Author: Clinton

The Google Payments Center is likely one of the few Google sites that you rarely visit.  It is a central location where you can see all of your payment information such as your recent purchases, your credit cards and shipping addresses, and your subscriptions that you have through Google.  It is a site that, to be fair, you rarely need to use as most of the information in it can be found in the Play Store app or in Google Pay.

That doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t think it is important and over the weekend gave it a heavy Material Design makeover.  The update was a cloud-side push as these things tend to go so there is nothing you need to do on your end.  Just go to https://pay.google.com and you will be dropped into the new & improved Google Payment Center site.

Back in May, Google announced three new phones were coming to the Mountain View company’s MVNO service, Project Fi.  At the time of the announcement, the Moto G6 was immediately available while the LG G7 and LG V35 were slated to be available in June.  While it is a few days late, both of the LG flagships are now available to order.

The LG G7 ThinQ is priced at $749 ($31.21 per month for 24 months) while the LG V35 ThinQ is priced at $899 ($37.46 per month for 24 months), putting it up there from a pricing perspective with the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.

Earlier this week I posted an article on an update to Google Duo which brought the ability to register your Gmail account on multiple devices to use the video chat app.  It was a big win for the app and a feature that was sorely needed.

The next obvious question was if Duo could be installed on a Chromeboook that is capable of running Android apps?  It could prove to be a great win for Chrome OS and provide users the option to use the video chat app not just on a mobile but on their laptop too.  The answer is yes, but it is extremely limited right now.

Google Play Games, the game hub for Android devices, has a new update rolling out to the Play Store today that brings a new game as well as a new search functionality to help you find games to play.  The new update is version 5.10 for those keeping score at home.  It has been released by Google to the store but it may take a day or two to get to everyone.

The first new bit in this update to Google Play Games is the classic game Snake.  Like you use to play it in the pre-smartphone days, Snake allows you to use swipe actions to move the snake around the screen to eat the apples without crashing into the walls.

Two new commits in the Chrome OS Gerrit suggest that the Nearby Connections API that is currently in Android is going to be coming to the platform.  The first commit points to the actual import of the Nearby API code into the Chrome OS platform while the second commit more clearly outlines the need for classes within the platform code structure to support Nearby.

Right now the Nearby API is pretty limited in functionality on Android.  The idea long term is to allow for devices near each other to quickly share information or, through beacons, get information about a location or event that you happen to be near.  Rarely does it get used these days but Google is continue to develop the API, it is up to version 2.0 now, and developers are slowly beginning to implement it.

A new commit in the Chrome Gerrit is suggesting that Chrome Duplex, the new split menu view coming to Chrome for Android, is to be renamed Chrome Duet so as to avoid confusion with Google Duplex.  Google Duplex, as you likely know, is the human sounding assistant that can call and make appointments for you through Google Assistant.  Chrome Duplex is completely unrelated and has to do with a UI update for Chrome for Android, particularly for larger devices.

What Google is wanting to avoid is end users confusing the two duplex’s or assuming that they do the same thing – one on your phone and one in Chrome on your phone.  They are two completely different technologies and thus a name change makes a lot of sense.