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Following a string of delays and an anticipated late-October launch, Huawei's Mate X folding phone has finally gone on sale in China for a mere $2400 (16,999 Chinese Yuan). Or, at least, it was on sale. The phone has reportedly sold out in just minutes, though more rounds of sales are expected to happen in the coming days.
Assistant-powered Smart Displays aren't the perfect kitchen device for everyone — they have a few limitations with what sort of content they can stream, and you can't just plug them in to watch cable (if you have it). In many cases, a tried-and-true TV is the best solution, and Philips new 24" Android TV means you won't have to give up any smarts, either.
Earlier this year, Google rolled out a fresh coat of paint for its 2016-era Crowdsource app, which lets volunteers like you and me help assemble data sets for Google products to improve their machine learning chops. Now a new update is rolling out to further gamify the process, bringing a leaderboard for different categories of submissions, plus a whole new "Smart Camera" feature for improving real-life object recognition.
Right now, you're probably reading these very words from a phone gripped in your hand, but it doesn't always stay there. Once you're done scrolling your feeds or talking to friends, it gets put away for a few seconds/minutes/hours. When you aren't tossing it onto a desk or table, where does it end up most of the time? Do you slide it into a purse or a pocket, and which side does it end up on?
Like last year, here's another good reason not to buy a Pixel on launch day: Target is already promoting a discount for Black Friday that will get you a $300 gift card at the retailer when purchased on a payment plan for AT&T or Verizon. For folks that shop there regularly, that's almost as good as cash, netting you an effective $300 discount on the month-old phone.
The Google Opinion Rewards app is a good way to get a few bucks of Play Store credit with almost no effort, turning targeted surveys into cash you can spend on apps, books, movies, and games (though there is a cost in terms of privacy). However, those of you raking in credit might want to fire up the app and check your current balance, as there are several recent reports that Play Store credits appear to be expiring en masse and without notice.
I don’t know how many people have taken advantage of the RCS “hack” recently discovered in Google Messages, which allows almost anyone to hop onto Google’s Jibe servers for RCS/Chat messaging, but it must be a pretty insane number given the attention our walkthrough has received. For some of those folks, this last week has been a source of anxiety, too, as all of us enjoying the new “Chat” features are left wondering whether or not Google will let this carrier circumvention fly. There was even a small hiccup that stirred up some panic. But if Google really wants what is best for consumers, it should do more than just ignore this apparent workaround. I think that Google should officially roll out Jibe via the Messages app worldwide. And that includes the US — carriers be damned.
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Late last week, the Statesman reported that Samsung is shutting down its CPU design division at one of its Austin R&D facilities, laying off 290 employees. This corroborates month-old leaks that the company was downsizing its CPU design branch, responsible for Samsung's in-house Exynos series chipsets.
Monthly security patches for November 2019 are out for Google's Pixels — including the latest Pixel 4 and 4 XL. This marks the first major monthly update for the pair of phones, and they're getting a few fixes with it, too. In addition to the generally enhanced security, the Pixel 4 and 4 XL are getting some camera tweaks and improvements to Smooth Display, likely tied to previous oddities observed in the feature.
Microsoft has been testing a new Office mobile app for Android since this spring, which combines Microsoft's mobile variants of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into one. The relatively new app gives you a convenient, cloud-synchronized central point for Microsoft Office document creation and management, plus scanning, notes, and more. It's an all-in-one, on-the-go Microsoft Office solution, and now it's available in public preview.
The announcement of Google's $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit has turned plenty of heads this week. Even if it doesn't end up being Wear OS's salvation, it could be a herald for bigger changes in the wearable ecosystem. Whether you see that ecosystem as vibrant or stagnant is a matter of personal opinion, but there is a decent selection to choose from. So, do you use a smartwatch, fitness tracker, or other wearable "smart" device?
Even though it sounded like there might be some caveats, the big four US carriers recently announced that they'd finally get their act together and roll out a joint RCS system, bringing modern messaging to US customers sometime next year. Too little, too late, carriers. Earlier today, some folks figured out how to forcibly enable RCS on seemingly any recent phone here in the US via Google's Messages app. At first, it sounded too good to be true, but in our own testing, it works.
In need of some tunes for your Halloween party tonight? If so, Spotify has pushed out a "Stay Scary" playlist for the holiday, featuring around 200 minutes of music spread across fifty songs. It's not exactly a Halloween-themed playlist — think "party pop" across eras — but it does give you a sort-of-spooky Easter egg while it's playing.
Spam is one of the banes of contemporary digital life, but a new change to Google's Messages app should at least make it a bit easier to manage. Earlier this week, a Google employee revealed that Messages is getting the ability to report group spam messages, though it isn't live for us just yet.
Power accessories are important because they can be dangerous, but they really just fall into three broad camps: legitimately unsafe, odd, and fine. The best you can hope for is for an adapter to meet its specs as defined without doing anything wrong, hazardous, or suffering any incompatibility issues — in other words, the best chargers are just "fine." In that fine tradition, the $40, gallium nitrite-powered, Type-C, 60W, Anker PowerPort Atom III perfectly meets our expectations.
Google's been introducing a pile of ".new" domain shortcuts to its services in the last year, but first-party services like Calendar and Google Docs were just the tip of the iceberg. Google has opened registration for those .new domain shortcuts to third parties, and piles of services, including Spotify, Medium, Stripe, and Bitly, are already on board.
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In what is probably the biggest deal we'll spot this week, JBL's massive, Assistant-powered Link 500 smart speaker has been discounted to just $150. That's $300 off compared to the $450 MSRP, but there are two catches: Only the white model is on sale (black is still full-price at $450), and you have to buy it through JBL's storefront.
Wireless charging is one of the few benefits of having a glass-backed phone: it doesn't work through metal, but it does through glass. That limitation in materials may be concerning for folks that want to use steel plates for magnetic mounts, but in our own testing, you can actually squeak by with both so long as you put the plate in the right spot.[EMBED_TWITTER]https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1187766729910341633[/EMBED_TWITTER]AP's own Artem Russakovskii was able to get the magnetic mounting plate (a Spigen Kuel) set in a position on both the Pixel 4 XL and smaller Pixel 4 where the phone retained its ability to charge wirelessly. Best of all, it worked without any increase in temperature, as you might potentially expect (though YMMV).
Between the US carriers promising a cross-network RCS solution and the discovery of a Google-based workaround widely enabling RCS via the Messages app, we've got messaging on the mind here at Android Police. Whether you're among those who recently flipped the RCS switch in Google Messages, an RCS old-hand with a supported Samsung device on a compatible carrier, or someone sticking to SMS for now, you've got to use an app to do it. (When it comes to RCS, you might not even have a choice.) So, which app are you using for SMS/RCS messaging?
In a stunning bit of late-night news, the big four US carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon — have just announced a "joint venture" to support cross-carrier messaging based on the RCS standards, starting in 2020. Sadly for RCS enthusiasts, this carrier collaboration is happening sans Google, and sans Jibe.