Gadgetory

hello again ladies and gentlemen I'm Joe Hindy the android authority app guy and it's Friday and you know what that means this week we're going to talk about a bunch of new advertisements a bunch of applications on sale and a bunch of application updates as well as virus shield again so let's go our first bit of news this week the google play store is having a spring sale that features 19 games some of the more well-known games on the list include the room to the Dark Knight Rises Riptide gp2 need for speed most wanted and 10 million but pretty much every game on the list is pretty enjoyable it is not known how long this sale will continue so if you're up for buying a few awesome games now is the time to do it it's also worth mentioning that the sales page may not be up for all regions just usually is not a problem as you can just go to the game itself in the play store and get the discounted rate there if you want the full list and links to each one will have that linked in the written companion which is in the video description below google announced earlier this week that they're going to be bringing app install ads as well as deep a plinking to both google search and youtube okay so these two pieces of news mean two wildly different things if you're a frequent visitor of sites like yahoo or Facebook you've seen app install ads before it's essentially an ad that when you click on it will install the advertised application directly to your device this is meant to help bolster app downloads and get people out of their shells to try some new things arguably the more interesting piece of news here is the deep app linking here's an example of how this would work say you did a search for house m.d. advertisements and the results would point you to things like Netflix if you were a netflix subscriber you could click on that advertisement and the netflix would open on your device and put you on the house m.d. page ostensibly this would make advertisements more useful and would probably generate not only more clicks but encourage people to use their android devices and android apps more in their everyday lives a couple of weeks ago we talked about virus shield the world's most useless application this week Google is sending out refunds people who purchase the application all received an email from google apologizing for not taking quicker action against the waste of space that was adorning their top paid apps list along with the email que me redeem code that people could use to get a five dollar google play credit so they could go purchase something else and with that the story of virus shield comes to a and we sincerely hope there won't be any more of them so Google Hangouts got an update this last week that takes SMS messages and hangouts messages and merges them into one thread along with some other features people seem to be really happy about this update and I guess I can see why it helps clean up the multiple threads problem and makes the experience more streamlined ironically the update also included a separation of phone contacts from hangouts contacts so while messages are mixed contacts are now separated it's a good update and pretty much everyone should have it fine now I was really hoping for something like SMS support and chrome extension or a standalone hangouts application on desktop but this is still good to you know baby steps her last bit of days this week Samsung is bringing advertisements to milk music and it's causing mayhem worldwide not really this is kind of a big deal because its original selling point was that it was ad free however as the fine print states the ad free part was for a limited time only and unfortunately that limited time is running out faster than we would have liked here's the thing even with the advertisements this is still a pretty decent music service for samsung devices it is still free to use and it's still powered by slacker radio which means you're still getting more music than you would with Pandora it's not going to stop people for being angry about it and that's okay but if you have it and you're wondering if you should go back to Pandora or another music service I'd wait and see how bad these ads are before tossing it away for good so who wants to check out some trending applications as usual if you want to check any of these applications out you can find the links in the briton companion which is in the video description below first to get the nod this week is ES file explorer it's already ragingly popular but if you're a root user ES file explorer is latest update can be really helpful it includes a new route only permission that allows it to read and write to your SD card thus circumventing the new android kitkat SD card limitation problem currently it is one of only a few file managers that can do this so if you're rooted and suffering from the KitKat SD card blues ES File Explorer has you covered if you're a fan of the original baldur's gate then I've got some good news for you the original game has been re-released for Android with some enhancements to make the mobile experience better it's one of the better action rpgs to come out over the last 15 years and it seems to continue that proud tradition there are in app purchases that include more missions re-recorded voice sets and artwork it's a little expensive at 999 you're looking at 60 hours of gameplay so it's probably worth it another big game released this week was amazing spider-man 2 from Gameloft they just finished up releasing Captain America a couple of weeks ago and now there's a new spider-man game the graphics are actually pretty good and the gameplay looks like it's a lot of fun you play as spider-man as you battle against classic bad guys as well as new bad guys the only potential issues that the game costs for 99 and also contains in-app purchases gameloft seems to really want to push it with their customers but the game still rates a 4.1 in the google play store at least for right now I know this isn't as exciting as other releases but there was a farmville game released by zynga this last week we did a review here on android authority and i'll link to that here at the end of the video as well as the video description below this is the essential farmville experience with the classic farmville mechanics if you like and play farmville you know what this game is about if you didn't like it then you probably won't like it now at the very least it is free to play last up this week is the now venerable clash of clans this insanely popular online multiplayer strategy game got an update recently that has introduced a new game type called clan wars the concept is very simple your clan goes up against other clans and you battle it out for a few days it has some new life to an aging premise and they manage to do it in a way that newer and veteran players can't enjoy the game is free as usual so there's no harm in checking it out once again I'm Joe Hindy the android authority app guy don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and if you want to follow android authority myself or the rest of the video team you can find all of our social media links in the video description below if you're hanging up for me we have a couple of Awesome videos for you to watch right over there including the breakdown of the oneplus one release event as well as my review of farmville 2 finally don't forget to check out the written opinion in the video description below for all of the download links as always thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day bye