About Rita El Khoury
Rita was a Managing Editor at Android Police. Once upon a time, she was a pharmacist as well. Her love story with Android started in 2009 and has been going stronger with every update, device, tip, app, and game. She lives in France, speaks three languages and a half, and watches a lot of TV series.
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One of the best places for a smart camera is your front door. That way it doesn't record anything that goes inside the house, if you're wary of privacy issues, but it still lets you see who got near your home. And if that camera is replacing your doorbell, then it serves double purpose for security and convenience, letting you see who's at the front door, even if you're away, and talk to them to see what they need or let them know when you'll be back.
The 16GB SHIELD TV (2017) costs $199.99 and the price has rarely budged since its release at the start of the year. It was once down $20 for Amazon Prime Day and another time you could get $25 off with Visa Checkout, but that's it. So you can imagine that the smallest discount is worthy of mention, and that's the case of this $30 discount that brings it to its lowest price yet at $169.99.
The holidays are fast approaching, which means the opportunities to gather with family and share the past year's memories and make new ones will be aplenty. This makes now the perfect time for using Google's Photo books to print neat physical albums of your existing photos or to prepare for the impending holiday picturefest. And as it so happens, Photo books are now available in Canada as well.
The Pixel 2 and 2 XL may have not garnered universal praise, but there's no denying that Google's new phones can do a lot of cool things. Sure, plenty of other Android smartphones with Assistant have access to near-identical features, but it's Google's DNA in there that makes all of them possible. So I guess we can forgive Google for the extra gloating and enjoy this neat ad for the Pixel 2.
Google has been publishing its security bulletin for the monthly Android patches for a long time, but starting October 2017 (last month), it created a special bulletin for Nexus and Pixel devices. With the newly released November patch, Google has started populating one new section in the bulletin that details "Functional updates."
Android Pay's arrival in Brazil has been rumored for a long time, but back in May, Google confirmed that it would be live by the end of the year in a few countries amongst which was Brazil. Most of those already have Pay, so Brazilian users have been waiting, but they won't be put off for a lot longer apparently.
This will be great news for developers who live in Bangladesh and South Africa. Up until now, they couldn't register for a merchant account on Google Play, which meant that they could only publish free apps and games on the Store. But now they can, they finally can. Publishers in Bangladesh will have their currencies set to USD, but those in South Africa will be on the local ZAR.
Pocket Casts, one of our favorite podcasting apps on Android and my personal go-to for the last four years, has received a nice update to version 6.4 with a bunch of Android Oreo 8.0 features and plenty of fixes.
In the list of Google's Home control partners that we found a few days ago, you may notice one interesting mention: HP Printer. We're not sure how long it's been there, but as the name suggests, Google Assistant and Home can issue printing commands which work with your HP printers.
Nest announced its Secure alarm system in September, but the starter pack just became available for purchase today. And to go with that, Nest has updated its app to support the features of the Secure.
Halloween is over (sad face) but that doesn't mean we can't still enjoy its nerdy tricks and its geeky treats. Google Home already has its own Halloween tricks, but if you're an awesome dad, you'd go above and beyond that. Case in point: this set of Halloween bowls rigged by tjudkinsYT and demoed by his daughter. He's using Android Things on a Raspberry Pi and his own unpublished Action on Google (hence the "getting the test version of Trick or Treat Bowl" you hear the nice Google lady say in reply) to trigger it through Assistant on his Home Mini.
Amazon announced its entry into the smart security camera business last week with the new $119 Cloud Cam. The official release date for the camera is November 8, but if you ordered one or plan on doing so, you can already grab the Android app that goes with it from the Play Store.The Cloud Cam app is the control center of your cameras. You can add the cams you got, rename them, view the live stream if you want to drop in and check something, and activate two-way audio to talk to your kids or anyone at home, calm your pets, or scare an intruder. You also get notifications for motion alerts with the option to replay, download, share, or delete the automatically recorded videos.The app should also let your manage person alerts plus viewfinder zones to exclude areas you don't want to be monitored. Plus, you can use your phone as a presence detector and automatically turn off recording when you're home for privacy.
While I can't use Google Voice myself, I see a lot of positive feelings for the service online. And now the Android app will be getting just a little bit more approval thanks to a handy addition: billing history.
It's always a nice surprise when an official app, whether it be for a government or an organization or a company, is well designed and built with the most modern guidelines and the most responsive elements. Given how often we come across poor apps that look clunky and feel clunkier, from those that you're dead sure have been copied straight from iOS to those that are easy to recognize as web wrappers, I've sort of lowered my expectations for official apps. And that's where the USO's new app surprises with its very modern Android aesthetics, clean interface, and responsive UI elements.
Many months ago, Cody predicted through his all-seeing eye (and some strings in the app teardown, but I prefer to think of Cody's powers as absolute magic - is there a thing the guy doesn't know beforehand?) that the Android Pay app would start showing full transaction histories on your supported cards, even for those transactions where Pay wasn't used.
One of the new toggles you'll see in Android 8.1's developer preview is hidden in Developer options, under the Networking category and is called: Tethering hardware acceleration. The description, "Use tethering hardware acceleration if available," doesn't do a lot to clarify the ambiguity of the new option, and the speculation from AP alumni Ron Amadeo and a few users has been that it would use a more efficient method for tethering that relies on hardware. We've been looking into it to try to understand what it does and there are hints here and there that favor that explanation.
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- WhatsApp has officially announced that deleting a message for everyone is now rolling out to users globally on Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, and desktop. You'll need to be on the latest version of the app for your platform to use it. (Though odds tell us that it might possibly work on recent versions too, but don't rely on that.)
Message recalls have been rumored on WhatsApp for months now and every couple of weeks, we got a glimpse of the functionality in a beta version but it was always a false alert and never properly worked. Now the option appears to be going live, with a slow rollout to more and more users.
HMD can't seem to stop making new Nokia phones and after the 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8, today we go to the lower end of the market with the new Nokia 2. Though the specs are pretty much the bare minimum, the recently leaked Nokia 2 has its own appeal not the least of which is HMD's commitment to a pure Android experience and fast updates.
The Jensen brand might evoke a lot of nostalgia for many of you, but the company isn't stuck in the past. One of its recent forays into modern audio tech is the JSB-1000, which was announced earlier this year, and is its first Chromecast built-in speaker. But that's not the only notable feature of the JSB-1000. For the past few months, the JSB-1000 has been blaring in my kitchen as part of my whole-home Chromecast speakers + Google Homes setup and it has quickly become an integral part of our daily lives. I love the JSB-1000, but each time I think about its current price and competition, I put a question mark around my recommendation of it.
While I'm sure very few people have yearned for a broccoli or a cricket emoji on WhatsApp, there are plenty of other emojis that were still missing from the app compared to the Android 8.0 emoji set and Apple's latest set. The monocle, star eyes, swearing face, vomiting face, shushing face, exploding head, and many more were still missing from WhatsApp even when the app revamped its entire emojis early this month and introduced its own set.