Category: Android

The latest Android Distribution Report has been made available and the numbers for Android Oreo are still anemic.  After being available for 8 months, the latest version of Android is on only 5.7% of devices that came to the Google Play Store for the 7-day period ending May 7, 2018.  That is an improvement of 1.1% over the April report but still shows the significant upgrade challenge Android faces.

If there is good news it is that the last two version of Android, Nougat and Oreo, are the only two in this month’s report that gained any usage.  Nougat was up .3% and remains the most widely used version of Android at 31.1%.

If there is one app outside of Google Photos that shows the power of Artificial Intelligence in Googleville, it is Google Lens.  The AI-driven camera feature allows you to quickly identify objects simply by pointing your camera at them and tapping that object.  At Google I/O yesterday, Google announced some of the next steps for Lens and they are going to be impressive when the land over the next few months.

First, and perhaps the biggest news, is that Lens will be available in the native camera app for several manufactures.  That means the feature will be available a lot more people right out-of-the-box.  If you have a device from LGE, Motorola, Xiaomi, Sony Mobile, HMD/Nokia, Transsion, TCL, OnePlus, BQ, or Asus, you can expect an update to the native camera app on your phone to support Google Lens.

As expected, Google has announced that Developer Preview 2 and the first public beta of Android P, the next major version of the mobile platform, is now available.  The announcement came at Google I/O today along with a slew of new features that will be coming to Android P.  Perhaps more exciting is that for the first time, Google will be opening up the public beta to non-Google devices.  Those devices, beyond the Google Pixel lineup, include the Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6, and Essential PH‑1.

As for Android P itself, there are a lot of new features.  First, the UI has moved to a more gesture driven experience with the ability to enable swipes around the UI to open up the app tray and a new app system navigation view.

Google Photos is arguably one of the most popular and successful apps that Google has produced today.  But that success is not stopping the company from continue to develop and push Artificial Intelligence – which is already deep inside photos – even further.  Today at I/O, Google announced that Photos will be gaining several AI-driven suggestion features and the ability to add color to black & white photos.

The new suggestions will be based on the content of the photos and the overall quality of them.  If there are pictures of friends for example which are identified by Google Photos, you could see a suggestion to share those photos with that person.  Likewise, if a photo can be enhanced, the suggestions will give you one-tap ability to enhance the photo to improve it.

With Mother’s Day coming up this weekend, Huawei has a great promotion running for those Mums who need a new phone.  Right now at Amazon you can pick up the powerful Huawei Mate 10 Pro in an exclusive Mocha Brown color, for $649.  That’s $150 off the regular price.  There is no coupon code required – just visit this link and the special pricing is already applied.  That pricing will be good now through May 19th.

I reviewed the Huawei Mate 10 Pro a few months ago and as I put in that review, it is one of the best phones out there right now.  Huawei has done a fantastic job with the overall design of the phone and the Android Oreo built EMUI 8 user experience is excellent.

Today in Mountain View, California, the home of Google, the tech giant will be kicking off their annual developers conference.  Google I/O is one of the more important events and is the second developer conference going on this week behind Microsoft’s Build conference.

The event kicks off this morning at 10:00 am Pacific (1:00 pm Eastern) with the keynote address from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.  You can watch the streaming of his keynote on the Google I/O site, https://google.com/io for free.