Another week, and another weekly wrap-up post here on Android Community. This week we saw some interesting announcements, however there was also quite a bit of leaks and rumors. Those leaks and rumors circled around a few phones including the Samsung Galaxy S5 Zoom, ZTE Nubia X6, OPPO Find 7 and OnePlus One as well as “The All New HTC One.” Of course, it is the One we suspect most are looking forward to seeing and as a reminder, HTC has that event scheduled for March 25th.
Before we get into anything else, we want to offer a quick reminder about the tablet giveaway. We have teamed up with Lenovo and will be giving away a Yoga Tablet 10. The contest will come to a close next Friday (the 21st).
With that out of the way, let us begin with some topics from Google. There was mention of a new SDK, specifically, an Android SDK for wearables. That should be coming in another week or so. There was also some details about how Google is getting ready to open a retail shop in Manhattan, about how they purchased Green Throttle Games and an update to the Play Store that lets you require a password for every purchase.
Surprisingly, we also saw a few things related to Google Wallet. There was the addition of Orders which will offer another option to automatically track your online purchases. Google also has plans to stop supporting Tap & Pay functionality for devices running something other than Kit Kat. And given the few mentions of Wallet, we were spurred to share a bit about how we are currently using the physical Wallet Card.
One topic we have been paying a bit closer attention is fitness. With that in mind, this week that included the Jawbone UP app going to v3.0 with support for the UP24 fitness band. Sticking with the topic of fitness, we shared our review of the Garmin vivofit this week, and also saw a new entry for GPS fitness tracking apps with Tribesports Training. Samsung’s rumored S Band also turned up.
There were also some additional rumors dealing with Amazon. This week we heard about a streaming music service, as well as the long rumored set-top box. An Amazon branded game controller was also spotted. It isn’t the nicest controller we’ve seen, but it does appear functional. We was also saw a bit about an ASUS game box.
Other highlights for the week showed how there are at least 1 million people excited about the Nokia X, how T-Mobile is planning to convert 2G/EDGE network coverage into 4G LTE, Crazy Taxi: City Rush being announced with Crazy Taxi going free, Plex opening up Chromecast support for all, Wirefly suddenly shutting the doors and in the ever-expanding world of Angry Birds, Rovio began teasing something called Epic.
Nate took a look at the LG G Flex after 30-days with the handset. He also shared a piece on a Twitter app called Robird, and a launcher called Inspire.
Our month with the Omate TrueSmart is coming up. It will be a full month on March 25th, and we’ve been putting together some thoughts. Without much in the way of surprise here, we’ve found some good and some bad. At risk of offering a spoiler here, we will let you know that it is still being used on a daily basis — and not just because of the upcoming post.
