Why Google Now Drains Your Battery

There has been complaints recently after Google Now came to the iPhone that the battery life has been awful. While google denies the fact that Now drains the battery it actually does but not by the app itself you could say.

So how does it drain your battery? Well by always using your location. You’ll notice if you have Now enabled you have the little location marker always on. That’s because now always needs your exact location to run. Using the GPS uses battery and that’s what has been killing if.

How do you fix it though? Well that’s something if you use Google Now on a regular basis you might not be so happy about. To save your battery you basically have to disable now by turning the app “google” off in location services. This will render now useless because the app needs your location to work.

So really google lied in saying Now doesn’t drain battery but it’s because the app itself needs something that drains the battery to work. Currently I have google in my location disabled allowing me to get a long battery life. Try it if you want a longer battery instead of the app.

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Google+ Updates with Hangouts, Messenger, More [Apps]

Well after I reviewed Google+ for iPhone and the service basically in general they pushed an update to the iPhone app to reflect some changes on the site itself and some things that some people will be happy too. Here is the full change log!

  • Join hangouts from the mobile app
  • Huddle is now Messenger
  • Send photos in Messenger
  • +1 on comments
  • Reliability improvements in Messenger
  • Granular push notification settings
  • Map view in profile for places you’ve lived
  • improved +mention support
  • Share a post with individuals
  • Improved public search for people
  • Various bug and performance improvements

Now just to be clear you can only join hangouts you can not make one… At least not yet and you need an iPhone 4, an iPod touch 4, or an iPad 2 to join hangouts I’m sure because you need to use the front camera. The app seems to be stable which is more than I can say for the Facebook app.

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Have Google Music? Great they just launched a new Web App For iOS!

Today Google has released a new web app for all iOS devices for their music streaming service or locker as some people like to call it. To get to the web app on your iOS device go to music.google.com and you will see the web app.  Please know that it is streaming only you cannot browse music catalogs, or upload music into the app.

Google lets you store 25MB of music in your device cache. Content is streamed from your uploaded music collection. When you open the app you can choose what you want to play and then you are taken to something like the window above.

Google Music is currently an invite service (like everything else Google Does) and is currently free for beta testers.