David Ruddock
Contributing since June, 2010
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3358articles
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About David Ruddock
David is the former Editor-in-Chief of Android Police and now the EIC of Esper.io. He's been an Android user since the early days - his first smartphone was a Google Nexus One! David graduated from the University of California, Davis where he received his bachelor's degree, and also attended the Pepperdine University School of Law.
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- The Best Buy deal is back! The card is now just .99 at Best Buy (free shipping), which is definitely the best price we've seen so far.
With Black Friday looming on the horizon like the dark lord of some retail apocalypse (well, that's how we see it - we have to write about it), you're going to see almost unending deals on external storage for your smartphone. And, sure, maybe if you don't care about how fast that card is because it's going in a smart TV box or just being used as a photo storage dump, a simple $10 microSD card can be just what you're looking for.But if you want the best microSD card you can buy right now, there's actually only one obvious choice: SanDisk's new line of App Class 2 "Extreme" cards (we promise, this isn't an ad).
Just about a year ago, we reported that Amazon would finally be selling Google's Chromecast after a more than two-year hiatus from the e-commerce giant's store. Three months later, it still couldn't be purchased. Now, a year (OK, 11 months) later, Amazon's listings for the Chromecast and Chromecast Ultra still show as unavailable. This is as silly as it is unbelievably, comically petty.
If you're a Plex user who has stuck with the free tier of the media library streaming service to date, this might finally be the day you convert to paid: the company is offering a rare 25% discount on its lifetime Plex Pass, bringing the cost down to just $90. That's the same price you'd pay for 18 months on the monthly ($4.99) plan, and for a little over two years at the annual rate ($39.99). While it's not the lowest-ever price for a lifetime membership, they're discounted so infrequently that this is still a deal definitely worth highlighting, as we have no idea if or when memberships will be discounted again (or by how much).
Pre-registration is a handy feature on the Play Store that allows you to be notified when an unreleased app is available for download - it actually debuted several years ago. But around a year ago, Google started proactively pushing registration suggestions to some users, meaning you'd be notified if Google thought you'd be interested in a given app or game that had recently entered pre-registration. Engagement with the feature must be low, though, as a number of users have reported in recent weeks that they're receiving more of these pre-registration suggestions (some having never received them at all prior), and it's easy to understand how that could get annoying.
Long a staple of popular business directories like Yelp and Facebook, communicating directly with a business has been a curious omission from Google Maps for years now. While an attempt to integrate such functionality via the ill-fated Allo chat platform began last year, that obviously didn't pan out, and prior to that Google only allowed rudimentary messaging via business profiles on Google+ (which is also dying). Now, direct messaging support is coming inside the Google Maps app, which is really the only place it should have been to begin with, if you ask us.
According to a report out of the New York Times yesterday, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg ordered the company's high-level managers to switch to Android phones earlier this year. It's not clear if the order was ever enforced, or to what degree, but it apparently came on the heels of an MSNBC interview in which Tim Cook openly criticized Facebook's data collection and privacy policies in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and associated congressional hearings.
Following walkouts at Google offices around the world a week ago, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a series of changes to sexual harassment policy at the company today. A blog post provides a flyover of the policy changes, the details of which are in an internal Google announcement only viewable to employees (if anyone wants to share it with us completely anonymously, feel free). Those walking out demanded a series of five changes at Google, and it appears they're getting at least one of them, and arguably the one that was seen as most controversial.
At the Samsung Developer Conference today, Samsung announced its new Infinity folding display, the basis for an upcoming foldable smartphone that we now know will launch in 2019, news Google let slip earlier today. The device didn't have any specifications detailed, but the concept is certainly interesting.
We had a chance to go hands-on with some Samsung test devices running the company's new One UI - the latest in a long line of TouchWiz rebrands - and the feature likely to generate the most attention is almost certainly the new "Night theme" option. Basically, night theme sets nearly every stock app, along with the launcher and lockscreen, to an all-blacked-out look - something Android enthusiasts have been asking of device makers for years. My initial take is that Samsung's done this pretty well, and essentially every stock app on the test device had a dark theme. Here's a quick look at some of those apps in a gallery.
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At its annual Dev Summit in Mountain View this morning, Android VP Dave Burke announced that Google was partnering to optimize the Android platform for an upcoming foldable device... built by Samsung. The foldable phone in question will launch next year according to Burke, who appears to have confirmed something Samsung hasn't itself yet announced. We're currently at Samsung's Developer Conference in San Francisco, which overlaps directly with the Android Dev Summit.
