Category: Android

Good news this morning for Samsung Galaxy Note8 owners on AT&T.  Your Android Oreo update is now rolling out.  The 1.4GB update is build N950USQU3CRC2 for those keeping score at home and has been released by the carrier.  That means devices will start getting updates as soon as today.

And let’s take a moment to give AT&T a bit of credit.  They are notoriously slow at getting updates out to their customers but, in the case of the Note8, they were first.  They beat out Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint.  Kudos AT&T!

After weeks of rumors and leaks, the Huawei P20 and P20 Plus have finally been officially announced by the Chinese manufacture.  The two new phones follow up on last year’s P10 lineup and they both bring some serious specs to the table.

Both devices are powered by the Huawei Kirin 970 SoC, the same one used in the larger Mate 10 Pro.  The P20 comes with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage while the P20 Plus will sport 6GB of RAM with 128GB of storage.  Neither device supports memory expansion, just like the Mate 10 Pro.

Google has announced the availability of Android Studio 3.1, the Android development app.  It is available to download for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), Mac and Linux.  The release comes with a lot of new features as well as underlying performance improvements.

First, there is a new C++ performance profiler to help developers find bottlenecks in their app code.  There are also improvements to the Kotlin Lint checks that add on to the support of Kotlin in the studio.  Editing SQL/Room database code in projects are now easier too.  Android Studio 3.1 has a SQL code completion in the @query declarations and better SQL statement refactoring.

When the Google Pixel 2 lineup was released, a series of “Come & Play” wallpapers were made available to the those devices exclusively.  Consisting of 5 wallpapers in all, they are colorful, playful wallpapers that bring a mix of organic shapes and Material Design.

Now, you can download all of the wallpapers for your particular phone.  I’ve added the five wallpapers to the Wallpapers page here on the site as well as to this post.  As usual, I’ve added them after the break so for those of you who aren’t interested, you don’t have to wait for them to download on the main page.

A new update to Microsoft Outlook for Android is rolling out, bringing improved conversation viewing and interactions for users.  The new update is version 2.2.121 for those keeping score at home.  It has been released to the Play Store so if you have Outlook installed, you should get the OTA update over the next few days.

First, all messages now appear uncollapsed in conversations and with cleaner separation between messages.  This makes it easier for you to scan email conversations to find a particular email in the thread.  Previously, everything was collapsed into one header and you it looked like one giant email.

Chrome 65 rolled out to Chrome OS last week and with it came a lot of improvements and changes.  One thing that was added that was not documented was inline replies in Android messaging apps.

If you are using the Android app version of a messaging app like Hangouts or Facebook Messenger, you can now reply to that message from the notification that you get when you receive the message.