WE have a new unboxing post for you, a practical text and pictures style, so don’t worry, no annoying video and audio 🙂 It is our first adventure in the land of smartwatches, the brand new Fossil Q Explorist FTW4004, an Android Wear 2.0 model in the brown color scheme!
Partially Working Task Manager for Android Nougat
Google changed Android with Nougat (7.0) making it much harder for existing “Task Manager” style apps to work on an un-rooted phone. However, hope is not lost. It turns out, some of the app manager apps work partially…
By partially I mean they work with some apps, but not all Android apps. For example, most of Google’s apps DO NOT appear in the list of running apps, but other popular apps do, and they can be killed this way.
Nexus 6 Case Review: CaseMate Naked Tough Bumper Case with Kickstand
This is our sixth Nexus 6 case review, and I think that’s the last one I have at the moment! So unless I find another one hiding or buy another one, I will then do a group review summarizing and contrasting them all.
Today’s review is the CaseMate Naked Tough Bumper Case and surprise-surprise it is still available and at a reasonable price, $6 and Prime-eligible at amazon.com. And not an Add-On item to boot 🙂
Staples Pencil Stylus Review
We take a break from the cases with a review of a more general use item. It is the Staples Pencil Stylus. I picked it up on sale at their local B&M stores. As the name truthfully suggests, this is indeed styled like an actual pencil. But it’s only a stylus. There’s no eraser, no ink, no writing tip.
Nexus 6 Case Review: the Cruzerlite Bugdroid Circuit
We now continue our Nexus 6 Case review series with the Cruzerlite Bugdroid case in the orange-pumpkin color scheme. I purchased this online with my own money. This has proven to be head to head with the Spigen Thin Fit as my favorite case so far. I say so far, because as long as the phone works, and as long as there are internet sales, I will keep on trying new cases. Because it’s cheaper to buy a new phone case than to buy a new phone 🙂
Unboxing the Dash Button
Amazon’s Dash Buttons are a curiosity, and sometimes a temptation because they have money-maker type promotions. Are you Dash buttons curious? Not sure what to expect? In this post, we show you what you’ll get when you purchase a goofy Dash button.
The Dash button arrives in Amazon’s trademark cardboard boxes (they also use them for their Kindles and AmazonBasics products). Most of their cardboards are reusable and repurposable, so open it gently.
The Dash Buttons are not as easy to install as you may think
Amazon advertises the Dash Buttons [see our Unboxing post here] as a simple way to re-order consumables, but the configuration of the physical Dash buttons is not as easy as they make it out to be. There are a number of pitfalls you may run into during Setup.
TOP TIPS TO HAVE A SMOOTH DASH BUTTON INSTALLATION
These tips here can save you from a number of potential problems when trying to activate a Dash button:
- a number of Dash buttons are not compatible with 5GHz Wifi. You have to use 2.4GHz
- turn ON Bluetooth on your phone during configuration. It can help with the connection. Once it is setup, you can turn off Bluetooth on your phone
- have the Dash and phone button near the Router to make it easier/faster
Tech Issues: Nexus 6 random rebooting (running Android 7.0 OTA)
In this edition of “Tech Issues”, it’s a problem of my very own! The last few of weeks I am getting random reboots of the Nexus 6. It is running OTA Android 7.0 (it hasn’t yet been officially “invited” to get 7.1), and was not among those who got the previously-retracted 7.1 update.
UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2017
I haven’t done an engineering debugging session on this, but it looks like the issue may be happening mostly when internet connection goes out, eg bad spots. But not always.
The other change I made was to remove the 3rd-party Project FI app. My next experiment will be to re-install the app…
ORIGINAL POST
So I’ve been trying to figure out what might be causing it. The changes I am made recently:
Nexus 6 Case Review: Evecase S-Line TPU Swirl
And we are back with another one in our series of Nexus 6 Case reviews. This time we have a swirly design, a TPU slim-line case with a bit of an ergonomic grip on the sides. As you can see, the all important “Motorola Pride” M logo is visible thanks to a cut-out.
Tech Issues: Instant Apps auto-update on GooglePLAY even if you have Auto Update turned off
In this new series of posts, we focus on various tech issues and tech problems. Our issue in the inaugural edition are auto-updates of Instant Apps through Google PLAY. Even though I have turned OFF auto update of apps on Google PLAY, it seems to be ignoring this setting for Instant Apps.
This auto-update happens very quickly. I got it doing this a couple of times, but it completed so fast I was not able to take screenshots. The first time I saw it I thought I was hallucinating, but I’ve seen it multiple times since then, in different days, and different times of the day 🙂
The silver lining of this though it appears that this waits until you are Wifi, because every time I’ve seen it so far happened when I woke up the phone while it was Wifi. I haven’t (yet?) noticed this issue while running on cellular.
This was observed on a Nexus 6, running stock OTA Android, currently at 7.0, and (impatiently) waiting for OTA 7.1 🙂
I understand that the nature of “Instant Apps” may be such that it has smaller updates, and but still, it feels like a violation of the promise not to auto-update apps.!