Author: Clinton

Croatia has become the latest country where Google Pay is now available.  It means that Croatians can now use their phones to tap-and-pay for services in supporting retailers as well as for online purchases.  The country marks the third central European country to get the service after Czech Republic and Slovakia earlier this year.

Support for Google Pay in Croatia is pretty limited at the moment.  Only the Visa Inspire Debit Card from PBZ is currently supported.  No other financial institutions or even other cards from PBZ are supported – at least not yet.  It is likely that other banks will join into the service once it is more established.

The new LG Stylo 4, which was released back in June, has made its way to Amazon as an Amazon Prime Exclusive Phone.  The $249.99 price tag is $50 less than the normal price for the phone and, like other Prime phones, will com pre-installed with the various Amazon apps.

For that $249.99 price tag, you get a solid mid-range device and a phone that is running Android Oreo 8.1.  The LG Stylo 4 has a 6.2″ Full HD display that renders at 2160×1080 on at 18:9 aspect ratio.  It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of built-in storage which can be expanded up to 2GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

Despite significant challenges in getting into the US market, Huawei has become the second largest phone manufacture, measured in phone shipments, in the latest report from IDC.  The shipping of 54.2 million devices in the second quarter of 2018 means that the Chinese manufacture has moved well past Apple, who was number two behind Samsung until this report.  Apple shipped 41.3 million devices in the same quarter.

Overall, Samsung remains the number one phone manufacture in the world, capturing some 20.9% of the global market with 71.5 million units shipping in Q2 of this year.  Huawei has approximately 15.8% of the market share.

Yesterday, Hauwei’s sub-brand Honor released the new Honor Note 10.  The 6.95″ phone is packed with performance and while it is only available in China currently, it is expected that a global variant of the phone will be available later this year or early next.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t get the wallpapers from the new phone today.

The Honor Note 10 has ten stock wallpapers that come on the phone and as these things tend to go, it didn’t take long for them to leak online.  I’ve got all of them now and I’ve linked to them after the break so those who aren’t interested don’t have to wade through them.

Regardless of if you like, don’t like, or vehemently hate sensor notches on smartphones, the reality is that they are coming into vogue.  Google themselves are expected to have a notched device in the Pixel 3 XL and there are already notched devices out there from the likes of Essential and Huawei.  That said, Android Oreo has never fully supported notches but that changes under Android P.

The Android team over at Google took to the Android Development blog yesterday to outline some key code elements that developers need to use in order to make sure their apps work with a notched device in Android P.  They also laid down the law for manufactures too.  No device will have more that two notches.

Good news this morning for those of you who have the LG V20 on Sprint.  The carrier has released the Android Oreo update for the 2016 flagship phone and it is making its way out to customers now.  The new build is OPR1.170623.032 for those keeping score at home.

The update brings all the standard goodness of Android Oreo 8.0 to the phone along with the July Android Security Update.  As you would expect, it is a hefty update at just over 1.5GB so you will certainly want to download this update via WiFi and to install, you will need at least 80% battery life.