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As expected, Samsung is full of announcements today, including a new, slimmer successor to 2017's Gear Fit2 Pro that looks to be a direct competitor to the Fitbit Alta HR/Charge 3. The new pair of fitness-focused wearables go by the name Galaxy Fit, with a lower-end black and white display model gaining the "e" suffix. Both of these fitness-oriented wearables do activity and sleep tracking, run similar software, have built-in heart rate monitors, "full touch capabilities," and are water resistant to 5ATM, but the similarities end there.
Earlier today, Spotify announced that it was rolling out a whole new look for the Library section of the music streaming app, subdividing content into two general categories: Music and Podcasts. This change is supposed to make the podcast experience on the platform a bit easier to manage. There's also a new "Liked Songs" playlist that we're surprised didn't exist before.
Earlier today Google pushed out a teaser for its upcoming Pixel 4, finally showing off the phone we all knew existed in an official capacity. But however much we might see of the phone now, we still have a long wait ahead of us. Google's Pixels have always been launched in October. And frankly, sticking to that schedule again this year is a terrible idea.
ASUS seems to get that plenty of the folks interested in the latest ZenFone 6 are among the same market that like OnePlus' devices, and one of the biggest advantages for Android enthusiasts when it comes to OnePlus' devices is developer support. The root and ROM crowd go for things like the OnePlus 6T in part because, well, you can root and ROM it. Now ASUS wants its ZenFone 6 to get some of that same developer attention, so it's sending phones to some of them.
[Update: out of stock] Today only: Get one of LG's world-beating 55" OLED 4K HDR TVs for under $1000
4K TVs are getting pretty cheap these days, even big ones don't cost much now, but the truly high-end OLED-based TVs maintain a stratospheric premium. For the next ten hours, though, you can pick up a decent-sized 55" 4K LG-made OLED TV over at B&H Photo for one cent under a grand. In the parlance of discount-seekers, we call that a "screaming deal."
In addition to the upcoming Face ID-like security planned for Android, Google could be taking yet another page from Apple's playbook — or from its own, depending on how you look at it. Our friends at XDA Developers spotted a "Display white balance" setting in earlier Android Q builds, and paired with some new sensors and a few other details, it sounds like the Pixel 4 may have the chops to dynamically adjust its white balance based on ambient light and color.
This might seem like wishful thinking at best, but hear me out: Google should make a photo editor. I'm not talking about the simple crop-and-filter tools built into Google Photos, but a "real" raster graphics editor with layers and more flexibility, not just to enhance the already great camera chops of the company's Pixel phones, but to help with modern productivity. The nature of work has been changing since the productivity side of G Suite — Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive — landed back in 2012, and in 2019 many modern workflows can't be completed without graphics or photo editing. Ergo, I think Google should make one for the web as part of G Suite.
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- OnePlus has beaten us to the punch, publishing a series of carefully chosen pre- and post-update camera samples. Take these with a proverbial grain of salt, and not all the results are objectively better in every way, but the improvements seem real. (Click/tap to zoom)
OnePlus has been quite prolific at pushing out fixes for its latest flagship, and another update for the 7 Pro is starting to roll out as we speak. OxygenOS 9.5.7 includes a huge pile of camera improvements and tweaks, as well as a fix for the recent "ghost" or "phantom" touch problem which could cause random and annoying taps at the top of the screen for some phones in certain circumstances.
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This seems to be the week of Bluetooth bugs. In what could be a related issue, we've received reports that notifications and notification sounds are being doubled (or even tripled) on Android devices which are paired with other Bluetooth devices. Some are also reporting that media and ringer volume are being inexplicably paired together, resulting in do not disturb, silent, and vibrate mode settings being effectively ignored when media channel volume is above silent.
Who responds to a nine-month-old tweet with news about an upcoming phone announcement? Andy Rubin, apparently. The Founder and CEO of Essential may be going through a (likely very messy) divorce, but he took the time today to respond to a near-ancient Twitter discussion telling folks to "hang tight" and that his company would "make an announcement" in regards to tweets encouraging Essential to release another phone.
