Top Stories: Best of the Play Store of 2020, the Wear OS Update, More

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In this week’s top stories: The Google Play Store showcases the best apps and games of 2020, Fossil’s Wear OS watches get updated, Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 888, and more.

Every year, the Google Play Store publishes lists of the best apps and games coming to Android in that year. This week the Play Store launched its best apps and games in sections 2020, including the best Android apps in the US, but it’s important to remember that each listing in the app is specific to your country / region.

The best app of 2020 is Loóna: Bedtime Calm & Relax. Google calls this a “rare case where utility meets ingenuity and pleasure” which is “beautifully designed and executed with care”.

Meanwhile, Google named Genshin Impact as the best Android game of 2020 for “[ing] expectations and deliver[ing] fascinating, accessible and genre-defining experiences. “

Earlier this year, Google announced that Wear OS would receive an update in the fall, called “H-MR2”. This week, the Wear OS H-MR2 update arrived for the first batch of Fossil watches, including the Fossil Gen 5, bringing improvements in performance and battery life.

Rolling out the features of the MR2 update has so far been a bit complicated and everywhere. The new Weather app / tile started rolling out in mid-November, while the ability to add additional tiles was added in September. Wear OS H-MR2 also started rolling out in early September on the Suunto 7, three months before Fossil watches got it. Either way, we’re happy to finally see it happening.

Every year, Qualcomm launches a new flagship chipset to power the next generation of Android devices, and this year instead of a Snapdragon “875” that many expected, Qualcomm chose to call this chip the “Snapdragon 888.” Name aside, Qualcomm promises that this latest chip will perform 25% better than the Snapdragon 865, and that it will arrive in phones from at least 14 different companies next year.

As previously mentioned, 5G is built right into the Snapdragon 888, thanks to the X60 modem, which Qualcomm says also includes support for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E 6 GHz. On the AI front, Qualcomm also claims that the Hexagon 780 AI processor can perform over 26 trillion operations per second, a massive jump of over 15 trillion over the 865, while being three times more power efficient. .

In this week’s Pixel News, it was discovered that Google is working on an “Adaptive Sound” feature for Pixel phones, which claims to “improve the sound quality of your phone’s speaker” by “rating[ing] acoustics “and” adjust[ing] sound ”depending on your environment. Overall, it looks a bit like the technology used in Google’s high-end smart speakers like Nest Audio and Google Home Max.

These capabilities will likely come to the ‘latest’ Pixel phones with the next major update. The adaptive sound could potentially enhance the muffled nature of the Pixel 5’s sub-display speaker used as part of the stereo setup. Adding credibility to that is how Google on the Pixel 5’s Amazon listing (via @siluah) first touted how “adaptive speakers adjust the balance of your music to suit your surroundings”

Google’s Discover feed on Android lets you adjust your preferences by indicating whether or not you like seeing a particular story. This week, a similar feature was announced for Google TV recommendations, both on the Chromecast with the Google TV dongle as well as on the web and Android apps.

The “More like this” and “Less like this” options will help Google recognize your likes and dislikes and better adjust future recommendations. Once this is done, the preferences set will apply not only to the Chromecast, but also to the Google TV app and the web.