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Welcome back to another week of the Android Police Podcast. To catch us live on Hangouts On Air every Thursday at 5:30PM PST (subject to change as per the calendar widget below), just head over to androidpolice.com/podcast. For the unedited video show, click here (warning: this video is uncut). As always, we'll take your questions at 530-HELLO-AP and also at our email address: podcast at androidpolice dot com.
Did you buy the new-and-improved 2015 Chromecast? If so, you may have forgotten that your purchase includes a free movie rental on Google Play Movies, even if you'd already purchased a Chromecast previously (offers are per device, not account - so you get one for each CC you purchased up to a maximum of five). The movie rental offer doesn't apply to Chromecast Audio purchases, in case you were wondering.
A reference to something called "music gifts" has appeared on the Google Play support page for Play gift cards today, and we frankly have no information at this point suggesting what they could be. The support entry, below, doesn't really provide any information, so we're left to speculate.
A truly useful piece of software? From Samsung? Color me surprised, too, but the company's new Game Tuner app is nothing short of incredibly handy for mobile gamers. As you may well know, playing visually-intensive games on your smartphone can demolish the battery fairly quickly. While most such games render at 1080p even on 2K displays like Samsung's, such resolutions can be big draws on both your remaining juice and your device's processor, causing throttling (and thus slowdowns) and excessive power drain. Samsung's new app lets you have a say in just how graphically hungry those games will be, allowing you to adjust maximum frame rate and resolution scaling.
When it comes to odd brand-licensed product mashups, typically you can count on Japan for a laugh here and there, but today, it's China bringing the chuckles. With a Pepsi-branded smartphone. No, I don't know why. But why not?
Hangouts for Android version 5.0 is rolling out to some users now, and it brings... nothing new in the way of features that we can find, actually. We do know this version is supposed to fix the broken animated GIF support that was an annoyance in Hangouts 4 (confirmed: they're fixed), but otherwise, you probably aren't going to notice much. There appear to be some very slight animation changes here and there, as well as a brief splash screen that pops up when the app opens to the main conversation view that wasn't present in the previous version (4.2).
Welcome back to another week of the Android Police Podcast. To catch us live on Hangouts On Air every Thursday at 5:30PM PST (subject to change as per the calendar widget below), just head over to androidpolice.com/podcast. For the unedited video show, click here (warning: this video is uncut). As always, we'll take your questions at 530-HELLO-AP and also at our email address: podcast at androidpolice dot com.
Initially, upon flashing the third developer preview of Android 6.0, we thought our beloved System UI Tuner had gone the way of the dodo. Not so - it's still here, it's just a little less obvious how to get it. If you flashed the latest developer preview and didn't wipe your user data (or received it via OTA), you probably didn't even notice anything changed aside from a little gear icon in your settings shortcut in the quick toggle area, and that little icon is key - press and hold it to activate (or deactivate) the system UI tuner, which will then appear at the bottom of the settings app.