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This week’s top stories: Camera 7.2 on Pixel 3, RCS rollout in US, Google Photos carousel

Kyle Bradshaw | Nov 16 2019 - 8:30 am PT

In this week’s top stories: Google Camera 7.2 arrives on older Pixel phones including Pixel 3, Google officially begins the rollout of their carrier-bypassing RCS service in the US, Google Photos gains a new image actions carousel, and more.

This week, the improved version of Google Camera app which arrived first on Pixel 4 properly rolled out to past Pixel phones like the Pixel 3 via the Play Store.

After first hitting devices on November 5th, version 7.2.016.279154257 is now widely rolling out via Google Play to all Pixel phones this evening. The full release notes are also available

With the new update installed, our Damien Wilde discovered that Google Camera 7.2 is able to automatically scan and crop documents, copy visible text, and even automatically translate that text. Some of this functionality was already possible via the Camera app’s dedicated Google Lens mode, but now it’s more accessible through the main Camera mode.

I have been able to confirm that Google Camera 7.2 on the Pixel 3 XL and Pixel 4 XL include the ability to scan documents, copy text, and translate foreign languages, all without needing to load up the standalone Google Lens app. It’s unclear if these additions are reliant on the Pixel Visual Core, or if we’ll see the functionality come to older Pixel phones, too. Triggering the translation pop-up is also a little bit tricky at times, and it only appears to work seven out of the 10 times I’ve tried so far — just something to note.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been keeping a close eye on a trick people had been using to force enable RCS through Google Messages and Google’s limited public response to the trick. In a twist no one could expect, Google outright enabled RCS via the Google Messages app throughout the United States. Once RCS support has rolled to your phone, and you’ve enabled Chat features, you’ll be ready to use things like live typing indicators and read receipts.

Today’s rollout is only stateside, but the company did note how it will “continue to work on bringing [RCS] to everyone on Messages around the world.” They also reiterated how they’re “committed to working with our partners, including carriers and device makers, to provide a consistent and interoperable experience for everyone on Android.”

Google Photos also received an update this week, bringing a redesigned UI for listing the various actions you can take with an image, like sharing, printing, and more. All of the available actions are now displayed in a carousel, below which you can find a new, cleaner layout for your photo’s EXIF data.

The EXIF data that appears below has been slightly tweaked. The day, date, and time is now on one line, with the description field underneath. The “Location” map with coordinates is next. “Details” like file name, size, resolution, and megapixel count — along with device details — is now at the very bottom.

While Walmart’s exclusive and very affordable ONN tablets don’t make for perfect competition for the Amazon Fire Tablet, they now inadvertently hold one strong selling point over the Fire Tablet. Thanks to their extremely weak security, it’s now possible to very easily install TWRP and start trying alternative Android ROMs on your budget Walmart tablet

That’s great to see, but there’s a dark side to this. The developers who created this TWRP build found during the process that the tablets are incredibly insecure out of the box. Generally speaking, installing a boot image such as TWRP requires an unlocked bootloader, but on the Walmart tablets, that isn’t required.