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Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that Google has scheduled an event today to unveil all its new hardware gear. The Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go, Nest Mini, and Nest Wifi are expected to debut there. If all the leaks haven't tempered your excitement and you still want to catch every bit of the livestream, you can watch it with us below.
Google's Pixel event is scheduled to start in about an hour and leaks are still pouring in. Following Best Buy Canada and the UK's Carphone Warehouse pre-order pages, B&H has already listed the device for pre-order in the US. This time though, it's not a simple landing page: It's a full listing with prices and availability.
Google Photos can do a lot of smart things with your pics. It suggests archiving bills and other paperwork, it applies color pop effects on some of your portrait snaps, and not very long ago, we were told it'd start recommending cropping pics of documents. While the latter is still not very reliable — you never really know when the suggestion will pop up and when it won't — there's now a manual document cropping extension in Photos.
Many apps are rushing to add a dark mode now that Android 10 and iOS 13 have implemented it on the system level. Some apps, however, have had a dark theme for years and the only thing they need to change is to make it respect the system setting. That's the case for Pocket Casts, the popular podcast player.
Last month, a problem with 4K playback surfaced on Nvidia's Shield TV. The issue affected VUDU and a few other unnamed services, and only occurred when using their native apps but not when casting to the Shield. Nvidia is now rolling out an update that's supposed to fix those problems.
Along with three new true wireless earbuds, Plantronics introduced last month a new over-ear headphone model. The BackBeat Fit 6100 offer a unique proposition for gym goers and workout aficionados who don't like in-ear buds: they're over-ear cans made specifically to withstand sweat and exercise, but they suit your commuter lifestyle or desk job just as well. The $180 price is on the high side, though.
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- A WhatsApp representative told The Next Web that the app is back, though they didn't specify the reason for the disappearance. I can verify this on my end: the app is now showing up in search results on the web. If you're on Android, you may need to close the Play Store and re-open it.
If you try to look for WhatsApp on the Play Store now, you're likely to find nothing. For many users, searching for the app's name only returns WhatsApp Business, and the regular Messenger app has disappeared from both the Installed and Beta tabs under My apps & games. It is still accessible under its listing's URL though.
Google Tasks has taken several steps forward since its launch in April of last year. Many of the features that were then missing, like recurring tasks and timed reminders, app shortcuts, proper Gmail integration, sharing to the app, and more, have been implemented. The service now has the barebones necessities of a to-do manager and is continuing to improve. With the latest update, it has added two homescreen widgets and a dark theme.
A few days ago, BuzzFeed reported that Instagram was removing one of the most berated features of its app, the Following tab. That has indeed been the case, with the app first showing a blank tab with a disclaimer that it's going away, then completely removing it in the most recent update.
Hot on the heels of implementing a dark mode with v63, a new version of Google Duo is rolling out now with a few minor changes. Chief among them is the ability to see which contacts are most active on the platform before calling them or sending them a message.
Over the past months, we've seen most of Google's prominent — and not-so-prominent — apps get updated with dark mode support. One holdout has stuck to its guns though: Maps. The app already has a user-configurable dark theme while navigating, but the rest of the interface remains white. Now, glimpses of a dark mode have popped up in Maps, hopefully hinting at a close release of the theme.
True to its promise of updating some of its devices to Android 10 before the end of 2019, HMD today begun the official roll out with the Nokia 8.1. Since this device was part of the Android 10 betas, it only makes sense that it's the first one to receive the stable update.
Over the past few days, updates to the Google Play Store broke the changelog menu under My Apps & games. Users noticed that tapping the little arrow next to any app didn't trigger the changelog to appear below it, so they had to dig into the app listing looking for the latest changes brought by each update. Thankfully, that's now fixed with the latest Play Store v17.
Plantronics dipped its toes in the true wireless earbuds market last year — with mitigated results. While it nailed the product's design and features, connectivity was an issue that you only noticed if you spent a lot of time out in the open. Now the company is back with a new range of true wireless buds and is hoping to fix that problem thanks to Bluetooth 5.0 and a new chip from Qualcomm.The Pro 5100 are Plantronics' new premium offering, though in the true wireless earbuds space, they fall in the mid to high-end. And if you manage to forgive their MicroUSB charging port and slightly high price tag, they're quasi-perfect.
Another day, another Google app getting a dark mode. Today's honors go to Google Duo, which appears to have received its splash of dark via a server-side switch — the app's latest update rolled out a few days ago, but it didn't have the theme back then.
Slowly but surely, Google's different apps are getting a dark mode to go with Android 10's system-wide setting. The latest app to receive this treatment is Google Play Books, which just got updated to v5.4.
The universal truth about Google's messaging efforts is that they're all over the place. However, its video calling app Duo has seen more growth and praise, which is likely why the team behind it is forging on with quirkier additions to the service. The app already lets you record and send video and audio messages to your contacts, and now you'll also be able to share self-destructing photos with them.
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- The new Shield has been certified by the Bluetooth SIG. It carries the same product name found on the FCC filing, P3430, and has Bluetooth 5.0.
Rumors of NVIDIA's Shield TV refresh have been making the rounds since March thanks to code hinting at a new controller and remote. Since then, we've seen a unit with the product code "mdarcy" pop up on the Play Developer console, suggesting a minor refresh over the 2017 Shield TV, "darcy," as well as an FCC filing corroborating that. However, new evidence hints that the new FCC submission was actually for a second new Shield TV, codenamed "sif."
One month after BitTorrent's update with a dark theme and bottom navigation, uTorrent is getting the same treatment on Android. The changes are live as part of version 6.1.4, which began rolling out a few days ago.
It's been more than a month since Google opened up account migration for Nest users, letting them switch their subscriptions and logins to Google. That migration was marred with several asterisks including broken Works With Nest integrations and the inability to go back once the login was changed. One other bad surprise that Nest owners only discovered after the fact is the lack of support for Android TV and Apple TV, and that has yet to be fixed.