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Remember when everyone was up in arms because the Nexus 6P and 5X were so expensive outside North America? It turns out that Google has decided to quietly fix that, at least in some parts of the world. On the Google Store, the Nexus 5X, which initially launched for €479 and then came down to €429 in the Eurozone, is now starting at just €349, while the Nexus 6P, priced at €649 back in September, now begins at €549. The prices in Italy are still €50 more expensive for every model than the rest of the Eurozone, and the price increments for each storage tier are the same as before.
There are a ton of events all year round where companies get to show off their latest products and fancy new tech. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had CES 2016 — one of the most prominent electronics shows of the year, which featured everything from smart fridges to smart belts. The next major exhibition, MWC 2016, is more focused on mobile tech and is scheduled to begin on February 22nd in Barcelona.
The developers behind the Telegram messaging service are starting off the new year with a few additions to their app — perhaps with the hopes of keeping their 5.7 million new users hooked. Version 3.4.0 brings faster GIFs and inline bots that are accessible within chats.
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The highlight feature of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus is something called "3D Touch" — a way of interacting with the phone by pressing harder on the screen than you regularly would. This is not to be confused with "Force Touch," which is exactly the same thing but on the Apple Watch instead. (One of our readers pointed out that there is a slight difference: 3D Touch has a few more levels of pressure sensitivity than Force Touch.) Shakespeare would probably have told you that a feature by any other name would be as gimmicky, but I digress.
It's easy to underestimate the importance of the review process. When considering a purchase, we scour Amazon for well-written reviews, YouTube for thorough comparisons, and (obviously) Android Police for insightful hands-on articles. We do it for everything from smartphones to cars to vacuum cleaners. Sometimes we even enjoy reading reviews for things we don't want to buy, simply for our own amusement. So why do we generally ignore app reviews on Google Play?If I had to guess — and it isn't really much of a guess at all — I'd point my finger at the overwhelmingly poor quality of app reviews in general. The same is almost universally true for all app stores, but for Android in particular, users are petty, juvenile, or just plain vindictive, and, on average, reviews hardly give any sense of the quality of an app. Unless it makes up by being entertaining, bad reviews are simply a waste of everyone's time.Obviously, there are ways to counteract this, with the most obvious one being to float high-quality reviews to the top and bury poor ones at the bottom. Google has already been employing this for a few years now with some success, when it began sorting reviews by helpfulness instead of in reverse chronological order. How Google actually classifies the "helpfulness" of a review is somewhat of an unknown, and the algorithm could probably do with a few improvements.There are still countless measures that could be taken to improve the overall review experience (filtering by version number or increasing the character limit of reviews come to mind), and that's why virtually any news of Google experimenting with reviews is good news.We've received a tip from one of our regular readers that Google is running a limited test with review highlights on the Play Store. Review highlights provide a quick glance at what a majority of users are saying about a given app, thus giving potential installers a brief summary of what they can expect to see.
SwiftKey — the company behind the eponymous keyboard app — has just released SwiftKey Symbols, an app designed to make it easier for non-verbal individuals to communicate. The picture-based keyboard was developed by a small team at SwiftKey that wanted to make it easier for children with autism or other speaking difficulties to express themselves, and is especially geared towards those individuals.
There's no limit to what you can build in Minecraft. From a one-to-one scale model of the Starship Enterprise to a working CPU, the block-based video game has seen practically everything. Fans of the game like to spend time on large-scale constructions, and the engineers at Verizon seem to be some of the biggest fans around. Staying true to what the company is known for, they've taken it upon themselves to extend the network's wireless coverage into the virtual world and build a working smartphone in Minecraft. The result is admittedly very cool.
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- Last week, the Nexus 6P became available in Europe, but only in its 32GB and 64GB incarnations. We've just confirmed that the 128GB version is now in stock in at least Germany and Portugal, and it's highly likely that this will also be the case for the rest of the Eurozone, if not the rest of Europe. If you were waiting for it to go on sale, this is your chance to buy one. For the time being though, the Frost color of the 128GB variant is the only one that isn't yet being sold, but it's labeled as "Coming soon."