If your pop's idea of Father's Day involves home improvement, this ongoing promotion for Google Nest hardware might be of interest. Right now Google has a ton of its smart home hardware on sale for the upcoming holiday, notably including a rare discount on the Google Nest Cam IQ Outdoor, which can be had for $50 off (0) for one, and $80 off (8) if you get the two-pack.
Google Maps is one of the company's most magical services, but its navigational utility sadly varies a bit from country to country. For several reasons, not all regions have the same sort of data available. Google offers three tiers of data availability and quality when it comes to things like biking directions, traffic, and speed limits, and the company has just updated its table for Map Coverage Details to reflect several recent changes in coverage.
Among the more important news of the last week was the reveal that the Google Trips had developed an expiration date, with it set to shuffle off its Android coil this August 5th. If you aren't familiar with Google Trips, the app debuted back in 2016, and it used some of the same data scraping, trip bundling tools shared with the now-defunct Inbox to organize travel details together, conveniently categorizing reservations and itineraries for offline use, all while providing handy activity recommendations to fill your empty vacation schedule. Now that the app is going the way of the dodo, we're curious to know how many of our readers that might affect.
"Virtual Desks," which is Google's name for the more generic term "virtual desktops" (or the greatest thing ever) have been spotted in Chrome OS 77 in the current Canary Channel. We previously anticipated their arrival to the platform when a Chromium Gerrit commit indicated it would be coming eventually, but now it's actually here and working as of the latest Canary builds. Our friend Kevin Tofel over at About Chromebooks spotted the feature when it hit, and put together a good video demonstrating it live on real hardware:
We were pretty wowed by the Nest Hello when we reviewed it last year, given it earned our "Most Wanted" accolade. The only major drawback we found was the high $230 asking price, but today's deal over at Massgenie eliminates that. For the next 6 hours, you can grab the Nest Hello Smart Wi-Fi Video Doorbell for just 0. Act fast, though, as the deal ends today.
You may remember the "Adaptive sleep" option that was spotted back with Android Q Beta 3. At the time, Google told us it was a placeholder for Android OEMs to use. According to some digging through the recent Android Q Beta 4 images by the folks at XDA Developers, the feature is now called "Screen attention," and it has picked up a new animation to go with it — that's an awful lot of work for Google to make on an OEM placeholder.
When the folks at XDA developers caught a look at an Android Q image early, one of the things they spotted was a pile of new options for theming the look of the operating system. At the time, we thought it might have merely been a test demonstrating easier OEM-level customization, but theming has persisted into the Android Q Beta 1.
Google's plans for better face recognition have been known for a while. After all, Apple's Face ID is so good that Google has to do something to play catch-up. According to teardowns by both 9to5Google and XDA Developers, new "face authentication" labels (strings) for settings options are hidden in Android Q Beta 4, and a search of the Settings app is showing related settings for some.
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- Mishaal Rahman has spotted a string while tearing down Android Q Beta 4 that is explicit in describing how screen pinning will eventually work when in gesture mode. Based on the discovery, a gesture-based solution to exiting screen pinning without the navigation buttons is still being worked on, it just hasn't been implemented yet.
When Google pushed out the new "fully gestural navigation" mode in Android Q Beta 3, regardless of your general opinion when it came to the new navigation system, there was one objective drawback: it broke screen pinning. Well, Google has fixed this particular issue in typical Google fashion as of Beta 4, disabling screen pinning entirely if you enable the new gesture navigation system.
Last year, Google speculated it might be possible for Android devices to boot a GSI (Generic System Image) without needing to unlock the bootloader and flash it. That functionality was shown off as working just recently at this year's Google I/O developer conference, under the name "Dynamic System Updates," or DSU. (It's not the most descriptive name, since DSU effectively lets you live boot into other Android images.) We were told the functionality would eventually make its way to Android Q, and as of Beta 4, it has.