DroidWolF

   Finding the ideal app for your young child can be challenging: Although toddlers have a natural desire to learn and are naturally interested, they typically have limited attention spans and cannot focus on educational games, puzzles, or activities. Since play is one of the main ways that toddlers learn about the world around them, they also require a lot of play mixed in.  The American Academy of Pediatrics is so certain of the connection between play and child development that they advise clinicians to give children up to age 2 a "prescription for play" during well-child visits! 1  The finest toddler applications smoothly blend interactive play with subtly disguised educational opportunities because as parents, we want to watch our children learn via play. Toddlers are fickle, so the best applications should be inexpensive (in case your little one gets bored easily), and since they are still developing their fine motor skills, they should be made for small hands. These ap

Google-branded smartphones weren’t always known for their stellar camera quality. The Google Nexus smartphone series featured generally average picture-taking quality (though the Nexus 6P was a step above the rest). It wasn’t until the company started to take a more hardware-centric focus with the Google Pixel line-up that their smartphones’ camera quality would noticeably improve. Part of what makes the Pixel smartphones excel at taking photos is the Google Camera app with Google’s HDR+ technology. It’s a great way to take beautiful pictures without learning how to edit RAW images. Google wants to give users more options to capture the precious moments in their lives, so they’ve added a few new features to the Google Camera app in the Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL: Motion Photo, Face Retouching, and Portrait Mode among others. We were able to spend some time with a Google Pixel 2 and have extracted a few system APKs for you to install. Earlier, we posted the updated Pixel

Android Things: The IoT Platform for Everyone (GDD Europe '17) Android Things is Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) platform that is based on the Android operating system. In this video, Rebecca Franks covers the basics of getting started with the platform and how any developer without electronics experience can build IoT apps with Android Things. She presents a few use cases and examples, along with an overview of how you can use the existing Android libraries with your next IoT project.

OnePlus has just announced the release of OxtgenOS 4.5 OTA for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. The new update brings in a number of new additions to the stable OxygenOS for these devices, as well as various system stability and battery improvements. Lift up Display, a feature previously limited to the OxygenOS beta channel has now finally made it to the stable version with this new update. That means users can now peek at their notifications simply by lifting the device up from the surface, without actually waking up the device by double tapping the screen or pressing the power button. The new update also adds a Gaming Do Not Disturb mode to help gamers better focus on their gameplay by effectively blocking out heads-up notifications and sounds. This last addition has been in the stable ROM of the OnePlus 5 since the device arrived, so it’s nice to see it get to the hands of OnePlus 3 and 3T owners. Other notable changes include the ability to show network speed in the st

GPS on smartphones today can be hit or miss for a lot of people. There are times in which it is actually right on point, but then there are other times that it seems to pin you on a completely different street, usually taking far too long to correct itself. Android has tried to improve this by triangulating your location from a number of sensors including GPS, WiFi, Cellular, etc. However, this issue could be coming to an end soon as Broadcom has just unveiled a new GPS chip that is said to bring 30-centimeter accuracy. Most GPS chips in smartphones today claim to be within 5 meters of accuracy when it comes to determining your location. As mentioned, Android tries to improve this by using data from other components in your smartphone. For instance, you’re only using the GPS sensor in your smartphone if you have the location mode set to Device Only. A lot of people will bump this up to Battery Saving mode though and it will try to figure out your location using WiFi, Blueto

When Google Home was announced last year, the company was trying to catch up in a market that had been dominated by Amazon. Many Google and Android fans rejoiced when the device was finally released and it was actually able to surpass Amazon’s Echo in a number of features (primarily when asking questions). However, trying to figure out which commands worked on the Google Home connected speaker (and even Google Assistant) has not always been the easiest thing to do. Many Android publications were trying to publish their ‘definitive list’ of commands for the device. While that was a decent attempt at providing a service to the community, many abandoned it and weren’t keeping it updated. Sometimes this was at no fault of their own though because even Google wasn’t maintaining a list of commands that you could do with Google Home. They put up a landing page for it that offered a few commands, and eventually we had some examples included in the Google Home application itself.