one found in the proper Contacts app but will get the job done nevertheless.