Android N is Android Nougat, Google reveals

After months and months of speculation and a public call for ideas or two, today Google has finally revealed the official dessert name for the next iteration of its mobile operating system.

Android N will thus be known as Android Nougat from this point on. Unfortunately it's still unclear what version number Nougat will get. Its predecessor, Marshmallow, is Android 6.0. So it's likely that Nougat will be 6.1 or 7.0, but that's a reveal for another time.

Google has also unveiled the Android Nougat statue, in front of its headquarters in Mountain View, California - something that it's been doing ever since it started assigning dessert names to its OS releases a few years back. You can see the new, Nougat-themed statue in the image above.

Google brings free Wi-Fi to 9 more railway stations across India

Following on its plan to make the Web and its own services available to more people in India, Google has expanded its public Wi-Fi program to cover nine new railway stations across the country.

The company first turned on free Wi-Fi at Mumbai’s Central station in January, in collaboration with Indian Railways and RailTel. The service is now available at the following stations: Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Ernakulam Junction, Kacheguda, Pune, Raipur, Ranchi, Vijayawada and Vishakhapatnam.

Google says the expansion will allow 1.5 million people each day to access the Web at no charge. It hopes to reach 90 more stations this year and eventually cover 300 more.

This initiative is part of Google’s mission to connect India to the Web, which CEO Sundar Pichai outlined last December. Last month, managing director for South East Asia and India Rajan Anandan said that the company was in talks with local telecom service providers to begin testing Project Loon, its program to beam internet access to users from balloons in the sky.

Free Wi-Fi at railway stations will certainly ease the hassle of traveling in India. In addition to checking trip schedules and occupying themselves with content like streaming video while they wait to board their trains, passengers can also use the service to order food using a range of apps as they pass through major stations.

High-speed public Wi-Fi rolls into nine more train stations across India on Google India Blog

Six WhatsApp features you probably don’t use

WhatsApp is one of the few messenger apps which supports Indian languages, and lets users use them for messaging.

With over 1 billion active users globally as of April 2016, WhatsApp is pretty much indispensable. Some time ago, Facebook added the end-to-end encryption to the instant messenger, making it hard for anyone to snoop or intercept a WhatsApp chat. Then there was the desktop client for PCs, which linked to a user’s smartphone. Similarly, there are lot of other features which the WhatsApp app on your phone packs in, but you probably haven’t used them yet.

Save your messages forever

When a WhatsApp user switches to a new phone, he has to install and configure the WhatsApp account from the beginning. This doesn’t mean a user has to lose all the text and chat threads from his last phone. WhatsApp allows users to take backup of all your chats, images and videos on Google Drive at the time of configuring the account or even after it. Even if you don’t have a Drive account on your device, you can save your messages on Drive by going to settings->Chats->Chat backup.

Find your favorite messages

In case you wish to save a chat or a message there is an option called Starring. To access this option hold and long press any message or group of messages and the star icon will show on the top of the chat window. Tap on it and the selected message will be starred. You can access the starred message anytime in settings->starred messages. You can see all the starred messages at one place, so you forward it to others or go back to the chat threads around which the chat took place.

Sending messages made easy

If your smartphone runs Android Marshmallow, you can take advantage of Android Direct Share feature in WhatsApp. This means that a user can share a web page with their favorite groups or contacts from the share page itself. The share window automatically shows the contacts your are most active with on the share page. This saves the user a trip to WhatsApp for sharing a link.

Chat in Indian languages

WhatsApp is one of the few messenger apps which supports Indian languages, and lets users use them for messaging. While you can use the app in 12 Indian languages right away, you can send messages in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. To change the language of the app go to settings->chats->app language. To change the language for sending messages go to phone settings->language and input-> keyboard and input methods and select Google Indic keyboard.

Find your favorites among the clutter

One of the predicaments of using WhatsApp is the many groups one is added even if one doesn’t wish to be there. This increases the length of the home page unnecessarily, making it difficult for one to figure out the chat group that a user actually wants to be on. You can create a shortcut of specific chat groups as if they were a separate app in itself. Press and hold any such chat group and a select create shortcut option from the pop-up window that shows up. This will add the shortcut on the home-screen and will show the profile picture of the group as the app icon. You can access the group right away. This feature can be used for individual contacts too.

Send messages to many users

This feature works on similar lines as sending an email to many users at once. You can send a common message to a group of people simultaneously. Just go to menu button on the main homepage of Whatsapp and select new broadcast. It will ask you the names and numbers of the receiver. Just tap on + icon and select the contact from the phone book.