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Google launched the Nexus Player one year ago. It wasn't very good. Priced at $99, it was a hard sale. Now you can pick one up for half the price in big box stores like Best Buy.
This week's Humble Mobile Bundle goes out to JRPG lovers. Folks who pay over the average can get their hands on over six games from Kemco, otherwise known as that publisher popped up when you searched for any RPG in the Play Store.
Want to buy Google Play gift cards in The Netherlands? Of course you do! Assuming, that is, you live in The Netherlands. It looks like Google's plastic little cards, and their digital equivalent, are now making their way to that particular corner of Europe.
Samsung Pay is an interesting approach to this whole mobile payments thing. You don't have to wait on retailers to roll out support. Sure, you can use NFC in stores that are hip enough for such shenanigans, or you can use magnetic secure transmission (MST) to pay at terminals that would otherwise only accept debit and credit cards.
I don't know about you, but sometimes Google Street View still blows my mind. Living in 2015, we have the ability to take out our phones and experience what it's like to walk the streets of a distant city. From my browser I've had views of Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia that I will likely never have in person.
Last month HERE showed off its upcoming route sharing feature, which lets users send others the route they're taking to get to a destination. This way you can answer "How are you getting here?" without having to go through the effort of explaining. Tapping the standard share button and having the question-asking-person read the plain text that appears on his or her phone, or open the instructions inside HERE, should be much less of a headache.
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Dyzplastic's Android figures designed by Andrew Bell take that warm fuzzy feeling you get from using your phone and plaster it on top of your desk. You can get a standard green one or choose from any number of models that look as though they were taken from Androidify and put through a 3D printer.
Huawei is one of the largest smartphone makers in the world, and while it may not be anywhere near as prominent outside of China as it is domestically, the brand is attracting an increasing amount of attention. You could say part of this is due to the company producing one of this year's Nexuses, but credit also goes out to an increasingly attractive portfolio of hardware.
Synology will sell you network attached storage, and it will give you no shortage of Android apps to access it with. Recently the company has updated several of those mobile bits of software with support for DiskStation Manager 6.0 Beta. This is the latest version of the operating system you can install to one of those aforementioned NAS boxes, which you're welcome to download if you have the right hardware.
Google Calendar 5.x is quite the visual experience. Sure, the relatively unorthodox way it goes about listing events rather than showing you a grid of dates may not feel as Calendar-y out of the box, but boy is it pretty. And now it's prettier. Google has added new illustration to accompany more of your events.
Unlimited always comes with an asterisk. Today Sprint has announced that it will begin deprioritizing customers who use over 23GB a month in a move to maintain a better network for the majority of its users.
When I fire up the Play Store, I generally start searching for an app right away. But sometimes it pays to scroll through the pages. Some users are seeing an option to save 50% off any one album under $15.
iPlayer is a treat from the BBC to its viewers in the UK. The broadcasting network produces content, and it lets locals view them from the comfort of their mobile devices. Think of it as the relationship seemingly every other popular Internet streaming service has with the US, at least initially.
You don't have to subscribe to a music streaming service to get a steady stream of songs spread across an eclectic mix of genres. Just wait around for Google to hand out free albums. With the regularly occurring Playlist: The Very Best Of... series, you have your pick of hits spread all throughout the decades.
Yahoo Mail remains one of the company's biggest properties, and it's going all out with the release of version 5.0. This isn't just about a visual design, which we detailed when we got our hands on the beta. There are new features that can be found both in the app and on the web.
TellTale Games has already done great things with the Borderlands and Game of Thrones franchises. Now eyes are on what the company intends to do next. Announced at the end of 2014, Minecraft: Story Mode has been a long time coming. Now it's available for Android devices, right on schedule.[EMBED_YT]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcKmyM6YQY8[/EMBED_YT]With Mojang's intellectual property, TellTale Games is taking its trademark adventure game formula in a different direction. Here we have an experience built around the player, who must step into the customizable shoes of a male or female named Jesse and steer him or her through a plot that changes depending on the choices they make.
Google releases an Android app each year providing Google I/O attendees with the schedule for the upcoming conference, and it uses the opportunity to show off how an Android app is supposed to feel. Then a couple months later it releases the source code, providing developers with a look at best practices. The source code for 2015's app has taken longer to arrive than last year's, but at last, it's here.
The SHIELD Android TV 2.0 update introduced the GeForce Now streaming service and brought the ability to play games natively in 4K. These additions were joined by support for additional codecs and containers. But some users didn't have quite the pretty picture they wanted following the update. Their picture quality was very dark.
YouTube has been able to display 360 degree video since early this year, and they remain just as cool now as they were then. The perspective even makes ads—which YouTube can also let you view in 360 degrees—more interesting. Take this new promotional Play Music video, for example.
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- One reader in the UK has shared this screenshot of what appeared when he followed the link above.
Yesterday a reference to something called "music gifts" appeared on a Google Play support page. Now a separate page has popped up that fleshes out precisely what this feature is, something Cody came across in a recent Play Music teardown just under a month ago.