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2018 is shaping up to be the year of the voice assistant, and Gourmia wants to bring that magic to all the dumb appliances in your kitchen. The company has five new products it's Google-ified, covering a broad range including the nebulously titled "Kitchen Machine" down to more pedestrian coffee maker and sous vide. Whether it's your kitchen fantasy or gustatory dystopia, Gourmia is bringing one vision of the future to meal-prep.
Smart home security cameras are very much in vogue these days. From Amazon's Cloud Cam to Nest's assorted cameras, it's a popular and growing market. Canary might not be quite so big as its competitors, but it offers affordable alternatives in the wake of its crowdfunding campaign back in 2013. The newest home security camera in the Canary lineup is the $99 Canary View. In addition to this new hardware, Canary has also announced an AI-based Package Detection feature and skill integration with Amazon's Alexa.
Just ahead of CES proper, Schlage has announced that its immensely popular Schlage Sense Smart Deadbolt (say that five times fast) will soon work with Google Assistant. A few months back, it added support for Amazon's Alexa, right after adding an Android app for remote control. And now, sometime in Q1 of this year, you'll be able to 'Hey Google' your way into locking or unlocking your Schlage-equipped front door.The new feature will work in the Assistant on both hardware devices like the Google Home variants, as well as in the Google Assistant on phones and tablets. So whether you're yelling "Hey Google, lock my door," into your living room, or double checking "OK Google, is my door locked," with your bedside phone, it'll work either way. And, best of all, there's no monthly fee.
With CES about to swing into gear, and Google apparently gearing up for a personal assistant blitz at the event, we've been thinking pretty hard about how Google Assistant has integrated itself into our lives.
Acer has just announced its new Chromebook 11 (CB311-8H/T). Although this new Chromebook has USB-C support for power and peripherals, as well as an alleged 10-hour battery, its specs are balanced by a low-resolution display and an uncertain Celeron-badged processor. Starting at $249 and available in touch and non-touch versions, this new model doesn't actually go on sale until later this year—April in the US and March for the rest of the world.
Last year, LG made it clear that it intended to enter the mobile payments space, and in June it jumped in, releasing the service on its recent G6. At the time, it was called LG Pay. But just today, LG released—perhaps accidentally—a confusing new LG Wallet app to the Play store, and the app listing mentions the G7.
It's been about a year since we first heard about the new Nokia phones, including the Nokia 6. Although it took a bit longer for the phone to hit stateside, it rounded out HMD Global's new Android portfolio reasonably well. What few disadvantages we might have seen appear to be fixed in the 2018 version, which just leaked in a detailed product listing by Chinese retailer Suning.
A bit under a week ago, we reported that HQ Trivia was gearing up to hit Android as the company opened pre-registration. Now, with just a few hours to spare, players on both platforms can ring in the new year with a quick and potentially profitable round of games. HQ Trivia is now available for download on Android.
HBO NOW has been the top grossing entertainment app on Google Play for a little while now, but the app just reached another significant milestone. It's ringing in the new year by the numbers, having just hit 10,000,000 installs on the Play Store. That's a lot of downloads, with some big implications for the number of subscribers the service has, though it's impossible to know for sure.
SMS Backup & Restore is a well-known app in these parts, especially among those of us that have to (or choose to) swap devices frequently. Just last year, the app was picked up by Carbonite, and with the purchase came a nice visual overhaul. But now it appears that Carbonite had decided to hand the app off of SyncTech, an Australian company.
Sometimes you don't want to read up on how someone "feels" about a product. Everything's subjective, of course, and it's good to combine multiple viewpoints, but once in a while, it's nice to just sit down and examine the raw data, that way you can come to your own conclusions. And Dylan Raga over at XDA-Developers just assembled an intense and in-depth analysis of the Pixel 2 XL's display that's worth a read. At least, if you'd like to scratch that purely quantitative itch.
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- It was bound to happen sooner or later, but it looks like the loophole has been patched in the latest update for the Pixel 2. If you've updated your device to the Verizon-exclusive build OPM2.171019.016, then you'll no longer be able to unlock your bootloader.
The biggest disadvantage to picking up the smaller Pixel 2 on Verizon's network is the locked bootloader. Big Red dictates that the phones it sells have to be locked down tight. That's a problem if you're into ROMs or if you'd like to root without an exploit. However, the folks over in the XDA forums have discovered a trivially simple way of unlocking the bootloader which is every bit as easy as the typical method for non-carrier locked Pixel 2 phones.
OnePlus has been prolific when it comes to updates over the last month. The most recent device to get the OTA treatment is the company's latest flagship, the OnePlus 5T. OxygenOS v4.6.7 may not bring you Oreo, but you do get the security patches for December, a handful of camera improvements, and some other miscellaneous fixes and enhancements.
Most of us that have been using Magisk for our root needs have probably been installing the latest beta builds. Through them, we've seen incremental improvements and additions to the stability and functionality of the root tool. And now Magisk developer topjohnwu has decided that all these recent additions are stable enough for everyone to enjoy, as a new update to Magisk has been released to stable.
A few days back it was revealed by a security researcher in a post on Medium that the LastPass Authenticator app for 2FA key generation wasn't entirely secure. Access to the keys was ostensibly secured by a PIN/fingerprint, but a workaround was found that allows anyone with the ability to launch an activity on the device, including other installed applications, to access those codes. LastPass has fixed this problem in an update today.
The holidays give us a lot of reasons to smile. With Google Photos, you can even make sure that every one of those happy moments is saved and backed up online. And now you can enjoy looking back at all those happy moments over the last year in a new "Smiles of 2017" movie.
Fans of game shows have yet another thing to be happy about this Christmas. Yesterday HQ Trivia announced that it was bringing its live trivia app to Android. Although a date doesn't seem to have been set just yet, you can pre-register to be notified when the app goes live in the Play Store.
One of the more vocal complaints leveled against Google's Pixel 2 phones was the display's default color calibration. Although some might prefer the over-saturated vibrance of less accurate color profiles, Google opted for a more calibrated default that was closer to sRGB as a means of providing color-accurate backward compatibility with apps that didn't immediately declare their color space.
If you've been having trouble with your Netgear Orbi mesh network, and you have a Pixel or Pixel 2, then your phone might be to blame. Or, at least, the software on it. There are many reports of spontaneous access point reboots, crashes, and intermittent connection issues for those using mesh network access points with devices running Android Oreo.
Someday in the not-too-distant future, your Android phone might try to hide the quality of your current cellular connection from you. The eagle-eyed folks over at XDA Developers noticed a recent commit to the Android Open Source Project that indicates an option has been added for carriers to disable user-facing signal strength from appearing in the SIM Status screen in Settings. However, the motivation for this change is a mystery.