Category: Android

After a few months of rumors, the Ticwatch Pro is finally official.  Price at $249 and available in both Silver & Black, the Pro sports a massive battery life of a minimum of 5 days on a single charge and can go up to 30 days in what the company is calling an “essential” mode.  Powered by Wear OS by Google, it has a AMOLED display with a secondary FSTN LCD display that is the key to the essential mode of the watch.

The new Ticwatch Pro is powered by the Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC, comes with 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of storage.  The AMOLED display is 1.39″ on the 45 mm stainless steelcase.  It has a 415mAh battery, Bluetooth, WiFi and, thankfully, NFC.  The popular Ticwatch S and E models from last year didn’t have NFC so this is certainly a step in the right direction.  Finally, it is IP68 rated for water and dust intrusion.

It has take a long while but Spotify has finally added the ability to edit your playlists.  The streaming music service has long had the ability to create playlist but to this point, they better be in the exact order you want the songs.  There was no way to edit the lists after the fact.  That, thankfully, has now changed.

So long as you have the latest version of the app, which is 8.4.61.683 for Android, you can go into a playlist that you have created and you will now see an edit option for that playlist.

T-Mobile has released a small software update for the Samsung Galaxy S9, S9 Plus and Galaxy Note8 on their network.  The updates are mostly focused on bug fixes and performance improvements.  The builds that you are looking for are as follows:

• G960USQU2ARF7 for the Galaxy S9
• G965USQU2ARF7 for the Galaxy S9 Plus
• N950USQU4CRF3 for the Galaxy Note8

All of these updates have been released by T-Mobile  at this point so you likely can go to check for the update in Settings on your particular device.

Back in May, Google announced three new phones were coming to the Mountain View company’s MVNO service, Project Fi.  At the time of the announcement, the Moto G6 was immediately available while the LG G7 and LG V35 were slated to be available in June.  While it is a few days late, both of the LG flagships are now available to order.

The LG G7 ThinQ is priced at $749 ($31.21 per month for 24 months) while the LG V35 ThinQ is priced at $899 ($37.46 per month for 24 months), putting it up there from a pricing perspective with the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.

Google Play Games, the game hub for Android devices, has a new update rolling out to the Play Store today that brings a new game as well as a new search functionality to help you find games to play.  The new update is version 5.10 for those keeping score at home.  It has been released by Google to the store but it may take a day or two to get to everyone.

The first new bit in this update to Google Play Games is the classic game Snake.  Like you use to play it in the pre-smartphone days, Snake allows you to use swipe actions to move the snake around the screen to eat the apples without crashing into the walls.

A new commit in the Chrome Gerrit is suggesting that Chrome Duplex, the new split menu view coming to Chrome for Android, is to be renamed Chrome Duet so as to avoid confusion with Google Duplex.  Google Duplex, as you likely know, is the human sounding assistant that can call and make appointments for you through Google Assistant.  Chrome Duplex is completely unrelated and has to do with a UI update for Chrome for Android, particularly for larger devices.

What Google is wanting to avoid is end users confusing the two duplex’s or assuming that they do the same thing – one on your phone and one in Chrome on your phone.  They are two completely different technologies and thus a name change makes a lot of sense.