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Sony has a new Android Auto head unit - its first, actually - the catchily-named XAV-AX100. The main draw of the device seems to be the sound quality, with four "55-watt Dynamic Reality Amp 2" amplifiers and Sony's EXTRA BASS low-boost circuitry supposedly overcoming engine noise to deliver crystal clear sound.
Google's very hot on the whole web apps topic, with it promoting things like Chrome Apps on both Chrome OS and Android, as well as things like Instant Apps, introduced earlier this year at I/O. Well, it seems like Google is preparing another assault, this time with 'Progressive Web Apps,' a way to make web apps more powerful and useful to end users, plus make it easier for developers to put them together.
Apps that do things with photos are becoming very popular these days, with Prisma racking up a considerable amount of downloads since its release on Android almost a month ago. Today, Fragment, an app which converts photos into prismatic works of art, is available for €0.10 in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, 10p in the UK, 10 RUB in Russia, and $0.20 AUD in Australia.
Instagram's Stories is a blatant copy of Snapchat Stories, so it's not really a huge surprise to see another feature carried over. In this update, Instagram is getting one-finger zoom - simply hold the record button and slide your finger up or down to zoom. Wonder where they got that idea from?
The Tony Hawk series might be the King of skateboarding games, but that doesn't mean there can't be other viable contenders for the title. True Skate, currently available for $0.10 in many countries (but not in the US), is one such game, and by the looks of it does a damn good job.
It has been often said that when Google redesigns a product, features are often removed. A good example of this would be the material Google Maps release, where a lot of 'classic' features of Maps were absent. Said features do, however, get added back in, and today one returns to Google Photos after being left out of the Google+ Photos split: rotating video.
A smart home is every geek's dream, so it's great to see the idea becoming more and more of a reality, with Nest, Alexa, Google Assistant (soon), and Apple's HomeKit making our homes smarter and automated. Accessory maker Logitech, which already has the Harmony Remote, is adding to its range with the Logitech POP button and accompanying app.
It is a sad fact of life that interesting, new concepts or ideas find it hard to set the world alight because generally, we humans don't like change. That's the basic message from Larva Labs, the team behind the Flow Home launcher, which has announced that it is discontinuing active development on the app, apart from some minor updates and bug fixes.
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- Here is our first look at the Dashboard tab, courtesy of one of our commenters below. For now, it mostly appears to contain event reminders.
With Google Assistant not that far off, it seems Google is really amping up the changes to Google Now. After the 'Explore Interests' card and autocomplete improvements, plus laying the groundwork for Assistant, the next new thing is a bottom row of tabs, with 'Home' and 'Dashboard' occupying it.
Right on cue for those in Rio for the Olympics, Microsoft has released an update for its translator app, a few months after the previous update got ever closer to Google Translate. The new version, 2.30.112, includes the ability to change the voice used for reading out translation results, alternative translations for single words, and a phrasebook feature for fifty languages.
Analytics may not be one of Google's most widely used apps, but it's an invaluable tool for administrators, website or app developers, bloggers, and anyone else who makes things using computers and the World Wide Web. The new version, 3.2, adds in a few improvements, namely landscape support and speed gains across the board.
Inbox might be one of Google's most controversial products - some love the time-saving features and some hate them (such as our Glorious Leader, Artem). That's not going to stop the Inbox team from adding more productivity innovations though; new to Inbox this time is Trello, GitHub, and Google Alerts integration.
Google Now continues to get better and better (hands up if you're looking forward to Google Assistant) so it's only natural yet more features and improvements are being added for the predictive search facilities. A tipster has sent us four screenshots showing 'Explore Interests,' which appears to be a new way to add things you're interested in for Google to track and update you on.
A few months after WhatsApp started encrypting all conversations by default, and a few weeks after Facebook announced encryption was coming to Messenger too, Facebook has turned on the security feature, with 'Secret Conversations' available to beta testers of the app.
Phones have progressed enormously in the last few years. If I look at my beloved Nexus 4, bought new in 2012, it had a Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, 2GB RAM, and 16GB storage. It cost me £279, or $349 in the US. For a phone of that quality, $349 was a stupendous price, much cheaper than comparable phones from Samsung, Motorola, or HTC. It kept me going for two years before the battery finally gave out.
Bolstered by surging sales of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, Samsung has announced its second quarter earnings for 2016, showing that profits, 8.14 trillion won ($45.2 billion), are up almost 18%, with revenue, 50.94 trillion won ($7.22 billion), also up by 5%.
The LEGO games are great - a little repetitive, maybe, but very good, especially for mobile devices. For the Star Wars fans out there (and boy are there a lot of you), your time has come: LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens has hit the Play Store, almost a month after release on consoles and PC.
We may all lament the state of app discoverability in the Play Store at times (it still sucks you can't do advanced searching), but at least Google is trying to improve the experience. Today it's added eight new categories and renamed two others, meaning apps will be better sorted into the relevant category, which will hopefully result in users being able to find what they're looking for quicker and easier.
It's not exactly a secret that Yahoo has been struggling recently, seeming unfocused and not having any real idea what to do with its products and services. To that end, the company has been looking for a buyer for the last four months, with multiple parties interested in acquiring the stricken, fallen colossus. That process has now come to an end, resulting in Verizon purchasing the 'operating business' (the day-to-day activities and products) of the former web giant for $4.83 billion.
After finally launching in Japan last week and France yesterday, racking up 50 million downloads in the process, the world's favorite augmented reality game has arrived in Hong Kong, according to the game's official Twitter and Google+ accounts.