Category: Android

Microsoft has rolled out a new update to their Android launcher app, Microsoft Launcher.  The new build, version 4.9.0.42615 for those keeping score at home, doesn’t bring a lot of orbit changing updates but rather focuses on creature comfort updates.  In other words, small tweaks that makes the launcher a little bit easier to use.

In this update, Microsoft Launcher has improved Home screen import logic from another launcher to make it a little bit less clunky of a process.  You can now also sort your apps alphabetically in folders on the Home screen so you don’t have to manually arrange them.  Display names of apps or folders are now visible in your dock while you can get customizable gesture for pressing the Home button from the Home screen too.  There is also a new gesture to quickly lock the layout of your Home screen.

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.

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.

After being announced last week at Google I/O, the new Google News app is now available in both the Google Play Store for Android users as well as Apple’s App Store for iPhone users.  While the app makes the AI-driven news app available, the Google News site is still hasn’t been updated at the time of this posting.

As you may recall, the new Google News app has an entirely new look and feel, drawing heavily on Material Design for its overall look with lots of visual content for news articles.  It is a far cry from the nearly all text-based version of the old News app.

Somethings things just don’t go as planned and Chrome 66 could fall into that category.  The update to the browser for MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome OS rolled out progressively starting in late April up through last week depending on the platform.  It came with an autoplay blocking feature that would prevent most websites from autoplaying audio and video content.  The problem is, it broke things.

Specifically, multiple reports came to the Chromium team about web games being broken after the update to Chrome 66 as well as some corporate web-based demos.  In response, Google has partially rolled back the feature with plans to reintroduce it later.