About Jules Wang
Jules joined the Android Police team in 2019. He currently contributes art for our stories and edits our podcast. Before that, he managed weekend news and wrote AP's newsletter.
Jules also contributes to our sister sites XDA-Developers and Pocket-lint. He also was editor at our now-sister site, Pocketnow.
Latest Articles
[Update: Free Plus for desktop app buyers] Pocket Casts goes freemium, sells PC app and extra features for $10 a year
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In its most sweeping change since being acquired by a public media consortium last year, podcast app Pocket Casts is making its Android and iOS apps free. Most features, including dark theming, cross-platform syncing, silence removal, and variable-speed playback will be available to all users. Other facets, including the desktop apps, will be available for a monthly or annual fee.
[Update: It's live] Watch the Huawei Mate 30 reveal livestream starting from 5 a.m. PDT
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Chinese tech company Huawei has been in too many headlines for a smartphone maker. It is at risk of losing all of its U.S. goods suppliers as questions hang in the air about what corporate crimes it may or may not have committed. But today, the firm is making news of its own agency in introducing the Huawei Mate 30 and the Huawei Watch GT 2 to market — and we have the link for you to see that happen live.
Bastion of privacy Facebook remains ridiculously insistent on wanting a presence in your home — something with microphones and a camera involved. So, it has come up with a new range of Portal smart displays and video chat peripherals for 2019. These include an update 10" design, a new 8" screen, and Portal TV, what's essentially a camera bar that plugs into your TV set.
Another day on the Amazon Deals of the Day carousel and this go-around, we're hitting up the storage device manufacturer PNY. If you want a 512GB SD card for well under $100, a 256GB microSD for under $40, or the best price on a 256GB USB-C drive, all of them are on sale until midnight PDT.The PNY Elite 256GB USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C flash drive has a necessarily long name thanks to the USB Promoters Group, but what it is able to do for your computer or phone is to read files at up to 130MB per second. The connector is also retractable, too.
Certain apps are able to automatically input SMS verification codes through Google's SMS Retriever API. If the app doesn't utilize the API, Android Messages is able to detect those codes and let users copy them right from the SMS notification. Now, it appears that Google is about to close the gap by having its own Autofill service pull SMS verification codes all by itself with the latest Google Play services update.
[Update: It's back] Anker 60W USB-C + USB-A super compact wall charger is at an all-time low of $32 for the next few hours
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It just so happens that we all tend to lose a wall charger every now and then, be it because of a power surge or because we're in a rush trying to make it out of the hotel before checkout time. Fortunately, Anker runs sales on its chargers pretty often on Amazon and we think its PowerPort Atom III block pulling 60W is a swell steal at $11 off, but you gotta get it before midnight PDT.If you're not familiar with what Gallium nitride can do for a charger, you're seeing it in the amount of punch it can pack at 60 whole watts and in the size savings — Anker claims it to be 15% smaller than a comparable Apple MacBook Pro charger. This particular unit has a USB-C port which can put through 45W your laptop and a USB-A to do 15W for your phone.
[Update: File size confusion] Clear gigabytes of cached Chrome storage you probably forgot existed
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If you're like me using an Android device, you probably browse the web with Chrome because it exists in plain sight and does the job you want it to do (and if you're not me, we've got an article for you). What it doesn't do a good job of, though, is telling you just how much stuff the sites you visit are caching into your phone — which will be particularly stressful for those surviving on 32GB, 16GB, or even 8GB disks. Fortunately, you can do something about it.
Google has promised gaming on every screen without the pain of local processing through its Stadia platform. However, it'll take some time to saturate every possible screen — Chromecasts will be at the forefront when the service goes into trial from November while Pixel 3 and 3a phones as well as computers with access to Chrome are expected to join the device pool. But what if you have an Android TV? Well, you may have to wait a good long while to get into Stadia.
Google Photos gets nostalgic with AI-curated Memories, lets you show off favorites with canvas prints
Google Photos isn't just resting on its laurels today by making 4x6" prints available within the same day at your local pharmacy or big box store — the cloud storage service is amping up its own boutique print offerings and using artificial intelligence to help you stroll through the tons of memories you've backed up.
