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College students: don't sign up for LinkedIn. Please. It's easily the worst social network on the block, career-focused structure notwithstanding. LinkedIn is the 21st century version of the Columbia House Record Club... not that any of you are old enough to remember it. However, at some point you might find that you're forced to create a profile and start playing the most boring MMO on the planet. If you've resigned yourself to such a fate, then I suppose LinkedIn Students isn't such a terrible place to start.
US carriers offering free service to disaster-stricken areas of the world has become something of a grim but inspiring tradition at this point. After a devastating earthquake struck the area off the coast of Esmeraldas, Ecuador last night, all of Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile have announced that they are offering free calls and texts to the country for the time being. This allows US residents to contact family members and friends in the affected areas. The offer extends to any calls or texts made from yesterday through Sunday, April 24th on Sprint, Saturday the 23rd on T-Mobile, and Friday the 22nd on AT&T. Sprint and T-Mobile subsidiaries like MetroPCS, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile USA, and GoSmart Mobile are also included.
Virtual reality is the tech topic du jour, with nearly every major hardware and software company (or one of their partners) looking into it in some capacity. Time will tell if this is just a fad or something that will truly change the way we interact with technology, but Google is hedging its bets. In addition to the growing Cardboard VR platform, a few user-facing changes in the second developer preview of Android N point to more robust support for virtual reality in the future.
For those who find Google’s synthetic speech-to-text voice somewhat robotic and grating… well, there’s really nothing that can be done about it. But if you prefer said voice to be higher or lower (or you just want it to sound really funny on those few occasions that you use it), the second release of the Android N developer preview offers it as an option.
The times they are a-changing. A few years ago Verizon infamously stabbed a dagger in the back of Google Wallet in favor of its own carrier-partnered mobile payment system, Isis. Now Wallet is more or less gone, Isis has been rebranded (thanks to, well, ISIS) as Softcard, Google has bought up its technology, and Verizon would really like you to consider using Wallet’s spiritual successor, Android Pay. In other news, my spec script for a soap opera based on the machinations of the US mobile industry still hasn’t been optioned.
A list of things that you’d like to watch in the future isn’t exactly breaking new ground for streaming video services – hell, Netflix was doing that back when they were just a mail-order DVD rental company. But the software engineers at Hulu think they’ve significantly improved on the idea with the new Watch List (capital W), which is apparently cool enough to warrant both an intro video and a press release.
Ever wonder how Android Police always knows right away when Google makes a new country available for any of its services? It's simple! We pick whichever intern has been annoying us this week, chain sit him down in front of a computer, and make him reload Google Support pages like this one once every thirty seconds. When he sees a change, no matter how tiny, he bangs a pot with a wooden spoon, thus alerting one of our diligent writers to take a look at the page. If something of substance has changed, like a new country being added to Google's list of officially supported Android Auto countries, we write it up. If it's just a couple of words added or removed, we beat the intern with the spoon.
Officially, the Android version of Google Maps can't navigate to multiple successive destinations, which is something that the desktop/web version of Google Maps has been able to do for some time. (It's possible to search for stops along a single route, but not to add new destinations further down the line.) If users try to send directions for multiple destinations to a phone or tablet, they get this discouraging little message:
In a perfect world, every manufacturer would update all of its Android phones and tablets every single time Google posted an update to AOSP. We don't live in that perfect world, but at least some of them have paid lip service to the new monthly security updates that Google has been issuing for the last eight months or so. Samsung is one of them... as long as the definition of "monthly" is stretched to something like "eventually." The company posted March's security update notes yesterday (on April 13th) and followed up with the April notes almost immediately.
In a continuing attempt to establish its SHIELD hardware as a platform all its own, NVIDIA keeps securing exclusive games from indie developers. Today we get two, count 'em, two games that have become favorites on Steam and other download services: Super Meat Boy and Stikbold! The former is an old-school platformer with wicked difficulty and a biting sense of humor, and the latter is a 3D reinterpretation of retro games like Super Dodge Ball. Super Meat Boy costs a hefty $15 and it's available for the SHIELD TV and SHIELD Tablet, but Stikbold! ($10) is only for the Android TV hardware.
