Gadgetory

so I have to confess it I have egg on my face if you remember a few months ago I made this prediction the flagship craze will be over and we will revert back to flagship phones being about 4.7 inches but it turns out I was clearly quite wrong with that because all the next crop of flagship phones and mid-tier phones are plus 5 inches 5.2 inches at least some is 5.5 45.7 inches and the other a trend is that tablet sales are actually going down not up because my original theory was that as people get both phone and tablet their media consumption on their phone would go down and up on their tablet but thus far that has not happened yeah and to prove that Samsung is releasing a new crop of mid to your phones and you guessed it they're all pretty large Samsung is expected to release the highly anticipated and metallic bodied Galaxy a7 and as the naming scheme implies the galaxy seven will be the high-end option in the galaxy a series range it supposedly will feature a larger 5.5 inch 1080p display and have an octa-core exynos 5433 chipset and the same system on a chip that powers the Galaxy Note rather than the mid-range quad-core processors found on the other two smartphones in this range the galaxy a3 and a5 the cortex a57 cores will be clocked in at 1.8 giga hertz and one point three gigahertz for the cortex a53 previous rumours had suggested that the galaxy a7 would ship with the Snapdragon 615 which is an octa core cortex a53 chip now Samsung is really doubling down on their mid-tier options with the e5 and e7 according to industry insiders the galaxy 5 and d7 appear to share a lot in common with Samsung's recently released galaxy a3 and a5 as well as the rumored a7 and fall right in the mid-tier category starting with the e7 the handset features a 5.5 inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 720p it reportedly packs a mid-range 64-bit Snapdragon 410 processor 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera we'll have 16 gigabytes of internal storage and a 2950 milliamp hour battery but that's not all because Samsung has more in store for you who love mid-tier phablets without the phablet price the samsung galaxy grand 3 was just approved by china's version of the USA's FCC the galaxy grand 3 does feature improvements over last year's generation of the handset the older Snapdragon 400 processor has been swapped out for a slightly better 1.2 gigahertz quad-core Snapdragon 410 which is built from the 64-bit ARM Cortex a 53 s the handset camera has also been improved the grand 3 sports a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing snapper the phone also comes with 16 gigabytes of internal storage up from 8 gigabytes and a microSD card slot to make all you microSD card Deeks happy and it will support up to 128 gigabytes of space does anyone else get the feeling that Samsung is just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks I mean didn't we hear just a couple weeks ago from a samsung VP that they were going to scale down their options and models I don't know what's going on now when Google Hangouts originally came out it was a very exciting time because not only did allow us to make video calls to each other for free or dirt cheap but allowed us to broadcast very easily from your webcam easier than just uploading and editing to youtube it was fantastic but it's lost a little bit of a momentum over the past few months but Google is not giving up on it and has updated hangouts significantly the hangouts Android app has been going through quite a few changes recently just a few days ago we saw the material design enhancements stickers and time stamps now an update is rolled out for the google hangouts chrome app that brings notification support and a new phone tab google is making your desktop much easier now allowing you to place hang out calls and SMS messages to your google voice contacts straight from the chrome app which is different from the chrome extension now for a kid who grew up in the 80s the google hangouts thing is really big way back when the movie 2001 came out we saw people doing these video messages that was really really easy and it was you know it looked fantastic and now Google Hangouts actually lets us do just that so was really really exciting but what do you think Google Hangouts needs to do to really really spread to the average person I think Google Hangouts so far has really done by geeks most people the average person love to text on their phone they often don't even respond to google hangout pings and messages what do you guys think needs to happen for really to go mainstream thanks for watching android army my name is Jace I'd love to connect with you right here on Google+ or Twitter you don't wanna forget about my brother's an Android Jost Joe and the technology Kevin lon and Chris Gary Nash all working real hard to deliver the best android content on the web I should see you next week on Android weekly