Author: Alvin Wanjala

Samsung followed its traditional custom of launching the Galaxy S flagship phones in February/March this year, but things might not be the same come 2021. According to a recent report, Samsung will allegedly launch the S21 flagship series phones in January. This will be the earliest the company has launched the Galaxy S series from its usual Feb-March window. The leaker, Jon Prosser, who’s been right on several occasions says the company will officially announce Galaxy S20 successors on January 14th. He also claims the South Korean tech giant will launch three models in a row: Galaxy S21, S21+ and…

Samsung was late to the Android 11 beta party, but the company has been making amends recent weeks with One UI 3 beta rollouts on its flagship phones. The company has already seeded out three beta versions of its custom Android skin based on the latest version of Android. According to the company, they will start rolling out stable versions of One UI 3 this November or later. As usual, over the air updates can take weeks, and in some cases months, to reach everyone around the world. The company is anticipated to kick off its Android 11 update roadmap…

Snapchat is for the first time letting its users show off their subscriber count. The company says they’ve decided to let public figures publicize their subscriber as per their request. “We’ve listened to feedback from our creator community, and many of them expressed interest in having the option to show that their community on Snapchat is growing,” the company said. The ability to show off subscriber count will be available to all creators with a public profile but it will be disabled by default. “We understand that not every creator wants to have public metrics visible to their fans. Therefore,…

WhatsApp has been working on a new storage management feature for some time but its finally here. A recent video posted by WhatsApp on YouTube shows how the redesigned storage management tool makes it easier to delete media files. You’ll be able to see how much storage youf WhatsApp account has built over time in a simplified page. The new storage management tool also shows you how many media files that have been forwarded many times in a new “Forwarded many times” category. Files larger than 5MB are placed in their own category, and you can see the storage occupied…

Apple has held several events this year, but there’s one more coming. The American tech giant has announced a new and probably the last event this year that will see the company unveil some new products. The “One More Thing” event has been slated for 10th November. Rumour suggests the company will unveil its long-awaited Arm-based Macs that will use in-house chips. Apple first announced plans to switch from Intel’s x86-64 chips to its own chips based on the ARM64 architecture at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference(WWDC) event. The switch will be a third time for the company’s MacBook laptop…

Telegram has rolled out yet another wide range of new features on mobile and desktop apps. The latest additions to the platform’s ever-growing feature repository are multiple pinned messages now available even in one-on-one chats, improved Live Locations, playlists, and channel post statistics for admins. Plus a little bit more for Android users. Multiple Pinned Messages The newest update is extending the current pinned messages feature allowing users to pin multiple posts in any chat. Users will access different pinned messages by tapping on the top bar. You’ll notice the top bar has been given a fresh look to indicate…

Zoom’s custom background feature has been handy for many enabling them to create virtual backgrounds to cover their real home office surrounding. As such, the feature has been adopted by more productivity platforms, and the latest is Google’s Meet. Google Meet has started rolling out custom backgrounds to its users on Chrome OS, Windows and Mac. The only caveat is you must use Google’s flagship Chrome browser to use the feature. Support for mobile apps is yet to come, so for now, you’ll have to use the web version if you want to use the feature. As in Zoom, Google…

Facebook has started to publicly test dark mode on its mobile app on Android and iOS. The company first began testing the night friendly feature with a few users in June. The news comes from the partnership between the company and longtime code-savvy Jane Wong. https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1322116035986808832 It’s still not available for everyone, though. To see if you have the feature available, head over to the Menu > Settings and Privacy and check if there’s a Dark Mode button. Users who use dark mode 24/7 like me should have the feature enabled by default since it can follow system-level settings. Facebook’s…

The Google Play Store is flooded with millions of applications. You’ll find many different applications which do nearly the same thing from different developers. As such, it can be hard to select which app to go for unless you comb through online reviews. To avoid all of that heavy lifting, Google is testing a new feature in the Play Store that compares similar apps against each other. The feature compares similar apps using different criteria such as ease of use, Play Store ratings, downloads, etc. The criteria will certainly vary because different apps with different functionalities have totally different core…

Google’s Android TV platform has started rolling out the previously announced data-saving feature to help users who use their smartphone’s hotspots to stream content on Smart TVs reduce data consumption. The new data-friendly feature enables Android TV to save mobile data by adjusting the video quality when streaming. This feature is targeted at those who don’t have fixed internet at home. In return for turning on the new Data Saver mode, Google says users will be able to watch three times as much content with the same amount of data. Theoretically, buffering should not be an issue anymore when using…