This may be the best deal for a kids tablet this holiday season. Right now Amazon has their new Fire HD 8 Kids Edition Tablet on sale. You can grab it for just $99.99. That's a $30 savings. The tablet features a vibrant HD display, 32GB of internal storage with micro sdcard slot for expandable storage up to 256GB, and up to 12 hours of battery life per charge. This deal also comes with a 2 year worry free guarantee. This is pretty awesome as they will replace it even if your kid breaks it. One year of FreeTime unlimited with access to 15,000 apps, games, videos, books, and educational content from PBS Kids, Nick, Disney and more is also included. Grab this deal while it lasts from below.

via Amazon

In the beginning the Android Nav bar consisted of the home button, back button and menu button. As Android matured so did the hardware. Eventually phones could handle keeping several apps available in the background. Pretty soon Android replaced the menu button with the recent apps button. Initially there was plenty of backlash, but over time the menu button was virtually forgotten as app developers just baked a menu button into their apps.

The PIxel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are bringing the menu button back. If you press on the furthest right area of the nav bar you will bring up the menu. This won't work with all apps. This will work in the settings app and some other apps like the Chrome app. This feature will help you with some otherwise unreachable menu buttons on the PIxel 2 XL.

via TechnoBuffalo

As the Pixel 2 XL finally started hitting doorsteps last week we were inundated with complaints and reports of terrible Pixel 2 XL displays. LG has been putting LCD displays in their flagship phones for years. They decided to go with their POLED display in the 2 XL. Customers instantly found issue with viewing angles. Tilting the display only slightly resulted in a blue hue. The display also features a bit of the same banding and blotchiness we saw with the V30 display but to a lesser extent. Others had complaints concerning Google's decision to go with an sRGB color scheme. While the colors are more natural and muted it's not what consumers used to overly saturated OLED displays were expecting.

Now that we have had a week to play around with the new device some folks are complaining of screen burn in after just 7 days of use. Apparently most users are seeing the navigation bar burn in first. You will notice this most when you are watching video or the phone is displaying anything in full screen. Sometimes this type of ghosting will go away after several hours, but with the nav bar being persistent there isn't really time for the ghosting to go away. This could just be another one of those annoying things that makes your experience with your new $850 device less than perfect.

via...

One of the best places to find great music and all sorts of cool podcasts is Youtube. Listening to your favorite music playlists on the Youtube app means you will have to kill some serious battery life as your screen will need to be turned on. Of course you can pay for the Youtube Red subscription which will allow you to turn off the screen and continue to listen to music. There is a free way to achieve this on any Android device.

To get youtube videos playing in the background or while the screen is off open youtube.com in the chrome browser. Go to settings and check the option to load the desktop version of the site. Search for the video you would like to watch and play it. You will receive an option to enable notifications from the chrome browser. Do enable the notifications. Now return home. In your notification panel you will see an option to play the audio from the video you were just watching. The audio will continue to play even if your display is turned off. This is a great way to jam out on the morning commute. Hopefully Google won't decide to shut this down/

For those collectors of Android Mini Figures, have some coin ready for the newest little guy dubbed the Android Webcrawler. This mini figure is the ultimate web-crawling spider bot! Indexing sites, logging server changes and biting unsuspecting sysadmins all night long. This occasionally toxic species is most readily identified by the distinctive hourglass mark on it's abdomen.

Coming 10/23 @ 11AM EDT

Source: deadzebra

HBO Now subscribers can plug into Google Assistant in just a few steps. HBO Now is the standalone paid streaming subscription for HBO. If you are a subscriber, head into the Assistant settings (or Google Home app) to add your account.

Continue Reading @ AndroidPolice

Button Mapper has been updated with a work-around that will let you change it, though it’s not as simple as just installing an app and tapping on a couple of things. Instead, you have some work to do, including a bit in adb.

Check out the video below or continue reading @ Droid-Life

Today, iFixit published its teardown guide and repairability score for the phone and gave us a look inside the device. The phone gets high marks for its modularity. Now we can see exactly how modular the components are and which parts will be the hardest to replace. Points were deducted from the repairability score due to how tightly walled-in the battery is.

Continue Reading @ androidauthority

I think this comes as a shock to no one. Apple shares have dipped 1.5% after a report showed that Apple has cut down on their November and December production orders of the IPhone 8 and 8 Plus. The phones were launched last month. The design is the most uninspired aspect of the phone only differing from the 2014 counterpart with a glass back. The newly designed iPhone X will be released in just two weeks and it seems that normal iPhone users are either waiting for that device or have ditched Apple in favor of the many Android flagships that have been released in the past few months.

The production cuts are pretty major. The report suggest that Apple is cutting production by an unprecedented 50%. I guess we will find out if Apple can recover when the iPhone X releases on November 3rd.

via BGR

Another major flagship has released and Zack has put it through is torture test... I mean durability test. He starts things off unboxing the phone proving that it is brand new and has not been doctored in any way. He follows up with a scratch test. The Gorilla Glass 5 front scratches at a level 6 which is to be expected. The fingerprint scanner is scratchable. Once scratched the fingerprint scanner won't work. The rear camera is covered in glass that won't easily scratch. The fire test rendered pixels on the front of the device useless. They never recovered. During the bend test the phone does flex slightly, but survives. Overall the phone seems quite durable!