Articles by Jerry Hildenbrand

The ASUS Chromebox 3 is the best Chromebox you can buy right now. It’s available in several configurations, but all models feature a true M.2 SATA SSD for years of worry-free storage and upgradability should you need it. If you’re more interested in Chromebooks for using Chrome OS on the go, Check out the best Chromebooks where you’ll find something that fits you and your style.

Best Chromebox Overall: ASUS Chromebox 3

The Chromebox 3 is ASUS’ newest model, and it’s one of the company’s best ever. You can get the base model for less than $300, but we think the N019U model, with a faster processor and more memory hits the sweet spot of price versus features — all for just a couple hundred bucks more. All models come with a full set of ports for connection to monitors or televisions — including current-generation USB-C ports — so you can use your favorite mouse and keyboard or an external storage drive filled with movies.

The ASUS Chromebox 3 is a Chromebox for the whole fam…

Android 11 has a big focus on user privacy and we talked with the people who worked hard to bring it to us.

Android 11 is here, and while the early developer previews and beta builds have shown us most of what is available, there is a lot behind the scenes that changed. Many of those changes have to do with user privacy, which is something that affects us all.

The changes themselves don’t seem like major additions to what has become the most used operating system in the world, and that’s by design. The team working on user privacy had the tough job of giving us more control and being proactive through the OS itself without anything feeling complicated or disruptive.

To get the full story on what was changed and some of the thoughts that went into those changes, which you can read in detail in our Android 11 review, I sat down with Google Product Manager and privacy specialist, Charmaine D’Silva, for a discussion about what it all means and how it all works.

The most important thi…

“Just this once” is a great addition to Android’s permission model, and seeing it expanded in Android 11 is awesome!

One of my favorite features of Android 10 was the new one-time permission system for location. In Android 11, that model is expanded to address even more privacy concerns with the inclusion of the camera(s) and microphone(s). Any app that wants to see where we are, use the camera to see what we see, or use a microphone to hear what we hear, now gives us the option of allowing it just one time.

From the Android 11 developer site:

In Android 11, whenever your app requests a permission related to location, microphone, or camera, the user-facing permissions dialog contains an option called Only this time. If the user selects this option in the dialog, your app is granted a temporary one-time permission.

This means that when you open an app that wants to use your location, camera, or mic, you’ll get an addition to the normal permission prompt that says, “Only this t…

The new class of mobile productivity device changes how we think about working and playing.

I have to admit, the Galaxy Z Fold 2 has wowed me the same way the Surface Duo has. I’m not saying I’ll rush to buy either because the price is still too high and these early adopter foldables haven’t reached their full potential just yet. But that’s coming and when it does get here, foldable devices are going to change everything we think we know about being mobile and connected.

Foldables are no longer gimmicks.

The Fold 2 especially drives home the idea that this sort of product is not just a gimmick. Like most of us, with the first foldables from Samsung and Huawei I simply saw a phone that stretches out into a bigger phone. While that might be useful for something like watching a show or playing a game, using a giant phone is awkward and cumbersome when you want to do something as simple as sending a message to a friend.

That “problem” still exists and Fold 2 users are going to sp…

Code optimizations and tab throttling will increase Chrome’s performance by 10% and make background tabs less of a resource hog.

What you need to know

Google has used optimization techniques to make the next version of Chrome load pages faster.
Tab throttling is coming to the beta channel and it should give Chrome a lighter footprint.
Google plans to continue improving Chrome, making it use fewer resources and load pages even faster than ever.

Chrome was designed to be fast, not light on resources. Changes coming with milestone 85 of the Chrome browser will make it even faster while cutting down on the number of system resources it uses.

The first change is what’s known as Profile Guided Optimization. In a nutshell, this means that the most important bits and pieces of Chrome will run faster through streamlining the code Chrome is built from. PGO was first built for milestone 53 version for Windows using Microsoft’s Visual C++ coding language. That’s now changed, and milestone…

Can a new company fix what went wrong the last time BlackBerry was “back”?

If you’re a regular reader of Android Central or happen to catch one of my Twitter posts, you might know I’m a big BlackBerry fan. The “new” BlackBerry version two where Android was the operating system of choice even more so than the original. I get the modern convenience of Android and the physical keyboard I love all in one device.

That’s why I was excited when we first got the news that BlackBerry, OnwardMobility, and FIH Mobile (the company that manufactured the BlackBerry Passport and Classic) got together to bring BlackBerry back from the dead again. For me, the BlackBerry Key2 from TCL and BlackBerry was the best Android phone and had everything a phone I could design for myself included. That changed when someone, somewhere decided to forget to update it past Android Oreo.

Later versions of Android have been largely focused on security and privacy and critical (for me, anyway) options like the one-…

Surround yourself with the action with spatial audio.

Android has supported a type of spatial audio — known as Resonance Audio — since Android 7, and you’ll find plenty of 3D videos or Google Cardboard and even Daydream apps still clinging to life have baked it in. It makes quite the difference when you’re watching a movie or playing a game and things sound like they’re coming from where the action actually is happening.

At CES 2020, THX and ZmBIZI introduced something a bit different — an Android phone that provided spatial audio through any headphones from any source. Normally, you won’t hear things in a way that feels like you’re “surrounded” by sound if an app wasn’t using Google’s spatial audio SDK or another proprietary developer kit like Dolby, and that’s still the case for most phones. But expect things to change once THX starts working with the major Android phone manufacturers.

Headphones

Getting started

10 underrated features you need in your next pair o…

Another move for better privacy means more work for developers, not the loss of third-party cameras.

You might have read that Google is killing off third-party camera apps in Android 11, and if they were true you’d have the right to be very unhappy. Don’t worry, though: it’s not.

This all stems from a posting at Commonsware, a blog dedicated to Android development. There, it’s explained that a behavior change in Android 11 takes away the standard camera picker when an app allows you to take a photo but doesn’t provide its own camera widget. In Android 11, the default behavior will be to use the built-in camera app.

Some apps include their own camera widget and are unaffected.

This doesn’t apply to every app. Something like Instagram uses its own camera widget and would be unaffected. It applies to apps that don’t work like Instagram but where the developer still wants you to be able to take a photo without leaving the app. In previous versions of Android, you would see a dial…

A controversial change that originally was slated for Android 10 becomes mandatory for all new apps in August 2020 and every app targeting Android 11.

When Android 10 was still in its early beta days, Google had plans for a big change in the way that apps could access the files and folders in your phone’s external storage (things like photos that you or other apps placed in the /data/media folder, not the SD card present in many Android models).

This change was known as Scoped Storage, and its purpose was to kill the abuse of the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions that so many apps and developers like to request.

These changes were originally slated to apply to every app on a phone running Android 10 or later, but because of developer backlash Google changed course and only required the use of Scoped Storage for apps that target Android API level 29, which is Android 10. But with Android 11 Scoped Storage is back, and Google isn’t likely to change its mind this time.

Top 10 featur…

Android’s developer site praises them and offers help to build apps for them. But does Google really want them around?

Android isn’t as open as most people think, at least when a phone maker wants to include the Google Play Store.

It’s not closed in the way iOS is, where every single piece of content has to go through Apple’s approval process, but manufacturers have a long list of details that are required by Google if they want to include Google’s own apps and services. Since those are what actually make an Android phone worth buying, phone makers do it, even if they aren’t happy about it.

Phone makers aren’t required to use Google Play.

But you’re not required to use Google’s services, including the Google Play Store, on your Android phone. There are plenty of other ways to download and install applications to your Android phone, and many of them use a competing service like Bing or Mapquest.

The official word from Google about third-party distribution makes it sound like …