Category: Android

Microsoft has released a new update to Outlook for Android that brings a much improved search experience in the email, calendar and contacts app.  Version 2.2.147 landed in the Google Play Store on Friday and by now should be out to most reader’s accounts and available to for update.

The biggest change in the app is the improved navigation bar.  It is much more simple in this release, providing one-tap access to mail, calendars and to the improved search feature.  The navigation bar remains at the bottom of the display has it has for some time now but looks cleaner.

Good news today for those of you who use Fandango to get your movie tickets.  You can now use Google Assistant on your phone to find movie times near you and order your tickets all with voice commands.   You can continue to use the Fandango app of course but now you have a voice enabled option.  Sweet!

The feature only works on Assistant on your phone and while you can ask your Google Home for details, it is going to move the process over to your phone to complete it.  Hopefully it’ll get fully enabled on home at some point but as you can see after the break, the interaction with Assistant on your phone is pretty visual instead of just blurting out a bunch of movie times.

A small but important update is rolling out to Google Assistant on Android.  You can now rate apps and services leveraged by Assistant to give your feedback on how well it works or doesn’t work.  It is a cloud side update so as long as you have the latest Google app installed, you should be good-to-go.

To access the apps and services in Google Assistant so you can rate them, long press the Home button on your phone then press the blue envelop in the upper right corner to open up the Assistant Explorer.  You will then see suggests services and apps that tie into Assistant as well as services that you already use.

Some seven months after it was released, Android Oreo is now the required Android version for manufactures who want their new phones certified by Google.  The change means that if a manufacture wants to introduce a new phone to the market and wants that phone certified by Google to run Google Mobile Services and access the Play Store, it will have to be on Oreo 8.0 or later.  Phones running Android Nougat will no longer be certified.

While we can debate why it took the Mountain View company seven months to require this, it is good news on the whole.  Oreo is far more stable and secure than any previous version of Android and it arguably provides one of the best user experiences at the same time.

Google has finally released a standalone task management app.  A round of applause please….  Google Tasks is a new app for both Android and iOS that allows you to create and management your tasks that formerly, you could only get to from Google Calendar.  The app, though, doesn’t remove your tasks from Calendar but instead, provides you a way to management without having to dive into Calendar itself.

The new app has been rumored for a while and was leaked a few weeks ago but there wasn’t much information on it until it was released today.  The new app is a beautiful example of Material Design and makes task management easy.

After being leaked a few weeks back, the new looking Gmail UI is now rolling out to everyone.  It will take a few weeks to get to everyone out there but when you do get it, there will be the option under Settings to try the new Gmail out and use it on the web and on the mobile apps.

The update brings a refresh to a product that has needed it for a long while.  Gmail’s UI fundamentally hasn’t changed in years and this update brings a more Material Design look to it as well as several advanced features like Smart Replies and the ability to snooze emails to handle them later.