Google Assistant rolls out to all recent Android devices

Article written by Menlo Software

Google unveiled its new conversational assistant last year during the launch of its new Pixel phone. At the time, the assistant was launched as an exclusive to the Pixel, Home and its chat app Allo. Now Google is making the assistant available to anyone with an Android 6 or Android 7 based smartphone.

Most industry watchers did not expect the Google Assistant to be made publicly available to phones from other vendors so quickly. It was meant as a unique selling proposition for its Pixel line of smartphones. However, due in large part to the sudden increase in devices with Amazon’s Alexa, Google has been forced to change plans.

At CES 2017, Vendors announced Alexa support for smartphones, refrigerators, home appliances and even cars. The sudden spate of Alexa announcements caught everyone, including Google off-guard. These announcements meant that unless Google Assistant were made available, Alexa would be everywhere. Also, Alexa is open to third party developers. As a result, it has thousands of skills that users can apply to the device.

However, it is still not too late for Google.  It can push an update that activates the assistant on the Google application overnight. By leveraging its presence on Android, it can add more than a hundred million devices to its user base overnight. It would not be surprising to see several hundred million users by the end of the year.

This does pose a problem for its Pixel 2 smartphone, which will not have the assistant as an exclusive to boost sales.

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Top Android Tablets

There is an amazing number of new Android tablets paving their way in the market. With all these choices, consumers might be confounded when it comes to buying their new device. The list below depicts some of the best 8-inch Android tablets of this year.

Google Nexus 9
This is the first tablet that will be sold with Android 5.0 Lollipop straight out of the box. The 9 is the successor of the Nexus 7. It is known to be one of the toughest rivals to the iPad. This tablet is manufactured by HTC and its touchscreen comes in 8.9 inches. It comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The resolution is 1536 x 2048. The main factor that brings an edge to this tablet is the fact that it has been designed with particular consideration for the latest OS release.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S
The Galaxy Tab S comes in 2 versions, the 10.5 inches screen and the other one is 8.4 inches. The screen features the AMOLED technology and the tablet is quite lightweight and extremely slim. Features and performance are some of the key strengths of this tablet.

Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2
This tablet has an 8-inch LCD screen. The resolution is of 1920 x 1200 and the density is at 283 ppi. The Wi-Fi version is quite lightweight at around 419g. The tablet comes with a quad-core processor and clocks at 1.33 GHz. It comprises of a 3GB RAM and 16GB internal storage. This is a good affordable tablet.

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