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If you haven't yet checked out Rick & Morty, Adult Swim's delightfully foul science fiction cartoon, you're missing out - and not just on obscure Android Police posts. The show is only two seasons old, but it's taken the Internet by storm, filling the irreverent, high-concept, mean-spirited place that Futurama used to hold. For those of you who are already addicted and waiting patiently for season three, take a portal ride over to the Play Store: Adult Swim Games just released a licensed game that drops Rick & Morty into a tongue-in-cheek version of Pokemon.
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- It looks like that Lenovo representative may not have been entirely correct, or else there's some miscommunication between what was said and Digital Trends' report. A Motorola representative, unnamed but directly quoted by The Verge, said that the company has no plans to phase out either the Moto G or Moto E.
Years after Chinese electronics giant Lenovo purchased Motorola, the lines between the two companies are starting to blur. The status of Motorola as its "Moto" lineup becomes a sub-brand of Lenovo is still somewhat up in the air. According to a post from Digital Trends, the Moto line will be positioned as a more high-end option, as opposed to serving a wide array of market segments as it does now. This will be accomplished by putting minimum specs on the various Moto X models, and merging the hardware currently known as the Moto G and Moto E with the Lenovo side of the business.
Google's cheaper option for this year's Nexus phone is now a little cheaper. Without any special fanfare, the LG Nexus 5X has dropped its price in the Google Store. The 16GB model is now $349 (down from $379) and the 32GB model is now $399 (down from $429). That places both of them more firmly in the mid-range price bracket, which is pretty nice considering the high-end processor and screen, not to mention quick Android updates from Google.
Dedicated cheapskates have probably built up quite a music collection on Google Play without spending a cent. The latest album to get the free treatment is the Greatest Hits compilation from psychedelic rock icon Janis Joplin, with a couple of songs from her associated band Big Brother and the Holding Company thrown in. The freebie album is available to US customers - as usual, your mileage may vary elsewhere.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
Android's Smart Lock is a great way to save a little hassle when users are around familiar locations or connected devices. The default system version of the feature skips the lockscreen when the phone or tablet detects that it's in a safe location, and last year Google did much the same thing for apps, essentially turning Smart Lock into a password manager for supported applications. While Netflix has supported this feature for months on its standard Android app, the latest update to the Android TV version brings it in line.
Believe it or don't, some people still pay for and allegedly use landline telephones. Most of them are either A) business owners or B) old, and in fact the only person I know with a landline phone in her house is my grandmother. (Though technically, she's using Verizon wireless service with a landline telephone adapter.... so I guess I don't know anyone with a landline?) Anyway, yes, they're still around, and in some cases still necessary. And if for some reason you want to use text messages with your landline, AT&T would like a word with you.
LEGO's relentless acquisition of licenses with which to make building sets is matched in fervor only by its media partner Warner Bros' frenzy to turn them into video games. So it is with Lord of the Rings, which has been a staple of the toys for years, but was made into a full-fledged video game for home and portable consoles in late 2012. As has been done with Star Wars, Batman, and a few other LEGO properties, the portable versions of that game (Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable) have been adapted into a mobile version. You can get it from the Play Store right now.
Pour one out for the little guys, folks... even if this particular little guy used to be a 700-pound gorilla that dominated corporate and government sales all over the world. After a mostly positive response to the BlackBerry Priv, the company's latest flagship and its first to run the Android operating system, CEO John Chen says that the older BlackBerry OS is not going to be used in any of the new phones it has planned for the 2016 calendar year. He told Cnet the news at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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The SHIELD TV, easily the best Android TV device available (in an admittedly very short field), will be upgraded to Android Marshmallow at some point. That was never really in question; NVIDIA has been quite good about upgrading software for its first-party Android devices, usually in a timely manner. That's not the important bit of NVIDIA's recent blog post. Nope, the important part is that Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, a PS3 port promised since the SHIELD TV was revealed way back in March of last year, will finally be available on Thursday.
