One of the quiet winners in the mobile space last year was the Moto Z Play. With mid-range specs, a solid premium build, compatibility with Moto Mods, and battery life that isn’t rivaled by anyone else, all for under $500, the Z Play easily became one of the best options on the market and now, it’s getting even better.
Verizon is well-known for being pretty slow with updating its smartphones, as we’ve seen this month with the Verizon variants of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. There aren’t many exceptions to this, although the company was the first to update the Moto Z and Moto Z Force to Nougat. Now, it’s finally updating the Moto Z Play to the same OS.
Google released the March Android distribution numbers today which showed a sharp increase in the percentage of phones currently running Nougat. While this number is helped by the arrival of new phones announced at CES and MWC, we are still waiting for many older flagships to get updated. Has your smartphone been updated to Nougat?
With many phones announced at MWC launching with Nougat and older devices continuing to receive updates, Android 7.0 continues it growth. According to March’s Android distribution numbers, the latest version of Google’s OS doubled in usage over the last month.
Samsung first pushed Android Nougat to the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge in mid-January of this year, but it’s taken time for each carrier to eventually push it out to their variants of the phone. Out of the four big carriers, Verizon has been the only outstanding provider to not update its S7 family. Today, though, that’s changing.
With first impressions on the table, we’re already pretty impressed with what LG has done with LG G6. The bezel-light flagship brings a lot of impressive aspects to LG’s primary lineup, and clearly, interest in the device is pretty strong. The company has just announced that there have already been 40,000 pre-orders for the phone.
One of the biggest downsides to buying a budget Android smartphone is their software updates. On most cheap devices, they’re never guaranteed. Motorola’s Moto line used to be the place you could go to solve that problem, but that’s changed over the last couple years. Now, though, last year’s Moto G4 and Moto G4 Plus are finally being updated to Android Nougat in the US…
Announced at MWC over the weekend, Google Assistant is officially rolling out to more Android phones starting today. Beyond needing Android Marshmallow or Nougat, Google has also specified some other device requirements.
The Honor 6X was one of a few phones announced back at CES, but first impressions weren’t all that great. The main sore spot with the device was the software. With stronger options available from the company, it was tough to recommend the 6X with the software it originally shipped with. However, that’s soon changing, as Honor is preparing a major update for the phone.
Verizon’s reputation for pushing out major system updates to its DROID lineup of devices is spotty at best. Some updates come through relatively quickly, others take months to arrive on customer’s devices. That’s the case with 2015’s DROID Turbo 2, which several months after its release on Nexus devices, is finally being updated to Android Nougat.
Android Nougat has been creeping its way into a few carrier handsets in the last week, most recently just this morning with the Sprint HTC 10. Now, that trend continues with word (via Android Police) that the AT&T LG G5 is also getting updated to the latest version of Google’s mobile OS…
According to various reports on Twitter and elsewhere, T-Mobile this evening has stared rolling out Android 7.0 Nougat to its Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge models. The update comes complete with the February 1st security patches in place. It appears that T-Mobile and Samsung are starting the rollout with users who had been beta testing the software and will expand it from there.
The Honor 8 was one of our favorite affordable smartphones of 2016, or at least it would’ve been if it hadn’t launched with Huawei’s infamous EMUI software layer. Despite the polished hardware, the same couldn’t be said about the software. Now, Honor is looking to change that with an update to EMUI 5.0.
Update: Honor has adjusted the rollout date to February 11th.
For the most part, Nvidia has been pretty good about keeping its Android devices up to date. Just a couple of weeks after debuting the fantastic new Nvidia Shield TV, it updated the former model with that new software. Today, that trend continues with a major update to its collection of tablets, with Android Nougat rolling out over the coming days.
Google has today released its monthly set of statistics regarding Android version distribution. Like in previous months, we haven’t seen any major drops or gains here, but we are seeing good progress across the board, with new versions like Nougat and Marshmallow seeing gains, and older versions taking slight drops.
ZTE’s Axon 7 was one of the most popular “affordable flagships” of 2016, and for good reason. Packing top of the line specs, premium hardware, and useful features into a price tag under $400 was nothing short of impressive. However, ZTE has been just a little slow in updating the device. Now, the company has finally released Android Nougat for the Axon 7.
Over the past few days, many Galaxy S7 users have had the official, stable build of Android Nougat become available for download as an OTA, but today Samsung has finally officially confirmed the update.
Update 1/18: As expected, 2015’s Sony Xperia Z3+ is beginning to receive Android 7.0 Nougat with the same 32.3.A.0.372 build.
While Nougat nearly doubled in usage over the last month, the latest version of Android is still only on .7% of devices. However, the continued flood of updates from OEMs should help, with Sony being the latest to release Android 7.0 for the Xperia Z5 and Z5 Premium.
As the company prepares to release Android Nougat for its popular Axon 7 smartphone, ZTE is opening up access to an Android Nougat beta program for one of its less expensive devices, the $99 ZTE ZMax Pro.
Following several weeks of testing, Samsung has today officially kicked off the rollout of Android Nougat for all Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge users.
Android apps are a game changer for the Chrome OS platform, and hardware manufacturers are responding with devices that embrace the new capabilities. However, despite the ideal hardware, Google’s software isn’t quite perfect yet, but that’s changing…
Including the shopping and gift-heavy holiday season, January’s Android distribution numbers are now available. Although still under one percent, Nougat almost doubled in usage, while the nearly seven-year old 2.2 Froyo finally disappeared from the list.
As previously rumored, LG has unveiled 4 new smartphones at CES 2017 this week including the LG K4, K8, and K10, as well as the new LG Stylo 3. All of these devices offer slightly different mid-range experiences, and most even include Android Nougat out of the box.
Google had a big year. Many people may consider the Pixel phone and the company’s many hardware launches among the most standout moves that the Mountain View company made in 2016, and they would be right, but 2016 was even bigger than that. It marked the first full year of Google operating under the umbrella of Alphabet, it marked a clear shift of focus for Google towards artificial intelligence, it brought the tenth anniversary of the Google I/O developers’ conference, and more.
But now that it’s 2017, let’s take a quick look into what really stood out as Google’s biggest wins of the year. From the flurry of official blog posts that come every week to the big press events at Google I/O 2016 to the fall Google event that saw the introduction of Google’s first solely self-branded smartphone, there’s a lot to talk about. In short: Google has long dabbled in hardware and AI, but in 2016 it became plainly obvious that these two areas will shape the company’s future…
