Author: Clinton

And here we go again…. Google announced, literally in the middle of the night last night, that they are going to rebrand YouTube Red and revamp the YouTube Music app.  It was odd timing to say the least.

YouTube Premium is essentially a rebranded YouTube Red.  You get all the benefits of Red like downloading of content, ad-free content and access to YouTube original content like you do today.  The price is $11.99/month and that includes the new YouTube Music.  This too is similar to what is available today.  If you subscribe to Google Play Music at $9.99/month, you get YouTube Red included.

A colleague of mine always starts detailed emails with “BLUF” – Bottom Line Up Front.  So here is your BLUF:  If your bank doesn’t support Google Pay at this point, it is probably time to look for a new bank.  Up until yesterday, in 2018 alone, the tap-to-pay service had added 141 new banks:  80 in January and another 61 in March.  They just doubled the number by adding an scarcely believable 171 financial institutions yesterday.

The additional financial institutions brings the total number of those supporting Google Pay to 1,364 across the United States.

Netflix has expanded the list of phones that support their HDR streaming today, bringing the total number of phones supported it up to ten.  The Huawei Mate 10 Pro and the P20 have been added today along with the Sony Xperia XZ2.  All three of these phones have HDR compatible displays.

Given that more manufactures are enabling HDR displays on their devices, the list supported devices will likely grow over the course of this year.

At Google I/O last week, we got a glimpse of new one-touch auto fixing of photos that would be coming to Google Photos both in the app and on the web.  It seems that those auto fix suggestions are now starting to roll out.

Leveraging AI, Photos will now pop up a small banner on a photos to suggest a fix for that photo.  The AI looks at the lighting quality, orientation and content of the photo and gives you the suggested fix.  Tap the pop-up and you open a simple editor which shows you the updated photo.  Long press the photo to see the original.  If you like the suggested fix, save it and your photo in your Google Photos library is updated.

On the heels of Google I/O, the Mountain View company has been pumping out a lot of updates over the past few days.  Google Assistant was front-and-center for a lot of I/O last week and the company is continuing to push the information that you have in the app on Android and iOS devices.

A new addition has popped up in the Assistant app on Android, showing you a new Your Actions section.  It is found on the Explore tab of Assistant and is located at the very bottom of that tab.  Tapping the link for Your Actions will show you a list of actions that you frequently use and will include things that are a part of routines for Assistant.

If you are a PUBG Mobile player and have a high end Chromebook, today is a good day.  The latest update to the mobile version of PUBG for Android can now run on a Chromebook but there are a few catches that you need to be aware of before getting overly excited.  The cool thing is that it is there.

First, make no mistake:  You need a high end Chromebook for this to work.  The game defaults into low graphics mode even on my i5 Intel Pixelbook and while it looks great, it still isn’t a sweet looking as it is on my Pixel XL phone.  ARM-based Chromebooks are going to struggle mightily with the game.  If you load it up on an ARM model, be prepared for a fair amount of lag.