Tag: Google

Google Trips, Google’s travel organizer app, was released back in September 2016 and hasn’t had a whole lot of fanfare.  It’s a solid little app that helps you keep your trips organized with all of your reservations as well as things to do and see while you are in that location.  Since its launch, the app hasn’t had many updates but for some users, there has been a nagging bug that has finally been addressed.  A small update is rolling out now that fixes an issue with notifications in the app.  Those notifications should now work, letting you know when you have a trip upcoming or events within that trip.  Previously it worked… sometimes.

If you have Google Trips installed on your phone, the update should be coming to you over the course of the next few days.

The 2nd and likely the last beta of Android Nougat 7.1.2 has begun rolling out to those enrolled in the Android Beta program.  The update brings additional bug fixes and refinements to the first beta which, on the whole, is a bug fix and refinement release for Nougat.  While there is no official word on when the general public will see 7.1.2, it is likely not far away.  Generally the first beta was solid and this second appears to be smoothing out a few rough edges.  It feels complete at this point.

While the focus is on bug fixes and refinements, this beta does bring a few new things to the table.  First, for those of you with a Nexus 6P, you finally get the fingerprint scanner swipe action that has been on the Nexus 5X since the first beta.  If you remember, the first beta for the 6P was delayed by about three weeks and didn’t come with the ability to swipe down and read notifications.  That seems to have been addressed in this second beta.

With Google Assistant rolling out widely to Android Marshmallow and Nougat running phones, the question of if the new feature would be hitting Android tablets too.  The answer is no.  The team over at Android Police got confirmation from Google directly that the feature will only be rolling out to phones and not to tablets.  As an Android tablet user (albeit limited these days), its a bit disappointing that the feature won’t be rolling out.  That said, it’s understandable.  Given that tablet sales are stagnate at best and most people are driving activity and searches from their phones, it just makes sense for Google not to invest the time and effort into getting it onto tablets.

If you are desperate to get Google Assistant on your tablet, there are hacks that will get it there for you.  If you hit the link to the Android Police article, they have a link to show you how to do it.  But,

Google Assistant

as always, proceed with caution.

Keep in mind that you can still use OK Google on your tablet, you just won’t have all the new benefits of Google Assistant on it.

Is this disappointing news for you?  Are you surprised?  Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Google Home for Android has been updated with a new Listen tab that makes it easier to find curated music streams across a wide range of services.  The app itself was updated last week but the new Listen tab has now been enabled on the back end.  If you don’t see it yet, don’t fret.  It will be there over the course of the next few days.  Once you have it, you will be able to see music streams from the likes of Spotify and Google Play Music that you can listen to at any time.  You will also get recommendation for apps that can be used by Google Home for music streaming.

The new Listen tab also gives you recommendations of artists and music streams based on your listening habits.  This is a great way to discover new music but also rediscover an old favorite from the past.

Listen Tab in Google Home

Google’s drive is to make it easier to find streaming music.  With so many options, having the ability to scan a single tab in the Home app makes things easier and faster for you.  If you have accounts with Spotify and Google Play Music, you will be able to open those apps from within the Home app to get to the music stream easily but you can also play them from within the Home app too.

Google has announced that the latest version of Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux has a new CPU consumption throttle that will limit the power consumption of background tabs in the browser.  This new throttling policy should shows improvements to users in the form of prolonged battery life, something that Chrome and other browsers are known to impact.

The update is a change from the current timer model that is used in Chrome today.  That timer limits the refreshing of background tabs to once per second.  In this new timer, it is based on CPU consumption.  Build 57 will delay timers to the limit average of CPU load of 1% of a core.  So think of it as an augmented and improved timer model over the once-per-second timer used today.

Google Chrome for Windows

It should be noted that tabs playing audio or real-time connections (like WebRTC) won’t be impacted.

So what does this really mean for end users?  It should result in improved battery life.  With fewer timer updates happening in the background, you should see battery life improvement.  How much is going to be dependent on how many background tabs you have open at any given time.  Even with these improvements, it is recommended that you keep tabs to a minimum as you work throughout the day, especially if you are running your laptop on battery power.

Eventually the Chrome team wants to get tabs fully suspended in the background and leverage new APIs to bring them back to life when you need them.  That’s still a bit away but is the end goal for the team.

With the March Android Security Update rolling out, February’s update is just now being rolled out by AT&T to some Samsung devices.  The update for the Galaxy Note 4, Note 5 and S5 Active are just now hitting customers. The updates themselves are quite small, under 200MB, and only contain the security update changes & fixes.  To put things into perspective, T-Mobile released the February Android Security Update for the Note 5 on their network on February 1st, the day the patch was released.

The challenge of upgrades and security patches is a well trodden road that we don’t need to visit yet again.  But it speaks volumes of the problem facing the platform when one carrier is releasing a security patch some 5 weeks after it was originally released.

Samsung Galaxy Note 5

The update for these devices shouldn’t take long to download given their size.  Once you have the download completed, your will need to reboot your device to apply the update which, all in, should take about 20 minutes to get done.  For reference, the build numbers for the updates are as follows:

• Galaxy Note 4 – MMB29M.N910AUCS2EPK4
• Galaxy Note 5 – MMB29K.N920AUCS4CQB2
• Galaxy S5 Active  – MMB29M.G870AUCS2DPK5

Unless you just absolutely have to do so, I strongly encourage readers to avoid carrier locked devices from any carrier.  Updates tend to be much slower from carriers while unlocked devices from manufactures, as a general rule, will get updates faster.  That doesn’t always hold 100% true but close enough.  Obviously devices from Google like the Pixel and Nexus phones get updates the quickest.