Category: Google

The day has finally arrived Star Wars fans.  Rogue One:  A Star Wars Story is now available for purchase in the Google Play Movies & TV Store.  The movie has been available to add to your wishlist since January and was one of the most successful movies of 2016.  The movie is set between the much maligned prequels and A New Hope, the original Star Wars movie, focusing on a band of Rebels who are trying to steal the plans to the Death Star.  If you haven’t seen it yet, rent it and see what you missed.  It has become one of my favorite movies in the franchise.

The movie is $19.99 in HD.  Right now there is not a rental option nor is there a UHD option for the movie.

Google Trips has seen its second update this week, bringing two new features that users will appreciate.  First, you now have the ability to manually add hotel and airline reservations to a trip.  Previously, there was no way to do this and the only way to get reservations into a trip was by having it automatically added via Gmail.  Now when you go into a trip within the app, you will see a FAB (Floating Action Button) which will now let you add flight and hotel information.

The other big change in this update is that Google Trips will now watch your Gmail for bus and train travel and add those automatically to your trips.  This expands the apps ability in searching Gmail as previously only hotel and airline information was automatically added.

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.

Google Play Music has released their first podcast produced by Google, City Soundtracks.  The 15-odd minute casts are aimed at highlighting an artist and the city from which they originate.  While Play Music has had the ability to listen to podcasts for a while now, this is the company’s first foray into actually producing one.  And I have to say, it’s pretty good.  Right now the cast list is only three episodes, all released yesterday, featuring artists from Austin, New Orleans and Oakland.  You can check it out here.

The official description pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

City Soundtracks by Google Play Music is a traveling conversation about the people, places and moments that shape our musical lives. Each episode features an artist and a city. Host Hrishikesh Hirway invites musicians to lead listeners on a tour of the city through conversation and music.

I’ve listened to two of the three episodes and I have to say, it’s not bad.