8 PCWorld APRIL 2019NEWS 5 MWC ANDROID ANNOUNCEMENTS
Here are five announcements made during
MWC that you might have missed:- GOOGLE ASSISTANT WILL
BE AVAILABLE IN MESSAGES
Back when Allo launched (go.pcworld.com/
allo), one of its best features was having
Google Assistant built right into your
conversations. Now that Allo isn’t long for this
world (go.pcworld.com/gbal), Google has
been slowly integrating the shuttered chat
service’s features into Android Messages.
Now it’s Assistant’s turn. Google
announced during MWC that its Messages
app will soon be using on-device AI
(meaning Google won’t be reading your
conversations) to offer Assistant-powered
Smart Reply-like suggestion related to three
categories: movies, restaurants and weather.
So, if you’re talking about going to see
Captain Marvel with your friends, Assistant
might chime in via a small button with trailers
or showtimes. It’s limited to English for now,
but soon millions of people will have a new
friend that knows everything. - GOOGLE FI 5G IS
COMING BUT IT WILL BE
VERY LIMITED
It was impossible to avoid 5G while walking
the MWC show floor (or really anywhere
else in Barcelona), and lots of brands and
carriers had a lot of pronouncements to
make. Among them was Google, which
announced that its Google Fi service will
support 5G once it’s available. But there’s a
catch: It’s only for Sprint 5G-compatible
and Designed for Fi phones. The current list
of Designed for Fi phones is very short, with
just a dozen or so handsets, meaning 95
percent of Fi-compatible handsets will be
stuck on LTE for years to come. However,
future Pixel 5G users will have plenty to
crow about.- YOU CAN BUY A TINY
TERABYTE FOR YOUR
PHONE
The top-of-the-line Samsung Galaxy S10+
(see page 29) might come with a full terabyte
of storage, but what if we told you that you
might be able to double that? SanDisk and
Micron have both announced 1TB MicroSD
cards, with 160MBps and 100MBps read
speeds, respectively. They’re coming in April,
and as with all new ridiculous advancements
in storage, it’ll cost you to be one of the first
SanDisk has announced a 1TB MicroSD card.