Google's Pixel Stand is a pretty nifty wireless charger - if an almost certainly overpriced one. Being a Google product, it's also not without its issues, and we've just had our attention drawn to a rather annoying one: the Pixel Stand just straight up breaks ambient display notifications on the Pixel 3 and 3 XL. We've been able to reliably recreate this bug with both devices.
The LG V40 is almost certainly the best smartphone the company has ever released. It has the best cameras, the best display, the best performance, and the most refined design of any LG phone I've ever used. And in 2018, that just isn't enough to more than an also-ran in the high-end smartphone space. At $950 unlocked, the V40 seeks to play in the smartphone big leagues with the Galaxy Note9 and iPhone XS. The sad truth is that for all this phone does right, it does just enough wrong (or simply, not as well) to knock itself out of contention.
Listen, I'm not going to tell you the Oukitel OK6000 Plus (yes, that is actually the name) is one of the best smartphones on the market. But, it does look basically normal and has a battery large enough to start a jet ski. Oh, and did I mention it's 3 today only on Amazon? Yeah. I don't think I need to tell you this phone isn't going to blow you away with specifications. It has a 5.5" 1080p display, 64GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, and a MediaTek MT6750 octacore A53 processor with LTE. It has cameras. This phone is, technically speaking, basic as hell.But, if you're in need of a travel phone, or just something as a backup, you could do a lot worse than this Oukitel, and it's a full $47 cheaper than Amazon's normal MSRP of $180 (and it's never been discounted before, as far as we can tell).
Google appears to be testing a new content discovery interface in the Chrome browser's new tab page called 'Explore,' and you can access it on Android right now by enabling an experimental flag.
Nova Launcher 6.0 beta 5 just launched yesterday, and while not a major update, it does include a couple of notable features. First, as the title of this post says, you can now launch the full Google Assistant directly from the search widget on the homescreen. It's not enabled by default, though, so you'll have to go digging into the settings to locate the slightly obscure toggle. To do so, launch the Nova Settings apps, go to 'desktop,' hit 'search bar style' about halfway down the list, then scroll all the way to the bottom of the following menu. You'll see to the right of the 'Voice search' toggle is now a drop-down menu with the options 'Classic' and 'Assistant.' Classic is the old Google voice actions interface that then launches the Assistant depending on the initiated action, whereas the new Assistant option will launch the full Assistant interface instantly.
We've got the Google Pixel 3 in our hands, and over the last 24 hours I've tried to take as many photos as I could when opportunities presented themselves. Being in New York City for the launch, a lot of those opportunities were really tall buildings - but I did manage to slip some variety in there.
The first Google Pixel - the small one - was basically a downsized carbon copy of its larger sibling. Price aside, it was what phone enthusiasts had been demanding from Google for years - a smaller smartphone that wasn't compromised relative to the bigger device that came alongside it. With the Pixel 2, that formula changed, and we got a phone with an older display layout, inferior haptics, and build quality that seemed a little "lesser than" the truly premium 2 XL. While the bigger phone had its issues, it was the little things that made the Pixel 2 just that much less special, less modern.
Four-and-a-half years ago, a $300 smartphone rocked American tech news with its tier one specifications and shockingly low price tag: the OnePlus One.
The LG V40 is officially official, and you can get all the specifications you can handle in the handy table below. But we already knew most of that going in, and of what we didn't know, most of that was predictable: the latest and greatest Qualcomm processor, a big, vibrant OLED display, and a whole mess of cameras. Stare at the list of features and value-adds all you want, but it's not going to answer a critical question: has LG built a big phone worthy of taking on Samsung's $1000 behemoth?
For decades (yes, Google is coming up on two decades), Google's trademark minimalist, all-white homepage has been the most successful effort to "branding" its ubiquitous search product. The Google search homepage appears on TV shows, in movies, video games, books, magazines, and news articles all over the world. Google's web search is so well-known and so dominant that "Googling" something quickly supplanted the actual word "search," because what else would you use to look something up? Bing? Hah (I'm waiting for That Bing Person now). Dramatically changing that instantly-recognizable layout might, then, seem like borderline-heresy given the success it's brought. But that's exactly what Google is doing.