Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. You can find his current work at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google 9to5Toys, Electrek, and more. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.
Google has today announced that the Google Drive app within Hangouts has been discontinued, and is being replaced by the ability to share links to Drive files directly within the Hangouts chat window.
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Amazon has today updated its Android app to support Lollipop, but with the update comes a very nice surprise. With the newest version of the app, you can use your Android Wear device to make search for products, make purchases, and save things to your Wish List.
The app will work for anyone who’s on Android 4.3 or later and also has an Android Wear device—all you have to do is say “Start Amazon.” To get the Android Wear counterpart, all you have to do is update the Amazon app. As mentioned, today’s update also packs Android 5.0 Lollipop support and the usual bug fixes.
Here’s the full changelog:
* Includes the Amazon app for Android Wear. Customers with Android 4.3 and above in the US with an Android Wear watch can use their voice to search, buy and save shopping ideas to their Wish List. Just say “Start Amazon” from your Wear watch.* Android Lollipop support.* Bug fixes and improvements.
When YouTube Music Key was announced earlier this week, we were left with many details about the service unexplained. Of these, was the question of whether or not current Google Play Music subscribers were going to have access to the service automatically. While the announcement said that subscribers of Music Key would be getting All Access subscriptions included, it wasn’t exactly clear whether or not it worked the other way around. Now we have the answer:
Starting next week, as a Google Play Music subscriber, you’ll get free and complete access to the YouTube Music Key beta, a new service from YouTube where you can watch ad-free music videos, and keep the music playing in the background or when you’re offline. The Google Play Music app will also include ad-free music videos alongside select tracks. Stay tuned for more information.
In an email sent out to Google Play Music subscribers this morning, the above snippet of text explained that those who already subscribe to Google’s music service will be getting access to the Music Key beta starting “next week.” The service promises ad-free listening to music on YouTube, offline playback, and the ability to listen to music in the background on your mobile devices.
If you’re not a Google Play Music All Access subscriber and you still want to get access to the Music Key beta, head over to the Music Key splash page and hand over your email address.
While the release of Android 5.0 Lollipop is only now beginning to roll out to Google’s own Nexus devices, it seems that Android 5.1 could already be in the works. Dutch site AndroidWorld has reported today that Google software engineers Romain Guy and Chet Haase were spotted using a Nexus 5 running Android Lollipop MR1 at the annual Devoxx conference in Belgium.
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While most of the world anxiously awaits Android Lollipop, AT&T has today started rolling out a couple of non-Lollipop updates to two of its devices: the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and the LG G3. And while the LG G3 is getting a relatively minor update, the Galaxy S 4 is actually being updated to Android 4.4.4 KitKat.
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The ASUS ZenWatch, which appeared to be for sale at Best Buy a couple of days ago at the price of $229.95, now has a page on the Google Play store—and a price of $199. Best Buy has since corrected its mistake, but this new page confirms that the price of the watch will indeed be the lower figure. The device isn’t yet available for purchase, but the Play Store says that it’s “Coming soon.”
It’s definitely one of the most highly anticipated software updates that Android has ever seen. Today, the Android 5.0 Lollipop update—that was first previewed earlier this year at Google I/O—has begun rolling out OTA to Nexus devices everywhere. “Dessert is served,” Google says. We haven’t heard reports of any devices actually having access to the update quite yet, but with this tweet from the Android team, one can expect updates to start appearing very soon.
Google has uploaded four new Android ads to its YouTube channel today, featuring more cute animated Android characters than you can probably handle. The ads span all of Google’s new Android products, including the new line of Nexus devices as well as Android Wear. The ads, named Scary Movie, Garage Band, Break Room, and Slightly Longer Road Trip, respectively, have hit YouTube on a day that we expect could be very big for Android. (Hint: Lollipop is probably going to start rolling out to some Nexus devices.)
http://youtu.be/fZOW0M4euyg
http://youtu.be/9y-mCOY4wI8
http://youtu.be/Mky5OLtvZB0
A new post has appeared on the Sprint community written by user “4Social,” with the title listing the Nexus 5 LRX210 software update as happening today, November 12th. The Android community as a whole has been expecting today to be one of the best “update wednesdays” ever (in light of the recent slew of Lollipop update leaks), but it looks like this is further confirmation that the Android 5.0 Lollipop update should be hitting at least one of the Nexus devices at some point today.
The post lists “Upgrade to the new Android L Release” as the main feature of the update, and the software version LRX210 is notably a couple of weeks old—meaning that no major changes have occurred since. The update will supposedly be rolling out to devices “in batches,” as expected. And with this being evidence of the update for the Nexus 5 landing today, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that the update will start rolling out to the Nexus 4, 7, and 10 very soon as well.
As we told you about earlier today, Phandroid seems to have gotten their hands on some unreleased Google software, and the leaks started with a new Material Design overhaul for the Android Wear companion app. This afternoon, we’ve now had a chance to peek at some of the more interesting ins and outs of the upcoming Android 5.0 Lollipop overhaul for the Android Wear OS, and with it is coming the long awaited watch face API, new brightness and accessibility features, and more.
