Android News

Google Assistant voice commands can now understand the Hindi language, which is spoken largely in India. However, the Android device settings must have English – India as the main language for this support to work. Google Assistant then translates Hindi voice commands to English. Google Assistant is expanding its language support in one of Android’s biggest markets—India. According to a few reports around the internet, Hindi language support is currently rolling out to supported Android devices in India, but there is a twist to it. The added support was first reported by The Android Soul , but as Android Police points out , if you live in India and have your phone set to the Hindi language, it will not work with Google Assistant. Instead, those users have to set their device language to “English – India”, and then tap or hold on the smartphone’s home button to activate Google Assistant. Users can then speak in the Hindi language, and Google Assistant will then transcribe...

Available for model numbers MHA-L29 and MHA-L09. Prior to all of the drama surrounding its Mate 10 Pro flagship this year, Huawei's best and most powerful phone was the Mate 9. The Mate 9 was first released in late 2016 followed by a launch in the United States in January of 2017, and while it may not be as visually striking as its younger brother, it still packs an impressive punch to this very day with a price that often dips well below $500. As many things as the Mate 9 gets right, however, one sore spot has been its now-outdated software. The phone's been running Android Nougat since its release, but it looks like an Oreo update is finally rolling out to unlocked models in the United States. The Mate 9 has been getting the Oreo treatment in other markets since December, but this marks the first time a rollout in the U.S. has been spotted. Unlocked Mate 9 units in the U.S. carry model numbers MHA-L29 and MHA-L09, and when the update hits your device, you'll be...

In an interesting and intriguing move, HMD Global has recently renewed the Nokia Xpress-on trademark under its ownership. This was used many eons ago for replaceable front and back covers, once a staple feature of a large number of Nokia handsets. The Xpress-on trademark is classified as follows: "accessories for communications apparatus, namely microphones, speakers, coloured covers, housings, cases, antennas, batteries, battery chargers". That list basically reveals what HMD Global could use it for - while we assume replaceable rear covers aren't coming back anytime soon, the company could release phone cases using this brand. The newly re-registered trademark is valid until 2028, so HMD Global surely has some time on its hands to decide precisely what products to call Xpress-on. Via

This is a big win for the music industry. Streaming services such as Spotify and Google Play Music are things that I use every single day, and when you think about it, they really have changed the way people purchase and listen to music. Opening an app on your phone and having access to millions upon millions of songs is way more convenient than stocking up on physical CDs, and while consumers have benefitted greatly from this transition, the same hasn't exactly been true for songwriters and music publishers. Up until now, royalty rates for songs on streaming services have been set at just 10.5% to be split between both songwriters and the labels that publish their music. However, the National Music Publishers' Association recently announced that this rate is being increased to 15.1% for the next five years. This will see a total increase of 43.81% during that time, and although specifics of how this will be dolled out are still up in the air, that's a lot more mon...

The Washington Post The FCC’s new rules would make the Wireless Emergency Alert more accurate and give more granular details. The Wireless Emergency Alert has been criticized for being inaccurate and over-alerting. Some rules go into effect November 2019, while another goes into effect May 2019. The alert you see above might have been inaccurate, but it went uncorrected for 38 agonizing minutes and sent Hawaiian residents in a frenzy. It is also an alert the FCC does not want to see again with its rules to improve the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system. If you own a smartphone in the U.S., you have probably heard that shrieking sound of doom from time to time. That is the WEA system, which pushes mobile alerts from the U.S. president, for events that involve serious or extreme threats to safety of life, and for abducted children. This is also the same system that has been criticized for being inaccurate, which makes it harder to use during disasters without setting off...

The ability to download YouTube videos for offline viewing looks to have rolled out to more countries. Commenters noted the feature is now available in several countries in and around the Middle East. We are not sure how many countries the feature rolled out to. The ability to download videos from YouTube for offline viewing is a feature I cherish, particularly in areas where internet is a luxury. Now, the option looks to be rolling out to more countries. According to commenters on  Android Police , the download icon popped up in Iraq, Lebanon, Thailand, Palestine, Morocco, Vietnam, and Serbia. Weirdly enough, there are folks in the US, UK, and Japan that still do not have it, so we are not sure if the feature rollout is a calculated measure or a random one. To check and see if you have offline downloads, open a YouTube video on your smartphone. You should see a download icon on the same row as the Like, Dislike, Share, and Add to buttons. Pressing the download icon let...

Apple has decided to postpone new features in iOS in favor of improving the reliability and performance of the operating system, as according to a report by Axios. According to the report, Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President, Software Engineering, announced the revised plan to employees at a meeting earlier this month. This pushes features like refresh of the homescreen and in-car user interface, improvements to core apps like Mail and camera experience to 2019. What we will get this year is improvements to AR, digital health and parental controls. Apart from that, the OS will largely feature improvements to performance and user experience. We have seen Apple do this with macOS in the past, where they dedicate one entire update cycle to just refining the OS and make existing features work better. However, we have never quite seen Apple do that on iOS. This is largely due to the hyper competitive nature of the mobile market where competition and customer demands push companies t...