Google Assistant is branching out to more smart home devices at this year's CEDIA Expo in Denver. You've already been able to turn on ovens, cameras, HVAC units, washing machines, lighting rigs, entertainment systems, and a lot more. But for people looking to squeeze out some autumn grilling and for those using an automation hub, we've got some good news coming in.
Accessories makers tend to come onto Amazon with their Deals of the Day as if it were a carousel. This day, it's Aukey's turn and we're tracking a dozen products on sale for at least 20% off. From keyboards to Bluetooth earbuds to speakers and chargers (a load of chargers), we've got them parsed down for your participation and consumption. You just need to act before midnight PDT tonight.We'll be honest and say that the section for wall warts is quite busy, noisy, and confusing. A couple of our picks are the Qi Wireless Charger Stand for up to 10W of power for your select Samsung phone or iPhone and a USB-C + USB-A wall charger with up to 56.5W total output which, believe it or not, is touted to be Power Delivery-compliant.
So, you've bought into Google Stadia with that $130 Founder's Edition kit, you've got enough internet pumping in and out to blast 4K HDR games without the console, and you're just about to explode with all the titles set to come in the next year. All you're waiting for is the word "go," and so far, we've only been given the word "November." But a couple of clues have recently popped up in the Stadia subreddit in the hopes of letting us mark down a specific day on our calendars.
One of the most ubiquitous cheap tech gifts in the past couple of years has to have been the Google Home Mini — if you caught it on sale for as low as $20, you could take care of all your family for Christmas. Recently, intelligence has been developing on a new version of this stout smart speaker — to be known as the "Nest Mini" — and we're now looking at an FCC filing that might tell us more about it.
You know how a traditional photo lab works, right? You go into a red room with your film negatives and treat them with developer, stopper, fixer, and clearing solutions until you get a visible, accurate result. Well, what if you want to develop and print a photo taken with your phone? It's simple: buy Polaroid's $130 optical scanner-printer called the Polaroid Lab.
We didn't think you'd be getting the best deals on a Galaxy Note10 or Note10+ from Microsoft in the first place, so to report that Samsung's newest mainstream, stylus-equipped phablets are on sale in the United States from Microsoft on eBay doubly confounds us. And yet, because we don't look at gift horses in their mouths, here we are.
Xiaomi is in a bad spot right now. Revenues aren't growing as fast as investors want. Competition in a saturated smartphone market is stiff. And software sales and service fees just aren't stacking up. Part of that formula comes from the ads plaguing its MIUI software experience from embeds in the web browser right down to the settings. Now, the company is beta testing an ad-free experience that may end up in the final update to MIUI 10.
Money changes hands — so it goes with capitalism. But there are plenty of ways to make that happen. Square, for example, makes smartphone and tablet peripherals for businesses to take payments from magstripe cards. Other people will use the emoji-ridden Venmo service from PayPal for entirely digital transactions. Samsung, however, is testing out a way to conduct in-person payments via phone or card using its phones and it's calling this new system SoftPOS.
LG seems really invested in making Dual Screen cases for its phones, expanding the amount of real estate available to smartphone users while bypassing the engineering requirements of a folding phone. There's one for the V50 and one for the sorta all-new G8X that just debuted at IFA 2019. But there's one detail that about that Dual Screen case for the G8X that seems particularly fishy and quite ugly.
Telegram v5.11 lets you schedule messages, prevent others from finding you by phone number
Vacation responders, snoozing, even rudimentary forms of read receipts? Oh, how far email clients have come to meet up with our instant message services. But if there's anything our chat apps can learn from its progenitor, it's scheduled replies — and Telegram has picked up that trick as well as a few others in its latest update.
JBL's IFA 2019 lineup includes noise-canceling earbuds and a trio of honkin' soundbars
For whatever reason you need music pumped into the background of an event or the foreground of a party, you have a discomforting number of options for speakers in the market. Well, Samsung-owned JBL has gone and complicated that market a bit further this IFA and while it has typically does a quality job on everything, you might need a little introduction on what all these speakers are good for — that's what we're here for.