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Earlier this week, photos of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy View tablet – a word I use primarily because there isn’t a better one for a product like this – leaked. Extensively. It’s an 18.4″ touchscreen with a huge stand/handle attachment, and as far as we can tell, it has basically zero productive aspirations. It’s a media […]

Update 1: 2018/05/14 2:57am PDT Despite frequent updates, Wear OS (formerly Android Wear) is definitely stagnating from a hardware perspective. Most watches use Qualcomm’s Wear 2100 processor, which is over two years old at this point. At long last, the company is working on a brand new mobile chipset for wearables, which will arrive this fall. […]

Update 1: 2018/04/30 9:26am PDT After a brief one-month beta period, OnePlus has now begun rolling out the latest stable version of OxygenOS 5.1.0 to OnePlus 5 and 5T devices. The version is based on Android 8.1 Oreo and includes April’s updated security patch. The complete changelog from OnePlus is shown below. System Updated system to […]

Galaxy Tab S3 owners, prepare your fingers to start mashing that check for updates button. Users in the UK are reporting that their tablets are getting the OTA to Android 8.0 Oreo. Along with it come all the goodies you expect from Oreo such as system-level PIP support, Autofill API, notification snooze and channels, and […]

OnePlus is good enough to provide a beta channel for its phones, so you can stay on the bleeding edge. You’ll also probably encounter more bugs, but such is life. There are new Oreo-based Open Betas live today for OnePlus’ recent phones. They include some functional updates as well as security patches. All devices appear […]

YouTube TV isn’t the only video service that seems to be running into problems today. According to widespread recent reports, many people are having trouble accessing specific Channels on their Roku set-top devices. The affected services, which includes YouTube and Netflix, are allegedly showing an FBI anti-piracy warning message.  The FBI and @RokuPlayer say that […]

With the release of Chrome 66 late last month, Google introduced new autoplay restrictions on both mobile and desktop Chrome. Sites could only start video and audio automatically if they had a high score on Chrome’s ‘Media Engagement Index,’ which takes into account how often the user clicks on the site and watches media. While this was […]

In the personal assistance arms race, the two real options for Android users are Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, and both companies have realized that victory will require ubiquity—not as the final result, but as the means. To that end, each has opened its platform up for third-party hardware, and Sony’s (un)imaginatively named LF-S50G takes […]

Android tablets are dying. There are signals that bear this out: sales estimates, web traffic, an utter absence of meaningful innovation or even competitive products in the segment. We’ve watched Android tablets struggle from day one: when Samsung’s Galaxy Tab was utterly panned for its subpar performance and pricing, to the years of Honeycomb suffering […]

A few years ago, a French computer science student named Florent Revest undertook a project to keep Android Wear smartwatches from dying of obsolescence. That project is called AsteroidOS, built entirely on GNU/Linux libraries and technologies, and in its current state, it’s fairly basic. Even so, for all fans of open source software out there, […]