latest
Who the heck needs 200 megapixels on their camera? Smartphone manufacturers, of course. It's always a race to the next big number on a spec sheet and it seems that a surprise contestant is tipped to be in the lead for 200 million pixels' worth of bragging rights.
YouTube's line art icons make the jump to your TV, complete with a new resolution button
Almost a year after they first came to Android
I don't know about our readers, but I spend a surprising amount of time watching YouTube on my television and not on my phone. With video length often pushing well past 30 minutes, throwing it up on the big screen like a TV show just feels right. It's taken a while, but that all-new line art look we've seen come to Android, the web, and even YouTube Music is finally coming to the TV interface — along with a better resolution indicator.
Speedtest now measures just what kind of crazy high-res video your connection can handle
Never get stuck on a buffering screen again
Most streaming services these days offer 4K video feeds, either natively or as an additional add-on. Of course, resolution improvements only matter if your internet is fast enough to handle it. With its latest update, Ookla's Speedtest app is now equipped to test network connections for video capabilities specifically.
One feature I wish YouTube had is an option to select a default resolution for video playback. My internet situation is so bad (WiFi is rather slow, 4G has a silly cap) that I always resort to 360p or 480p to avoid buffering or eating through my plan, so for now, I have to open the quality picker each time and choose the one I want. Those of you who are luckier than me had to do the same, only you'd be picking the highest quality instead. But things have now gotten a little easier for you and a little harder for me.
Turns out that Google's new Night Sight mode for Pixels, formally released just earlier today, has some non-night utility. In a bit of a twist, you can use it in the daytime as well for "denoising and resolution improvements" inherited from another Google Camera feature: Super Res Zoom. The results demonstrated look pretty good, so long as you're willing to hold your Pixel steady.
Free full-resolution photo storage has always been a selling point for Pixel phones. With this year's devices being pricier than ever, that perk is all the more important, and thankfully, it's still here: photos taken on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL until January 31, 2022 will be stored at full resolution indefinitely.
Until now, the default resolution for images sent and received on Facebook Messenger was 2K. That's quite small in terms of megapixels, and anything higher you tried to send someone would be compressed by Messenger before sending. Facebook has just bumped the default image size up to 4K (up to just over 16MP) so you can now send photos of much higher quality to friends and family.
Show of hands: how many Android Police readers are still using Android 2.3 or lower on a phone or tablet? According to the latest distribution numbers, it's under one in twenty of Android users worldwide - the rest have upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) or later. (We don't talk about the whole Honeycomb thing anymore.) That being the case, it's understandable why the developers of SwiftKey have decided to stop supporting those older machines with the latest beta version of the custom keyboard app.
Vine is... OK, let's be clear here: Vine is kind of useless. There's literally nothing you can do with Vine that you can't already do with YouTube, unless you count an arbitrary 6.5-second time limit. That being said, there's no reason that Twitter can't improve its property, and it has done just that by boosting the video quality. Newly-created Vines from iOS are now defaulting to 720x720 pixels. Look down there: you can see all the retriever's little golden hairs.
Let's get this out of the way first: SecondScreen is not an external extended monitor app for Android. (Though that would be extremely cool.) I think the developer does a bit of a disservice with that name. What it does is force your phone or tablet to use a different resolution in order to make it display correctly - or at least more correctly - when casting the screen to a television via Chromecast or simply using an HDMI cable.
Super ultra mega HD resolution support is coming to a robot-themed OS near you, but before we get into that, let's talk about Android and DPI.
Photoshop Touch may not be completely comparable to Adobe's desktop counterpart, but when you compare it to other photo editors on the Android platform, it's still the most powerful piece of software out there. At $10, it better be, too. Today, the best just got a bit better, especially if you own a Nexus 7. The app has improved support for 7" tablets. Though, there's a catch: the resolution on said tabs have to be 1024x768 or higher. Sorry, Galaxy Tab 2 7.0.
Looking to steal some of Amazon's limelight, Barnes & Noble tonight announced a new duo of NOOK devices that seem to take aim directly at Amazon's newest additions to the Kindle Fire family.
You may remember Pixel Qi, an ambitious display maker looking to provide users with brilliant displays that not only save energy, but which are actually readable in sunlight. Since we covered their 7" and 10.1" displays way back in May, the company has continued working, announcing in a blog post yesterday a new display which "matches the resolution of the iPad3 screen, and its full image quality including matching or exceeding contrast, color saturation, the viewing angle, and so forth with massive power savings." In the post, Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of Pixel Qi, goes on to explain the display's special low power mode which "runs at a full 100x power reduction from the peak power consumed by the iPad3 screen."
About a week ago, Engadget ran an article covering two bugs in Android's Messaging app: