Android Pay arrives in New Zealand

Following its recent launches in Hong Kong and Poland, Android Pay is now available in New Zealand, more than four months later than for neighboring Australia. So Google's mobile payments system is continuing its excruciatingly slow worldwide rollout unfazed, one country at a time.

Android Pay can be used in New Zealand everywhere contactless payments are accepted. This includes shops and restaurants such as The Warehouse, Domino’s, BP, BurgerFuel, and McDonalds. As always, you only need to wake your phone and place it near the contactless terminal in order to make a payment using Android Pay. Your actual card number isn't shared with the stores when you pay.

Thankfully, businesses that have contactless payment terminals installed across the country don't need to do anything in order to enable Android Pay functionality, it will just automagically work.

There is one caveat, however. If you want to be an Android Pay user in New Zealand, you'll need to have a BNZ Flexi Debit Visa card. It looks like that's the only supported card for now, so if you have another type (or one from another bank), you're out of luck. If you are in New Zealand, own an Android device which supports NFC, and have the aforementioned Visa card, then head on over to the Play Store to grab the Android Pay app and start shopping.

1.3 million Google accounts compromised by Gooligan Android bug

The bug formerly known as “Ghost Push” has gotten some new life from some successful hackers. And its name is somewhat ridiculous: Gooligan.

Check Point Software and Google have been tracking down this bug, which spreads through the installation of malicious apps from third-party libraries, and seeing what Gooligan does. Once the app gets downloaded, malware inside the app siphons account credentials, roots your device, sticks in code into your apps and downloads more of them and abuses authentication tokens into your Google accounts for Google Play, Photos, Drive, Docs, Gmail and others.

Your compromised account may “pen” fake, five-star reviews for apps on the Google Play Store.

Devices on Jelly Bean, KitKat and Lollipop are at risk with this bug — which is pretty much most of the Android smartphone market out there — and its blast radius of 1.3 million accounts has mostly been in Asia at 57 percent. 19 percent of the affected accounts are from the Americas, 15 percent are from Africa and 9 percent are from Europe. An estimated 13,000 accounts are getting hijacked every day.

For a complete list of fake apps infected by Gooligan, head to our source link. You can also check to see if your Google account has been compromised at this site.

For its part, Google is tracking down all the fake apps and removing them from the Play Store as well as revoking the authentication tokens of Google accounts that may have been hijacked. It is also contacting internet service providers to take down servers where these Gooligan operations are taking place.

Netflix enables downloads for offline playback

Netflix has introduced a much-requested feature on its mobile apps: the ability to download content for offline playback.

Currently being rolled out, the latest update for the iOS and Android app will let you download any of the supported movies or television shows from their catalogue. Not all of the content is available for download but from a cursory glance it seemed like most of it was there.

When a movie or TV show supports downloading, you will see the download button in the description of the movie or next to the episode title of the TV show.

In the settings, you can choose to enable the downloads only on Wi-Fi and also choose the quality. The quality settings available are 'Standard' and 'Higher', which doesn't say much about resolution and bitrate and they may as well have named them 'Meh' and 'Wow' for all the difference it makes. You can also see the amount of storage the downloads are taking on your device and delete them all at once if required. There is also a My Downloads section in the sidebar where you can find all your downloaded content.

The updated version is now available on the respective stores and across all regions where Netflix is available.

Meizu takes the wrapper off Flyme OS 6

The Chinese OEM also officially released the new 6th version of its Flyme OS.

That all sounds great, however, there is still shockingly little info on the new software. Even the basics, like the underlying Android version are still unclear. However, judging by the "Make 6 great again" slogan and a few leaked screenshots, we can only assume Marshmallow is running under the hood.

What we do know, however, is that Flyme OS 6 comes with a refreshed aesthetic, that users will be able to experience first-hand on the new Pro 6 Plus and M3X handsets. The update will be coming to some existing Meizu devices as well. The OEM just tweeted a full list of supported devices, which will coincide with the models eligible for the public release as well.

For said users, or at least the most impatient among them, the Flyme 6 experience must first go through a sign-up process for an open beta. From what we can gather, the beta will include a total of 6000 users, which will be picked from a pool of registered users. The sign-up process closes at 23:59 on December 10 and you can find the form at the source link below.

Google Play Store rolling out new search result interface

While we haven’t seen any changes yet, plenty of online reports claim the Google Play Store is rolling out a server-side update. This is said to bring forth a new card-based layout for your search results.

The new UI seems to focus more on each app that shows up in the results. Upon searching for any app, you will get large cards that you can swipe through (left and right). They include the option to install, uninstall, descriptions and more. It’s pretty much a preview of the app’s page.

There’s not much evidence of these changes, but we do have plenty of user reports and a video created by user Rony Mishchuk, who claims to have the update and has a video of the new improvements.

We are liking the new changes, but so far we have no idea what’s going on with this update and choose to treat it as a rumor. As always, don’t hold your breath on it. We will definitely keep our eyes open for any more details that may show up.

OnePlus 3 Nougat beta due this month, over-the-air update by end of 2016

Owners of the OnePlus 3 have some good news coming their way in the next few weeks. A new report confirms that OnePlus plans to release a “community” beta for the smartphone to support Android 7.0 Nougat sometime later this month, followed by an over-the-air Nougat update for all OnePlus 3 phones by the end of 2016.

The report comes from Engadget, who spoke to Brian Yoon, the head of software at OnePlus. He also confirmed that Nougat would be coming to some of its older smartphones like the OnePlus 2 at some point, but there’s no specific date for when that will happen. This news comes just a couple of months after the company decided to combine its HydrogenOS and OxygenOS development teams, in an effort to speed up the release of updates for its phones.

This news also comes just a few days before OnePlus reveals its next smartphone, which is rumored to have Nougat installed out of the box. The official reveal will be made on Tuesday, Nov. 15. In the meantime, are you excited that Nougat is going to be making its way to another smartphone in the near future?

Quick Charge 4.0 rumored to support 28W for even faster charging

We’re still yet to learn about what Qualcomm has in store for its next generation Snapdragon 830 mobile processor, but a new version of Quick Charge seems like a safe bet. According to sources who spoke with fudzilla, Quick Charge 4.0 will be Qualcomm’s most powerful fast charging solution to date, increasing support for charging power up to a huge 28 watts.

Allegedly, Quick Charge 4.0 will feature changes made to the maximum amount of current pushed to batteries, with 5V charging increasing to 5.6A, giving us 28W worth of power. The source also states that a 9V/4A option will be supported, but this would double Quick Charge’s existing power smartphone output to a huge 36W. 9V/3A seems more plausible for phones (up from 9V/1.7A), although Quick Charge does already support up to 36W with its 12V solution for laptops and high power batteries.

Currently, Quick Charge 3.0 supports 18W for phones across a range of voltages from 3.2 to 20V in 200mV increments, using the company’s Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage (INOV) technology. It seems likely that Qualcomm will want to keep this flexibility to charge larger devices like laptops as well as phones. Quick Charge 2.0 also supported up to 18W across 5, 9, and 12V stages. That being said, 3.0 saw charging speeds increase slightly due to efficiency savings and revised charging patterns. For comparison, Oppo’s VOOC passes up to 20W of power, and Huawei’s Super Charge tops out at 22.5W, so the new version of Quick Charge could surpass everything that’s currently on the market.