The ASUS ZenWatch has been one of the more anticipated Android Wear device since its announcement, and today the watch has finally gone on sale at Best Buy. The device can be yours for a cool $229, which is notably $29 more–and 2 days late as it turns out–than was previously speculated.
Google Trends is a great place to go if you want to know what the web is up to on any given day; it does a great job of showing you trending search terms—and charts that put a ranking on basically everything—from almost any country in the world. Today, the functionality of this website has expanded, with Google announcing that they’ve added a new “Trending on YouTube” section which shows some of the most popular YouTube videos of the day.
Today, Google announced that a slew of new apps are coming to the Chromecast, bringing Google’s TV-connected dongle closer to the Apple TV and Roku in terms of the number of services it can stream. Part of today’s update are both Showtime Anytime ad Starz Play, two services that—like competitor HBO Go—offer a variety of premium movies and TV shows that you can’t find anywhere else.
Old vs new (via <a href="http://www.omgchrome.com/chrome-os-roboto-font-made-default/">OMGChrome</a>)
While Roboto has been around since the launch of Android 4.0, it still has not to this day been added as the font used within Google’s own Chrome OS. It looks like this is going to change—if a Chromium issue tracker report is to be believed—and the font is going to jump straight from its current Noto Sans fashion to the second iteration of Roboto that launched with Android L.
1) Can we add Robot (and all weights etc) as default font to Chrome OS
2) Can we make it controllable by a flag in about:flags so we can test it and file specific design bugs where the new font will need adjustments
@Sebastien, can you provide a link to the latest Roboto font resources?
At first it appears that the font will be controllable via a Chrome flag so that the Chromium team can make sure the bugs get worked out before the font goes prime time. Notably, this new font is going to be slightly different than the Roboto we’ve known in the past, with Google saying the new version is “slightly wider and rounder, giving it greater clarity and making it more optimistic…” to match the design aesthetic of Android L.
(via OMGChrome)
Google Voice has been granted a pretty decent update today, bringing the service to support MMS via a new carrier: Verizon Wireless. Additionally, Google has added native MMS support to the service for photo messaging and—if you choose to opt for Google Voice in Hangouts—you’ll be able to send photos as MMS like you would with any other normal attachment.
Despite the fact that Samsung called the Galaxy Note Edge a “limited edition concept device” at launch, we now have word (via SamMobile) that the phone will actually be making it to quite a few more countries. It’s still to be seen how widely the phone will be available, but it’s likely that only a few selected stores within these countries will actually carry it. The device will be priced around €899 in Europe, and for an idea as to when it will launch, it will supposedly be available in Denmark on December 12th.
Although this isn’t an actual update to the app, WhatsApp is now sporting a nifty new feature that—although small—might make a big difference in how users of the messaging app stay in touch with their friends. The Facebook-owned app, which would previously show double check marks if a sent message had been received, now goes one step further and turns those check marks blue if the message has been read.
The Nexus 9 is one of the most exciting Android devices to hit the market in a long time, and with it comes the latest version of Android: 5.0 Lollipop. And with new hardware and a new operating system, it was only a matter of time before one of the better known developers in the rooting space achieved such on the tablet. It’s already available thanks to Chainfire, and it only takes a couple extra steps to get working.
Much like the five apps that Sony released last week for its SmartBand Talk, ASUS has today launched three apps for its upcoming ZenWatch Android Wear device (via Android Police). It’s kind of unfortunate, really, because Google made an app called “Wear” to do the kinds of things that these apps were made for. But along with Motorola (and the Moto 360), it appears the company has decided that it would rather have complete control over pairing and syncing its smartwatch.
The SmartBand Talk—which we leaked and was announced alongside the SmartWatch 3 earlier this year—is about to launch worldwide in the coming weeks, but today, its app has officially launched on the Play Store. Alongside the launch of this main companion app, the company has also launched four extension apps, which bring even more features to the SmartBand Talk.
Pushbullet, the service that easily lets you send files and links around to all of your devices, just today got a huge update for Android that brings—yes, you guessed it—Material design. And with such a redesign, the way the app works has been overhauled from the ground up, bringing faster and easier navigation and sorting of pushes.
Twitter, one of the web’s largest social networks, was actually one of the first companies to jump on board with an app for Google Glass. But sadly, the app that launched initially in May of 2013, has disappeared from MyGlass and is no longer in development by Twitter. The news comes via a Reddit user who got in touch with Twitter support, and the company went on to say that it is no longer working on the app:
According to Glass support Twitter is no longer developing their Glass app. This was one of my favorite and most used apps on Glass. If you remove Twitter from your Glass it disappears from Glassware and there is no option to reinstall it.
It was up in the air whether or not the LG G2 would be getting the update to Android 5.0 Lollipop, but LG has now taken to Facebook to confirm that the device will be at some point getting the update. The company also made note of the G3, which will supposedly be getting the update faster than most. Asus, yet another manufacturer of Android phones, has also announced some of the devices that it is currently planning to grace with Lollipop, with the ZenFone and PadFoneS making the list.