Nothing in life is free, and this is especially true of music. Spotify's free tier tries to cut most of these strings while you're on a computer, allowing you to play your music in the order you want with fewer ads. That said, those strings are still dangling, and they tangle and strangle free users on mobile devices. Spotify Premium can be worth every penny on Android, but how many pennies you shell out depends on which plan you use. Spotify Free Access to over 30 million songs, curated playlists, algorithm-based radio stations and mixes, and podcasts while within the country Ads when you open the app and during playback Shuffle Play only on Android (no listening to albums in order) No offline music Basic sound quality Spotify Free comes with some strings, but if you're a casual listener who primarily listens through the web player — or listens on shuffle anyway — Spotify Free can be tolerable. Bless you for your saintly patience with those ads, especiall...

Nikkei Asian Review reported that Apple will halve iPhone X orders , based on information from the supply chain. The predicted number didn’t quite line up with other estimates and it seems that the component suppliers themselves are hearings different numbers. Murata claims “the figure sounds a little bit bigger”, referring to the 20 million iPhone Xs estimate by Nikkei . Murata provides some of the wireless connectivity components for this generation of iPhones. The company has heard talks of production cuts, though it seems no one is certain of the extent of those cuts. Apple will publish its quarterly financial reports on February 1 (this Thursday). Source

Google removed 700,000 apps from the Play Store in 2017 that had violated the store’s policies. That number was up 70 percent compared to 2016, but 99 percent of those apps were removed before anyone could install them. Of the apps removed in 2017, 250,000 of them were trying to emulate already released apps. It seems we can’t go a few days without news about malicious apps popping up in the Google Play Store. However, it appears that Google is making inroads in taking out those kinds of apps before they are downloaded to the billions of Android users. Today, the company announced that it had removed 700,000 apps from the Google Play Store in 2017 that were found to be in violation of the store’s policies. Google added that the number of apps removed last year was up 70 percent compared to the app removal numbers in 2016. In even better news, 99 percent of the apps that were taken down from the Play Store in 2017 were removed before anyone managed to download them fr...

OnePlus has a new feature that improves navigation on Android phones by copying the iPhone X. OnePlus is in a weird place right now. It's dealing with accusations of privacy violations , and has just made public an enormous credit card breach that affected at least 40,000 paying customers. There have been public calls to stop buying their phones . But the company continues to operate, releasing new colors of its flagship OnePlus 5T and working towards stable versions of Android Oreo for its 2017 lineup. In its most recent release , Open Beta 3, for the OnePlus 5 and 5T , the company unveiled a new way to navigate the operating system, and in my short time with it I'm proclaiming it the best alternative so far to on-screen navigation buttons. It's a gesture system that to some extent mimics the iPhone X's swipe combinations , adding some Google-specific nuances to overcome differences between Android and iOS. Here's how it works: you enable a new setting t...

OnePlus announced Open Beta 5 and Open Beta 3 for the OnePlus 5 and 5T, respectively. The updates remove the Clipboard app, include a CPU security patch, and more. The latest Open Beta updates are now available for download. Rejoice, OnePlus 5 and 5T owners, for a new Open Beta is available for your phones and includes an interesting mix of additions, subtractions, and fixes. First up is the removal of the Clipboard app, which debuted on the OnePlus 5T just two weeks ago. The idea was for a little window to pop up whenever you copied something. For example, copying a link would open the page in a browser, while copying a word would bring up a search query. The problem is that some folks found Clipboard to be annoying. Because it was a separate app and not something baked into the software, it would put itself between your two most recent applications. This made things irritating when switching between apps, so the best way to solve that is for OnePlus to get rid of it. E...

OnePlus posted an infographic detailing its busy 2017. The company’s revenues doubled to $1.4 billion as phone sales grew 55% compared to 2016. OnePlus sells its phones in 32 countries and supports 24 languages and it had the #1 selling phone on Elisa, Finland’s top carrier. The OnePlus community boasts over 1.3 million members with user registrations growing more than twofold since 2016. Fans met IRL in 40 pop-up events – with a combined 19,400 people waiting in line. OnePlus has 776 employees spread across 18 countries. Fueled by over 18,000 cups of coffee, they worked over 200,000 hours and yet managed to eat only 268 pizzas and 87 birthday cakes. We think that’s something to improve on next year. The Open Beta program boasts 111,000 users who helped squash 1,700 bugs. Check out the annual report for more details. Source

Record your driving with ease. If you're worried about getting in an accident and being blamed for it, you're going to want to pick up a dash cam. Anker's Roav DashCam A1 is currently on sale for $46 at Amazon when you use the coupon code BESTCAMB during checkout. This is a savings of $14 from its regular price. Don't be caught wishing you had one. This dashcam has a super wide-angle lens that captures the entire road, and it has a ton of technology packed into its night vision as well. It's easy to manage your video using the built-in Wi-Fi along with the Roav DashCam app. It will even record when you're away. The built-in gravity sensor detects sudden movements, like someone bumping into your car, and will automatically turn on to record activity. You'll get the camera, a car charger, a suction mount, a cable, a trim removal tool, and a manual. You may want to pick up an extra microSD card if you don't have one lying around. See at Amazon ...

