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Those of you with pro—or maybe just moderately complicated—home entertainment systems know how much of a pain it can be to manage the various remotes involved. Even worse is if anyone other than you wants to operate them; I had somebody watch my pets while on vacation and I came home to see the TV on and static buzzing because my poor friend just couldn't figure it out. A universal remote like one in the Logitech Harmony series can make things much easier, so why not jump on board today when they are on Amazon's Gold Box daily deal?There are two models, each refurbished, available:
I always felt like one of the big downers to web browsing on mobile was typing in passwords. Of course, the built-in password management for Chrome (and other mobile browsers) can sometimes take care of things for you. But I'm sure if you do a lot of signing in, you know there are some sites whose login system just doesn't work with the browser's password manager. With Chrome v51, now in beta, Google is taking some steps to help smooth things out.
It's always fun when the newest flagships start seeing their prices drop, but this deal on a brand new 32GB Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is not just a price drop–it's a steal. At $629, it's a full $150 less than the price you'd pay to T-Mobile or the like. You can get it a little cheaper on Amazon, at $752, but this deal is still over $120 better than that.
In its quest for world domination adequacy, Microsoft has an Android variant of its well-known Outlook email client. In fact, it's a decent app. Among other things, it has a built-in calendar. However, unlike some other calendar clients—like Microsoft-owned Sunrise—you cannot have events from places like Wunderlist in your Outlook calendar. With its latest update, though, Outlook now supports "calendar apps," which is just a not-that-fancy name for third party services that it can add to your calendar. The initial rollout includes Wunderlist, Facebook, and Evernote, which are as good of a trio as you could hope for.
Microsoft's Office Lens scanning app is really good at what it does and that might be why they don't bother to update it too often nowadays. But this is one of those special times when it has gotten some love from the good people in Redmond. The headlining feature is getting to OCR handwritten text in scans, but I assure you that there is a bit of a catch. More practically useful is the other new feature, the option to rotate your scans.
Do you like to use YouTube to stream music, but wish it had the audio-centric interface and exclusive mixes that SoundCloud does? Maybe you're really a Spotify loyalist, but you're itching for some Taylor Swift in the middle of your playlists. Well, Qus, a relatively newcomer to Android, lets you stream from any combination of these sources, plus Deezer and tracks stored locally.
Many baseball fans—not to mention non-fans—know the R.B.I. Baseball franchise fondly remembered by NES console gamers as the first baseball title to include real MLB players. Major League Baseball has acquired the rights and revived it as a true premium game, in which the $4.99 upfront cost gets you the full experience. Ahead of the coming weekend's Opening Day, the 2016 reboot has hit the Play Store.
The Play Store is getting a new email client. Big deal, right? It's not as if we're suffering for lack of options. Well, MailTime, which debuted on iOS in late 2014, is anything but just another entry in a crowded category. For MailTime, emails are just messages, nothing special. You didn't ask for a bunch of metadata, you just got it. The app parses your emails to separate the actual messages from the rest of the clutter.
Microsoft has been steadily marching towards getting familiar desktop features onto their mobile apps. Most recently, that meant support for versioning, auto-save, and live collaboration. This time around, all three get the ability to export to PDF, something we take for granted when using the full versions of Office. They also get a new feature allowing users to insert images directly from your camera, which of course is a feature more unique to mobile. For its part, Microsoft Word for Android can now open RTF files, which falls into the "I didn't realize it couldn't already do that" category for many of us.
If you routinely upload photos from your phone to Facebook, you have probably noticed that the end result is what you might call potato quality. Facebook compresses all uploads regardless of the source to ease the strain on their servers, but mobile uploads have gotten it worse than those done on desktops. A new setting rolling out, though, allows users to opt into higher quality uploads from the Android app.
Microsoft is rolling out big updates to all three of its major Office apps for Android, with several overlapping improvements. The highlight is the addition of auto-save, a staple on desktop versions and frankly overdue on mobile with so many more opportunities for lost connections, unexpected battery drains, and other interruptions. In the same vein, Word and Powerpoint get real-time collaborative editing support, similar to what is available in the web apps and Google Docs.
Cheetah Mobile, perhaps the least respected large-scale developer of mobile apps, is partnering with the truly world-class computer science and engineering programs at Carnegie Mellon University to show them how the pros shove ads into everything. Yep, this is not a drill, Cheetah Mobile is in fact teaching a course in mobile advertising at CMU's Silicon Valley campus to students paying over $40,000 per year in tuition to get graduate degrees in software development and related fields.
Google Classroom for Android debuted just over a year ago as part of the free suite of software provided by Google for schools. The app, just like its browser-based counterpart, is a centralized place where students can access handouts, assignments, and news from all of their classes. On the instructor side, all of those same elements can be managed in addition to the convenience of teachers having the ability to work with all their classes at once. The app is now getting the v2.0 upgrade with a series of less-than-groundbreaking improvements.
Microsoft's Work Folders, which is for organizational accounts, allows you to sync work files across devices and access them while offline. For important internal documents, having employees using their own computers and phones to access them is a bit of a security nightmare. Work Folders is a compromise, adding some more protection—and convenience—to allow people to work with potentially sensitive information that is stored on an organization's server.
Much like Chrome releases, Mozilla's updates for Firefox are rarely mindblowing. Instead, we get a constant stream of smaller changes that slowly but surely upgrade all aspects of the user experience. The latest beta release for Firefox, v46, falls right in line with this pattern. The highlight of the update is that the browser will display recently visited webpages even when you are offline, using data stored in cache.
Two noteworthy improvements found their way into the latest set of routine updates for Google's office suite on Android, both implementing desktop features into the mobile counterpart. Sheets will now properly render images while Slides now allows users to choose between 18 pre-supplied themes.
Those of you who use Chrome on your desktops are probably aware that rather than doing a clean sweep of your browsing history, you can choose to only erase an hour, a day, or a few other increments of time into the past. While I won't speculate too much about why a person may find themselves needing to do these things, it's an option that is better to have than not. The simplified functionality of mobile Chrome had to this point lacked these options.
We first spotted the rollout yesterday, but today Google made it official that its AMP initiative will be enjoying a wide launch effective immediately. AMP, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a new feature to Google's search interface on mobile browsers that will load an optimized version of news articles far more efficiently than the conventional way of navigating to a separate webpage. While Google emphasizes that there is much more to be done, it is going to be prioritizing compatible news and displaying the AMP wording and lightning bolt logo in mobile search by default.
It wasn’t long ago that ASUS, while beloved by many on the desktop computing scene, was hardly a player when it came to smartphones. Some early Android tablet adopters will remember their Transformer books, but the ZenFone line is relatively new and has been the most serious attempt by ASUS to break into phones. It would be easy to overstate the popularity of the ZenFone, especially in western markets, but there’s no doubt that lovers of Android now have ASUS on their radar.
In an announcement, Reddit's CEO said that they are launching an official Android beta, which for the time being is a closed beta. Of course, these kinds of things have their way of ending up in the public eye. The current development version, similar in appearance to the screenshot an administrator posted back in September, boasts the full spectrum of capabilities that Redditors currently have to go to third-party offerings to get.