The SHIELD Tablet is still going strong, right there with the SHIELD Android TV. (The original SHIELD Portable, not so much. Hey NVIDIA, where's that SHIELD 2 you guys were working on?) The original tablet and the slightly newer variant, the K1, were both updated to Android 6.0 a couple of months ago after a rocky start. But for some reason the K1 is getting the latest incremental update first. K1 update 1.2 adds Android 6.0.1, including the security patches from March.
In the Venn diagram of mobile users, the circle marked "rabid Shaq fans" and the one marked "active Waze users" must have a pretty tiny crossover section. But if you do happen to use Waze on a regular basis and you have the special extended DVD edition of both Kazaam and Steel boldly displayed on your shelf, today is your day. Waze has announced that the company is celebrating the start of the NBA Playoffs later this week by adding official Shaquille O'Neal voice narration to the map app's navigation service.
You know those fake "download" buttons you see when you're searching for old Super NES ROMs completely legitimate open-source software? The kind that advertising networks sometimes spit out even on otherwise above-board sites? Yeah, they're awful, and they often link directly to copycat or malicious files. Google hates them as much as you do, and is taking steps to make them less effective. Starting today, Chrome browsers on all platforms will warn visitors to sites with potentially misleading or fake "download" ads.
Patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to the fickle world of yearly hardware upgrades. If you're willing to wait a bit for that fancy new phone, you can save an insane amount of money. For example, a brand new version of 2014's flagship Samsung phone, still only a year and a half old, can now be had for less than half of its original price. And from two different vendors, no less!
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
If you happen to own an Android phone or tablet that works with USB On-The-Go (OTG) for external storage, you'd probably like some storage gadgets that can take advantage of it. Combo drives - standard USB on one side, MicroUSB on the other - have been on the market for years, but they're not easy to find and they usually carry a premium over more conventional designs. Today Amazon is offering a 32GB combo drive from Corsair, which is also compatible with USB 3.0 ports on the standard side, for just even.
Android's notification system has gone through some pretty intense work since the start of the platform, but that doesn't mean that third-party developers can't improve it even more. Case in point: Floatify, a customization app that's been floating around (sorry) for the better part of two years. The latest version is number ten, and it adds a couple of features from the new Android N Developer Preview. If your device isn't invited to play with the Nexus crowd (or you just don't want to deal with the instability), you can back-port some of those neat touches.
If Android Wear doesn't meet all your smartwatch needs, the Pebble series of devices is an impressive alternative... and it doesn't hurt that most of the time, it's the cheaper option. That's especially true today: discount online retailer Monoprice has the latest version of the platform, the Pebble Time, on sale. You can pick one up for just $97.99, plus shipping and local sales tax, when you apply the coupon code "AP20" at checkout. That's a discount of over fifty dollars compared to the retail price of the plastic model.
If you're around the same age as me, you fondly remember playing the Pokemon Trading Card Game (TCG for short) for hours in middle school. Or more accurately, you remember watching all the other kids play it because your parents couldn't afford to buy 10,000 licensed pieces of cardboard just so you could get a shiny Blastoise. (It's OK, I played the Game Boy Color version for vicarious thrills.) As it turns out, the Pokemon card game is still rolling along with a huge following, and now there's even an online digital version. Yes, that's a video game based on a card game based on a video game - try to keep up.
Since the fall of Google Reader and the rise of Feedly as its de facto replacement, gReader has risen to become one of the best options for RSS reading on the Play Store. That said, it's been quite a while since the app was significantly updated, or updated at all: before today, the last time the app was touched was back in August of last year. But today's update bumps it up to version 4.3.0 and adds quite a bit of new content, notably tweaks to the user interface, settings menu, and a host of bug fixes.