The Nexus 6P has been in and out of stock in the US, but in most of the rest of the world, it's never been in stock at all — until now, that is.
It's Black Friday, and everything must go! Amazon is offering considerable discounts of over 30% on plenty of devices, including Fire TV sticks and Fire tablets, as well as that futuristic-looking cylinder called Amazon Echo.Here's what we've managed to find:
It's Black Friday, and deals are popping up everywhere like crazy. The Nexus 9 saw its price slashed by a whopping $200 and the brand-new Nexus 5X is being sold at just $299 on the Google Store and B&H. But while those deals are definitely great and all, nothing beats free.
You probably wouldn't guess it if you live in the United States or Europe, but Huawei is actually a pretty big brand in Asia. In China, the national manufacturer controlled 15.7 percent of the smartphone market share in Q2 2015 — more than either Apple or Samsung and just shy of Xiaomi's 15.9 percent. This alone accounts for a significant part of why it's the third largest smartphone vendor in the world, with that only set to improve as Huawei expands into more countries across Europe and the Americas.
The Google+ redesign from last week may look pretty, but it's also missing a lot of features that were available in the classic layout. This is true of every product revamp or relaunch: there will always be a tradeoff between getting all the bells and whistles of the new version and keeping the things you're used to on the old one. There's a whole help page that lays out most of the changes and features that the redesign still lacks, ranging from the simplification of profile pages to the (temporary) removal of polls from the web version. Fortunately, upgrading is still entirely optional, so for now you can stick with the classic version of Google+ if that suits you better.
Yesterday, CyanogenMod announced the first wave of devices supporting CyanogenMod 13 (CM13) — the latest version of CyanogenMod based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The range of devices was reasonably small, containing just seven entries, but CyanogenMod promised they were working hard to get that list to expand rapidly.
CyanogenMod has just announced the first nightly builds of CyanogenMod 13 (CM13) running Android Marshmallow 6.0, which will begin rolling out to a handful of select devices. Nightly builds are not as bug-free as snapshot releases, but they are typically still reliable enough that many users don't mind facing a few issues here and there in order to stay on the bleeding edge.
In preparation for the release of Episode VII in just a few weeks' time, Google has partnered with Lucasfilm and Disney to bring the Star Wars experience into just about every Google app and service around. Fans can pick between the light side and the dark side on google.com/starwars and apps like Maps, Search, and Gmail will begin to transform to reflect their chosen path.
If there were a prize for color of the year, rose gold would be the 2015 champion. Ever since Apple released the rose gold iPhone 6s, every other manufacturer has been quick to launch their products in the coveted 'rose gold' variant. The color itself has somewhat of an identity crisis, ranging from the everyone-knows-it's-pink-but-let's-not-call-it-pink tone on the iPhone to the not-pink-at-all gradient of the ZTE Blade S7.
Last Tuesday I got a top of the line McLaren F1 from earning $16020 these last four weeks while working 3–4 hours a day, all in the comfort of my living room couch. This is definitely the coolest work I have ever done. Without any question it's the most financially rewarding I've had. I started this 4 months ago and practically straight away began to bring home over $97 per hour. Visit this weblink to start immediately.
If you're one of the select few who work for a company that uses Facebook for Work, then Facebook has just released the messaging app for you. Work Chat is Facebook's take on work-based communication apps like Slack and Hipchat — although it does feel slightly barebones for now.
Skype for Android has just been updated to version 6.11 with a handful of nifty features and improvements. The upgrade lets users delete, mark as read, or mute notifications via a long tap on a contact or conversation, and search results will now become populated with conversation content, in addition to contact and group names. It also allows users to save sent and received videos to the photo gallery, which wasn't offered in the previous version for some reason (and which Skype added because of user feedback).
YouTube Kids launched in the US back in February with the aim of making it easier and safer for kids to watch videos on YouTube. So far, the app has been downloaded more than 10 million times across all platforms, and Malik Ducard, YouTube's Global Head of Family and Learning, says that families consider it to be "among the top kids apps available." Today, the team is expanding YouTube Kids into five new countries — Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — and adding in lots of country-specific programming like Charli's Crafty Kitchen and Wild Kratts, too.