Mobile

There are many ways to enter emoji and other expressive media, with most messaging apps offering their own experience. Google Messages is now redesigning its emoji and GIF picker while simplifying entry. Update 7/13: A few weeks after it first appeared in May, the redesign disappeared. Many beta users (version 8.5) of Google Messages are now seeing the updated emoji/expressive media picker and…

The Phone by Google app — as it’s officially named — is a key part of the Pixel experience, and home to a handful of Assistant and other smart features. Google is now testing a settings redesign in the Phone app to make everything more manageable. Update 7/13: The Google Phone settings redesign is now more widely available for beta (version 67) users. Some section names and icons have been…

Verizon and Mastercard have announced a new partnership that hopes to advance contactless payment solutions with 5G cellular service. The collaboration is aiming to help small and medium-sized businesses and one of the most interesting possibilities is making iPhone and other smartphones contactless payment terminals without needing any external hardware. Update: While the report from CNBC noted…

In a curious turn of events, iOS 14.6 and some earlier versions are preventing the temperature from showing as 69 degrees on iPhone in its default Weather app even if that’s the actual reading. Instead, the temperature is being rounded up or down to 68 or 70. Update: Mentioned by my colleague Gui Rambo, one possible explanation could be an issue with converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit: I…