99% of abusive apps were removed before users could install them. There are a lot of excellent apps and games to be found on the Play Store, but to no one's surprise, it can also be home to some bad seeds, too. There were quite a few reports of malicious Android apps all throughout last year, but new numbers from Google reveal that things could have been a lot worse. In just 2017 alone, over 700,000 malicious apps were removed from the Play Store. That's 70% more than what Google removed in 2016, and of that 700,000, 99% of the apps were taken down before a single user could install them. Similar to other products and services Google is involved with, a lot of this success can be attributed to the company's machine learning systems. There were a few nasty app trends in 2017, and Google has more evidence to back up its claims of staying on top of all these. When it comes to malicious apps that try to impersonate legitimate ones, 2017 saw Google remove a whopping 250,...

Facebook is under fire from child health experts over its new app, Messenger Kids. In an open letter published today, co-signed by nineteen organizations and just under 100 advocates, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has urged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to pull the plug on the video chat app, citing research that suggests social media can have a detrimental impact on a child’s healthy development in early life. Messenger Kids launched back in December as a heavily redesigned and streamlined version of Facebook’s regular chat app . Facebook pushed the app as a safe and secure way of letting under 13s chat online with friends and family. Editor's Pick 10 best Facebook apps for Android Facebook is the most popular social media site on planet Earth. It has over a billion registered users, most of which are active on almost a daily basis. Unfortunately, the official Facebook app is a … The app works by letting its younger users set up a “child” profile, but...

You could name your Google Assistant Bob, Mary, or anything else you'd like. Before the Google Assistant came about, one of the best voice assistants on Android came from Motorola with Moto Voice. Moto Voice was able to search the web and perform basic actions, and starting with the 2nd-generation Moto X in 2014, Motorola allowed you to use whatever hot word you'd like to get Moto Voice's attention. Now, it looks like Google Assistant may finally get something similar. Our friends at 9to5Google recently conducted a breakdown of the Google app (version 7.20), and while doing so, discovered a string of code suggesting that users will soon be able to replace the "Ok, Google" and "Hey, Google"prompts with whatever you choose. \"%1$s\ is used to reference the customizable hot word, and it's found in lines of code such as "You'll be able to access your Assistant directly by saying \"%1$s\"" and Teach your Assistant to ...

Xiaomi is looking to open a physical store in Milan soon. The maker posted a "Ciao! Italia" picture to its global Facebook page (and subsequently deleted it) indicating its intentions. The brick and mortar store in Milan will follow those in Greece , Spain and India . By adding a local store Xiaomi will offer a local warranty service and not require people to ship the phone outside of the country. There's no official word on what Xiaomi will sell through its physical store but if its Spain operation is any indication it could sell Mi and Redmi phones as well as other tech and accessories. Source | Via

Google has finalized its deal with HTC, bringing the Taiwanese manufacturer’s core design team across to the Mountain View company. Google Senior Vice President Rick Osterloh commemorated the occasion in a short blog post , where he touched on what the HTC staff could bring to the company. Editor's Pick What Google buying HTC means for the mobile industry The rumors drifted around about a possible Google purchase of HTC for only a short time before the news was confirmed, but the details were a surprise. As we now know, Google didn’t outright buy HTC, … Osterloh said that the estimated 2,000 engineers bring “decades of experience achieving a series of ‘firsts,’” and noted HTC’s production of the first 3G smartphone ( HTC Universal ), the first touch-focused handset ( HTC Touch ) and first phone with an aluminum unibody ( HTC One ). Osterloh also said Google is committed to investing in its products “for the long run,” reaffirming that the new folks are there to help G...

The mobile payment game is heating up with a new competitor – Huawei Pay. The tech is already established in its home country of China, but now the company has signed a deal with China’s UnionPay to bring the service worldwide. The first overseas market will be Russia. Ten Russian banks have issued 1.3 million UnionPay cards, which can be used on 400,000 terminals. Next in line is Eastern Europe. The competition – Samsung, Apple and Google – are largely focused on West European markets. Huawei Pay already boasts support on 20 devices (smartphones and smart watches) and that’s a number that will grow in the future. Source | Via