News & Reviews:   Google

Google has officially announced today, that they have recently acquired FitBit for USD2.1 billion(~RM8.75 billion) with plans for the newly acquired company to produce wearables in the future. With all that said, future wearables by Google will come with Wear OS installed instead of FitBit’s very own operating system that’s currently used most of the Fitbit wearables out there in the market.

As both iOS 13 and Android 10 introduced a system-wide dark mode earlier, most of the developers have yet to update its apps to accommodate the dark mode, this includes the Gmail app on Android 10. Finally, Google has announced its latest updates, Gmail is now compatible with the Dark Mode for Android 10.

The Huawei Mate 30 series certainly got a buzz over the news, not because of its entry in the Malaysia market but the concerns of Google apps usage. The US government and Huawei are still in a rocky relationship, but someone might have found a loophole to bypass that. 

Based on a statement by xda-developers.com, Google will not approve Android-based smartphones that are running on Android Pie and below by 31 January 2020. However, this does not mean that Google will stop providing updates to Android Pie due to the fact that the roadmap states that it is expected to receive updates until the launch of Android 11 which will be around August 2020.

Earlier today, Digi has officially announced that they have more than 7000 Digi WiFi access points across Malaysia, which are currently located in various key areas. These areas include shopping malls, business centres, tourist spots as well as several educational sectors such as colleges and universities. By connecting to the aforementioned Digi WiFi, the user can have unlimited internet quota with speeds of up to 4Mbps starting from only RM1.

Snapchat and SYBO Games has announced today that you can race against your friends via Subway Surfers Air Time, which can be found on the Snapchat app. To go into more detail about the game, Subway Surfers Air Time is the first franchise extension from the immensely popular Subway Surfers game released several years back.

Family Mart has announced that their My FamilyMart mobile app is now officially available for download via the Google Play Store, as well as the iOS App Store. Not only that, but you can also sign up to get free stuff such as Sofuto Ice Cream and more as well every week.

In this latest news, Huawei fans and consumers may have to face some bad news on the upcoming Mate 30 series. According to Reuters, the Mate 30 series will not be launching with pre-installed Google apps and services. This was also confirmed by Google for both the Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro from orders by the White House in the USA. 

Instead of naming the Android Q after a yummy dessert, Google threw everything we knew about their Android operating system naming scheme out the window and settled with Android 10 instead. Not only that, it seems that subsequent Android operating systems in the future will have a numerical identifier instead an alphabetical order we’re all familiar with.

There is still some time before we can get our hands on Android Q, but for those who prefer the simple and smaller things like Android Go, you'd be pleased to know that you can actually download it now and install that version on your regular Android phone!