Category: Android

With it being the first Monday of the first full week of June, as expect, the Android team within Google has released this month’s Android Security Update patches.  The full builds along with the OTA builds are now available for those who want to sideload while devices should be getting the update via the System Update settings on their phone later today.

As usual, there are two patches in this month’s update.  The first, date June 1, 2018, consists of 22 total patches, five of which are considered critical.  This patch mostly deals with the base Android platform itself and the patches address things like Media Framework and System level patches.

Over the weekend, I posted about the great deal the Google Store is running on the Google Pixelbook.  Now it seems they have put together a great deal on the Google Pixel 2 XL phone too.  Right now at the store you can pick up the flagship Pixel device for regular price but you get $150 in store credit to use later plus a Google Home Mini.  All you have to do is add both the Google Pixel 2 XL and the Home Mini to your cart and the price will be discounted.

While we all know that the Google Pixel 3 lineup is going to be coming later this year, that is no reason not to give the Pixel 2 XL a serious look.  It will be updated to Android R when it is released and you still get free Google Photo storage for two years too.  Oh, and it is a seriously awesome phone.

The solid mid-range phone from Sony, the Sony Xperia XA1, is now on sale at Amazon for a pretty stunning price.  Right now you can pick up the XA1 in black for just $180.  That is a savings of $119 off the normal $299 price, or 40% off depending on how you want to look at it.  The best part is, this is the US warranty backed variant of the phone, not the International version that often goes on sale at Amazon.

The Sony Xperia XA1 made its debut in May of last year and earlier this year it, along with most of the rest of the Sony 2017 phone lineup, was updated to Android Oreo.  Sony, for their part, does a pretty solid job of getting updates out to their various phones.

Nearly 10 months after the release of Android Oreo, it has finally made its way to the popular Samsung Galaxy Tab S3.  It’s about time.  The 9.7″ tablet, which was announced at Mobile World Congress back in February 2017, has to this point been running on Android Marshmallow here in the United States.  The UK variant of the tablet was updated to Oreo earlier this month.

The update itself is just over 1.2GB in size and will bring you Oreo and the new Samsung Experience 9.0 user interface.  You can expect about a 15 minute install time once you download the update to your Galaxy Tab S3 and a reboot is required.

Following the release of the Chrome 67 update for desktops, the Chrome for Android update has now too been updated to the latest build of Chrome.  Build 67.0.3396.68 was released earlier today and it will take a few days for everyone’s Play Store account to be updated so it can be downloaded.

The update brings a lot of security fixes and overall improvements to the browser along with a new generic sensor API which adds gyroscope support for augmented reality as well as the new Credentials Management API.  Of course, on the desktop version, the bigger news was the full fledged support of Progressive Web Apps in Chrome.

Following Verizon’s lead from last week, Sprint has become the second US-based carrier to release the Android Oreo 8.0 update for the LG G6 on its network.  The 1.8GB update brings all the normal improvements that come with Oreo along with some other performance optimizations.

As with all of these big version updates, it is recommended that you download the update to your LG G6 via WiFi and have at least 80% battery power when you install it if you are not connected to AC.  The update will take about 15 minutes to install once it is downloaded and will require a reboot.