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Google's new Pixel phones aren't the developer-friendly devices that the Nexus phones were, and they aren't priced like them, either. The Pixel starts at a whopping 9 for the standard 5-inch 32GB version. A 128GB upgrade costs an extra hundred bucks ($749), and the Pixel XL is $120 more expensive at both capacities, $769 and $869, respectively. Google has added financing options to the Google Store, very much like US and international carriers, to help with the sticker shock. Customers can spread that price over 24 monthly payments. The cheapest option is $27.04 a month.
Google announced its Android-powered VR platform, Daydream, at Google I/O earlier this year. Today's Pixel announcement brought with it the formal debut of Daydream View, Google's official first-party VR headset that's designed to work with the new Pixel phones. In addition to compatibility with Google's custom software, the design has a unique fabric approach that treats the hardware like a true "wearable."
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
Android visual standards are a hot topic - just check the comment section every time a point of contention in Material Design springs up. One of the most contentious is top tabs and slide-out menus, as featured in Android since Ice Cream Sandwich, versus bottom navigation links, as tends to be popular with lazy iPhone ports (though they're actually part of the documentation). The latest update to the official Wikipedia app indulges in a little bottom-nav action, and it's... okay.
Even if you're a regular gamer, you might not know about Ketchapp. The publisher is only a couple of years old, and the games it posts to the Play Store and App Store are uniformly small, simple titles. But what it lacks in ambition it makes up for in volume: by my count there are no less than 75 Ketchapp games on the Play Store, an impressive accomplishment in a short amount of time. Ketchapp seems to have caught the eye of some industry heavy-hitters, because it's being acquired by Ubisoft, one of the biggest game publishers on the planet.
Happy Birthday, Google, you're legally an adult now. According to the Google Doodle, anyway: the actual date that Google became a company is something of a point of contention. Google's own history says that it was incorporated in California on September 4th, 1998, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin setting up shop in a garage office in Menlo Park. A little less than two decades later it's the most dominant search engine on the planet, it develops the world's most-used operating system, it sells more advertising than a billion Times Squares, and it never turns down a chance to make its logo look weird on the home page.
It's a frequent woe of Android users: you buy that fancy, top-of-the-line phone in the summer or fall, and you just know it's going to take the manufacturer months to get around to releasing the updated software that Google pushes out soon. They tend to issue press releases or Twitter posts promising support for the new update, though dates are typically either absent or vague. Such is the case with Motorola's commitment to Android 7.0 on its latest phones.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we have a long-awaited survival game, a unique management sim, a Chromecast multiplayer game, a text-based AR game, and a uniquely twisted adventure title. Without further ado:
Remember when console sports games were just about, you know, sports? RBI Baseball back on the Genesis was basically just Street Fighter with nine guys on a side: pick a team, pick an opponent, and go. EA's latest soccer games have season modes, manager modes, career modes, and on and on and on. The FIFA Ultimate Team mode, a mix of franchise management and "fantasy" sports with full-length matches, is designed so that players can pit their team-building skills against online opponents all over the world. (Oh, and also spend a bunch of money on in-app purchases for a $60 game).
If you've never played the original Tomb Raider, you really should. All jokes about Miss Croft's polygonal charms aside, it's a certified classic that was one of the first action games to get third-person shooting and platforming right way back in the PlayStation era. The Android port has been available for over a year for the very fair price of one dollar. But if that's too rich for your blood, the game is back on sale for just ten cents in a lot of countries. And for once, they don't include the US.
Yahoo is having a rough week in terms of security. It's probably just a coincidence that a considerable update for the official Yahoo Mail app comes days after one of the biggest password leaks ever. Even so, it's nice to get official support for something like Google's Fingerprint API. That, among other new goodies, is waiting inside the latest Mail update in the Play Store. On my Nexus 6, it's version 5.9.1.
There's a Chick-Fil-A location on Powers Boulevard in Colorado Springs. It's there. It sells chicken sandwiches. It's the only one on that side of the city. The store is technically open from 6AM to 10PM every day, but I don't think I've ever been there before nine at night. Because as good as Chick-Fil-A sandwiches are, they're not worth waiting 40 minutes in a drive-through line that wraps around the building twice.
If you don't subscribe to a cable or satellite provider, your options for all of these new streaming apps seem to shrink fairly quickly. There are more and more channel apps coming in for Android TV, but most of them assume that you already pay for premium TV somewhere else. CNN is offering an alternative, and if it's not ideal, then at least it's there. CNNgo doesn't want any of your money, it just wants to show you the news. And also some ads. But mostly news.
Lenovo turned a lot of heads when it announced its latest Yoga design, the Yoga Book. It's essentially a convertible laptop with a fold-back screen, complete with the Yoga line's well-regarded watch band hinge. But the Yoga Book has an ace up its sleeve: instead of a conventional keyboard, it uses a gigantic touch-sensitive panel that includes a dedicated keyboard mode, with virtual backlit "keys" that can be activated at a touch. Windows and Android versions are being made, and the latter is now up for pre-order.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
Last month a few Google Maps users started seeing a new display style for the direction indicator, that little arrow that shows which way your device is pointed (or at least which way it thinks it's pointed) on the primary maps and navigation interface. Specifically, it's no longer an arrow: it's a more general "beam" indicator that shows both the approximate direction you're facing and how accurate your device's orientation reporting is. According to the official Google Maps blog, that feature is now rolling out to all users.
The Xperia X line is decent, but considerably behind competitors from Samsung and LG this year, with prices that border on the astronomical for their features. So what happens when you price your flagship phones too high and nobody buys them? Discounts, baby. Best Buy is already offering the mid-range Xperia X and flagship Xperia X Performance for considerably less than retail, and as unlocked GSM phones, too - no carrier shenanigans to be seen.
Customers who want a solid phone with good specs and a screen size under five inches have been having a hard time of it for the last few years. Sony seems like the only manufacturer that will give them the time of day, and their phones aren't always easy to find in any given market. Those in the US who've been salivating over the Xperia X Compact, the company's latest bantamweight heavy-hitter, can now put down some money to get an American unlocked model.
As someone who's kind of exhausted by the amount of Star Wars promotional material that's being vomited into our culture at the moment, I have to admit that the remote control BB-8 from Sphero is pretty awesome. Because even toys need sequels now, this year we're getting the original adorable droid in remote control form: R2-D2. Hasbro is planning on releasing a similar toy, complete with all the smartphone connection goodies. Here's the official app for it.