Bertel King, Jr.
Contributing since April, 2013
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3518articles
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About Bertel King, Jr.
Bertel is a Linux user who likes budget smartphones more than flagships, uses a custom ROM, and gets his apps from F-Droid. When he isn't writing short stories for Android Police, you might find him penning the fictional kind. Otherwise, look for him reading pixels that were converted to ink and paper.
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For Cyber Week, ZTE is selling various products for up to $100 off. That makes now until November 30th a good time to save money on what is already pretty affordable hardware.
Some people reserve all of their big tech purchases for Black Friday, and Sprint has a plan to get some of their dollars. For starters, the carrier will give away a year of Amazon Prime with the purchase of a Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, or Note 5.
Samsung Pay and mobile payment services of its ilk are only as good as the credit and debit cards they support. If you can't insert your bank or credit union into the app, you're still left swiping every time you get ready to spend money. Today Samsung has announced eight additional partners.
Black Friday, or Black Thursday Evening, is only several days away. You're probably not thinking of making the Verizon store your first destination, but the Big Red wants your money just like everyone else. If you find prices particularly off putting throughout the rest of the year, this may be the one time to pay the carrier's site and retail stores a visit.Verizon is offering a $200 Black Friday discount on the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, and DROID Turbo 2 if you switch carriers and trade-in your own phone. When combined with the $300 gift card or account credit Verizon offers for certain used devices, you're looking at potentially saving $500 when everything is said and done.Since those phones can't satisfy everyone, Verizon is also offering $100 off the retail price of select Android smartphones priced at $400 or higher. These include the LG V10, Samsung Galaxy Note 5, and the S6 Edge+.
MicroSD cards come in a variety of sizes, but the largest ones give us something to aim for. They're aspirational. No, I'm not going to spend $400 on one when it first comes out, but I know that someday, eventually, I too will be able to afford nice things. And sure enough, the price comes down. Then it drops again. And again. And again. Right now SanDisk's 200GB microSD has lowered to 5 on Amazon.I hear you—that's still a lot of money. That's phone money. You can buy a Moto E and stick a 64GB card in it for that price. But on the other hand, sticking a 200GB microSD card in an Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 is going to cost significantly less than a 128GB Nexus 6P. If you really want to treat your phone as a portable hard drive, the cost of this microSD card is steadily entering the range where buying one makes sense.Source: Amazon
Or in other words, HBO Now support for Android TV has actually arrived. Sure, you could sideload the app that was updated with compatibility back in October, but that software was aimed at Sony and Sharp smart TVs. Now you can install the app directly from the Play Store from your set-top box of choice. Alternatively, you can head to the website and download the app remotely.
Christmas is coming. But before that, we have Black Friday. Either way, the time is ripe to give consumers the best shopping experience you can muster and bring in that extra dough. For its part, Google is making improvements to Google Shopping. You may know it as that tab that you forgot you could click when you perform a Google search, somewhere to the right of images and maps.
The physical hardware that pumps audio into your ears using Bluetooth comes in many forms. You can have earbuds connected by a cord or bulky over-the-ear headphones that pamper your ears with cushion. Both types are currently on sale at Amazon from MEE. What, no, I don't know how to make headphones. Why do you ask?MEE will sell you the AF18 Bluetooth wireless sports earphones for $23, down from a regular price of $35. The MEE Air-Fi Headphones in black/red or white/blue are both reduced to $40, down from $80. According to those three camels, this is the lowest price either product has hit on the site.Whichever way you go, you're looking at a sizable discount and an average rating of 4.5 stars. I don't know much about audio fidelity, but that sounds good to me.Source: Amazon
There will be at least two ways you can part with $600 on a single Android tablet this holiday season. You can pick up the upcoming Pixel C along with a keyboard attachment, or you can get the Galaxy View from Samsung. Buyers going the latter route should be aware that this thing takes the mobile computer label very seriously. At 18.4 inches, you've basically grabbed one of those failed Android all-in-one desktops and started carrying it around under your arm.
Minecraft v0.13.0 for Android entered beta earlier this month. Gamers downloaded the game. They tested it. They played with the new Redstone components. They dealt with bunnies. They opened and closed new types of wooden doors. Everything checked out, so now the latest version has gone stable. Non-beta testers are free to download the update straight from Google Play.
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Imgur's flood of images never ends. The Android app and smartphones come together to form the easiest way to lose track of twenty minutes known to humankind. On tablets, the experience hasn't been quite so fluid. Version 2.3 addresses that.
A year after Telltale Games kicked off its point-and-click take on Game of Thrones, the season is coming to an end. Episode 6: The Ice Dragon is now available inside the Android app. If you haven't bought a season pass, you can snag up the episode for $4.99.
Many of us would consider the Galaxy S6 a significantly prettier phone than prior iterations. It's thin, sleek, shiny, and slippery. Thing is, none of these characteristics are particularly appealing when you're climbing mountains or constructing oil rigs. Most manufacturers would say, "Tough luck, stick it in a case." But Samsung isn't like other smartphone makers. This company cannot turn down the chance to produce another piece of hardware, no matter how slight the change may seem.
Hey, do you use [insert instant messaging or video chatting service here]? No? Well, what do you use? Weird, no one else I know uses that. Here, just create an account real quick. Please?
There's a certain peace of mind that only comes from spending a bit of extra money when you buy something to get a protection plan that you probably won't even use, and now OnePlus 2 and X buyers in North America will have that option—just in time for the OnePlux X to kind of become available on these shores. And just as we saw in Europe, this enhanced warranty is only available to new customers.
Google does things—a lot of things. For two years now, the company has been indexing the content inside of apps. This way it can point you to other Android apps when they can better provide answers to your query than a general website. Google says 40% of searches done on Android bring up app content.
During the keynote address yesterday for this year's Chrome Dev Summit, VP of Chrome Darin Fisher shared some numbers about the mobile web browser's rate of adoption. tl;dr, people are flocking to Chrome, and fast. Over the past year, the number of 30 day active users has doubled from 400 million to 800 million.
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- You can try out the new Google+ now by going to Settings > Manage other apps & activity > Manage Google+ activity and clicking in the search bar at the top of the screen. Yes, it does kind of feel like activating a cheat code, but note that at the moment, the UI reverts back if you refresh the page.
Google consists of at least one, maybe two, trillion departments, and they each adopt new visual styles at their own pace. Even then, interfaces can vary from one device to another. Google+ looks one way in the Android app and another way entirely when you sign on from a PC. Now this particular Google department is pushing out a more unified look across devices, starting with the web.
Google gives you a choice when you back up your images to Google Photos: do you save them at their original size or do you let Google store a compressed "high quality" version? The former counts against your storage space, while the latter doesn't. Unfortunately when you choose one, you're kind of stuck with the decision. You can opt to change how you save future photos, but you can't go back to compress those shots you previously saved at their original quality.
Google Photos is a way of spreading your photos from your device to the cloud. But the latest update isn't about getting your images on Google's servers. It's about deleting them.