Part of the attraction of things like laser tag and paintball is that they bring the team-based combat that's become so popular in online shooters into the real world. After some notable success with its embedded heads-up display for snowboarders, Recon Instruments (recently acquired by Intel) is bringing a modified version of the Android-based system to the enthusiast paintball market. The Empire EVS "smart mask" includes a tiny Google Glass-style display in the visor that relays various bits of battlefield information to the player.
CES always seems to have at least one major trend at the trade show, and this year's hot ticket is virtual reality. With a new HTC Vive headset, the announcement of the Oculus Rift's pricey consumer model, and all manner of smaller announcements, it's safe to say that VR is the belle of the ball on the show floor. But all of them have one thing in common: you can't fit them in a pocket. Even Google's super-cheap Cardboard system is about the size of a dSLR camera when assembled. Case maker Speck thinks it's solved that problem with a new design, which is about the same size as a phone.
Any reasonable person might get a bit confused at the continuity of Worms, the perennial "lob stuff across the 2D map and watch it blow up" simulator. According to the franchise Wikipedia page, there have ben no less than 23 Worms games before this one, and at least one of them (from 2005) has been named Worms 4. Paradoxically, Worms 2: Armageddon and Worms 3 came after that Worms 4 (Mayhem), and now we're back to 4 again, this time with no subtitle. Maybe it's because this is the fourth Worms game to be available on mobile, if you include the disastrous version licensed by EA.
HTC raised more than a few eyebrows when it announced the Vive, a VR headset that ostensibly competes with the more well-known Oculus Rift. But far from being some one-off excursion like the Re Camera, the Vive has gained critical acclaim from those who've had access to its pre-production developer units, and HTC's partnership with Valve gives the company an in with one of the gaming industry's most influential players. At CES 2016, HTC revealed a new model, the Vive Pre, with some very interesting additions to the original.
We've had Bluetooth technology for the better part of two decades now, so it's surprising that it's still so hard to find a decent pair of headphones that use it. One of the more consistently good brands for wireless headphones, at least of the sporty variety, has been Jaybird. The company's using CES to show off the newest entries in its product lineup, and by "newest," I mean it will be three to six months at the earliest before you see either of them. Meet the Jaybird Freedom, an ostensibly new design (despite the fact that the company has used the "Freedom" name on models before), and the Jaybird X3, the latest revision of the popular original and the more recent X2.
Lenovo Announces The Cheap And Eye-Catching VIBE S1 Lite At CES, But It's Unlikely To Come To The US
Remember when a low-cost phone meant something you were kind of embarrassed to pull out in front of your judgmental in-laws? A tiny screen, a chunky plastic body, and a processor with about as much kick as a grasshopper with polio - you'd be lucky if you could get Angry Birds to run on the thing. That's no longer the case - there are plenty of phones available for under $200 that look downright swanky. Case in point: the new VIBE S1 Lite, which Lenovo announced at CES in Las Vegas. It's quite a looker, and according to Lenovo, it will sell for around $199 USD.
When I'm browsing a comments section on Reddit on the Android version of Chrome, I prefer to open links in a new tab, because opening them directly will make the current page "forget" which threads I've already minimized. But when the links are to a YouTube video, they open in a tab with the mobile version of YouTube, instead of in the dedicated Android app. This little app fixes that: Open Link With allows you to open a web page with any compatible app. It's perfect for quickly switching over to YouTube for that link I opened wrong, or for opening a page in an alternate browser that isn't set to the Android default.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
AccuWeather is one of the most popular dedicated weather apps in the world - on the Play Store it's racked up somewhere between 50 and 100 million downloads, and that's just for the free version. The latest update actually started sometime around Christmas, and it's been going out in Google-style stages, so it's taken us this long to spot it. Version 4.0 significantly updates the user interface of the app to bring it more in line with Material Design standards... sort of.
Android news tends to focus on the flagship phones from the largest companies, if only because they inform the direction of phone design for the following year or so. But it's important to remember that giant corporations like LG release dozens of new models in the same timeframe. The first two LG phones announced for 2016 are the K7 and K10, both being revealed before the enormous Consumer Electronics Show (which doesn't technically begin until Wednesday).