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Acting on a complaint by Russian search giant Yandex, Russia's antitrust authority has ruled that Google's policy forbidding the pre-installation of competing search providers on GMS-enabled devices is illegal in the country. Yandex, who dominates the huge Russian market on the desktop, has been hemorrhaging market share in mobile to Google. Their complaint is that Google cannot have a rule requiring Google be the default (and only) search engine on devices that ship with the Play Store.
TomTom, who you may know best as the company who makes car GPS and fitness products, has decided to dive into the blossoming industry of action cameras. As an extension of their sporting background, this is a logical move. The TomTom Bandit is surprisingly polished and offers some unique functions for a first generation product, signaling to me that this is more than a “me too” business strategy.Of course, I’ve already given away the review in saying that. Expectations are in some ways lowered for the Bandit given its status as TomTom’s first action camera. When it comes time to reframe things in terms of what you should buy and for what price, the Bandit is far from a failure but will come up short for many potential buyers.When you are entering a market where GoPro dominates and Garmin has emerged as a top choice for fitness geeks, you really want to make your product look like a safe bet compared to established competitors. The Bandit doesn’t quite stand out in that way, at least not at its $399 entry price point.Here’s a quick overview of where we're headed:
For all the benefits there are to switching to Inbox, there are several areas where it doesn't have feature parity with good old-fashioned Gmail. On the web, Google recently implemented something on Inbox that many Gmail users have learned to take for granted: dragging and dropping or copying and pasting images directly into the composer window.
After a very long wait for owners of the AT&T variants of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, they are finally getting updated to Android 5.1.1. This is in large part due to the upcoming launch of Samsung Pay on September 28th. Most other current generation Samsung devices needed some updates to be prepped for Samsung Pay and most carriers have issued them over the past day or so.
A major aspect of using VPN services for privacy or security is that you must trust your provider. If the service is actually willing to cooperate with spies or hackers, they could compromise all of your browsing activity. In this environment that requires trust, Private Internet Access is among the industry's most highly esteemed services. For just a few days, you can get 2 years of their fully functional subscription for only $60, a $20 savings over their regular pricing that already blew competitors out of the water.
Mozilla advances another version in their rapid release cycle today, moving the stable version of Firefox for Android (and desktops) to v41. Unlike some other recent releases, this one has several goodies for regular users. These include a modification to in-browser search that makes it more like using the dedicated search bar in desktop Firefox, offering an easy tap-to-choose selection of different search providers.
We like to (deservedly) give AT&T a lot of grief around here, but it looks like they have a case in their latest lawsuit. According to the legal documentation, AT&T has evidence of several employees having engaged in a scheme to illegally obtain unlock codes for AT&T customers that were still under contract. Why would they do that? Well, the lawsuit alleges they were taking money from Swift Unlocks, a web-based company that charges a small fee to unlock people's carrier smartphones.
Google is keeping up its fast pace of updates to its office productivity apps, this time with meaningful improvements to both Slides and Sheets for Android. Building on existing presentation abilities, Slides gets notification forward/back toggles as well as an option to watch your audience while presenting to a Hangouts call. Sheets now gives Android users the option to easily edit charts, which were basically view-only previously.
When Amazon announced Underground, the remodeled Appstore that features the ability to play paid and freemium games (as well as other apps) for free, I immediately raised the question of how they planned to make money on this venture. Users obviously benefited by getting free stuff and certain developers would make more money since Amazon compensates them on a per-minutes-used basis. But where was the cash flow to Amazon?
Concerns about privacy online are only growing nowadays. You might be interested in avoiding the NSA, advertising agencies, your ISP, hackers, or whatever is going on at that free hotspot you just connected to. A popular and powerful method of doing this is using a VPN, which both changes your visible IP address (like a proxy) and encrypts all your web traffic to keep prying eyes away (unlike a proxy).
Anyone who has to pore over data on a regular basis knows that it's a best practice to look at some graphs, run basic descriptive statistics, and just generally play around to make sure you aren't missing anything obvious and to assure yourself that there are no mistakes in data entry. This can get really repetitive and sometimes corners get cut. Google is trying to make it easier for you as they have automated the process in Sheets for Android and the web.
There are several reasons why it isn't fun to write formatted documents on a phone, but one of the biggest is how arduous the process of doing simple things like hyperlinking or adding images is. Well, Google rolled out an update to the Android app for Docs that makes these tasks far easier. From within the app, you can now perform Google searches, read webpages, and insert links or images in a very user-friendly way.
Remember Mobilegeddon? This was Google's search ranking change for searches done on smartphones that placed pages that are "mobile-friendly" higher. For people who don't run non-mobile-friendly websites, this was a relatively non-controversial change.
Just a couple of weeks ago, we shared what we thought was a crazy good deal on LG's Watch Urbane for just $240 on Newegg. Now you can do even better if you're willing to jump through a couple of hoops, bringing the price down to $204 for the rose gold version of the watch. As long as you remember to mail in a rebate, you get $20 off. You also get 10% off if you use VISA Checkout, which requires nothing more than a VISA credit card. This is all lowering an already-great price of $249.
I would say you should feel excited, but we've actually seen the upcoming Moto 360 reboot a few times already. In yet another confirmation that Motorola is on the verge of announcing at least one and probably two new models of the Moto 360, our industry's most famous tipster, @evleaks, briefly came out of retirement to share the above image with the world.
In the tech world, we know that big things can come in small packages, but those packages usually have a big price. Well if you are looking for microSD cards with a ton of storage space, today is your lucky day because both Amazon and Newegg are is offering an over $30 discount on a PNY 128GB microSD card perfect your phones, tablets, action cameras, or wherever else you might need it.Newegg created a splash by offering the discount and Amazon answered in kind by dropping their own price; now that Newegg has sold out, you can be thankful Amazon is still competing.
Those who are always on the lookout for a good buy probably have some experience with Slickdeals. The web's most popular location for bargain hunting isn't new to Android, but the experience on mobile has always been a little bit lacking. As Slickdeal's current app has gotten fairly stale, they have not been sitting on their hands. Now in beta, an update to v3.0 features a completely revamped look with better spacing, tabs instead of a hamburger menu, and a smoother overall experience.
When Amazon announced Amazon Underground, a new app marketplace where many freemium games are made "actually free," everything seemed pretty great. You can make in-app purchases on apps downloaded from Underground without actually spending money, which is my favorite way to buy things. Of course, if you spend much time thinking about how this must work behind the scenes, it's tough to see how this will be a winner.
Over a year ago there was a lot of concern about this piece of malware that had not only a flashy, user-friendly interface, but also the ability to monitor audio and video on Android devices. Even worse, it was able to slip past the automated checking used by Google at the time. Technically, it was really a software toolkit to make it easier to package malware APKs and then do malicious things with them.
AMIDuOS Releases Major Upgrade To v2.0, Brings Full Android 5.0.1 Virtualization To Windows Machines
AMIDuOS, a popular solution for running Android apps on Windows, has issued a major update today that brings users a full Lollipop virtual environment. The update, to version 2.0, is most notable for leaving the now very-dated world of 4.2 Jelly Bean. With it also comes support for 64-bit apps, the ART runtime, and better APIs and compatibility for hardware features such as Bluetooth 4.0. On the not-as-fun side, the lifetime license now costs $15, up from the prior version's $10 cost.