It’s CES, and Google has made a number of disparate, small announcements about upcoming Android features. 9To5Google has collected them all, and it seems there’s not many things of interest here, nor are there any big changes or improvements. The only thing that stands out to me is that easy Bluetooth device pairing is coming to more scenarios.
First announced at CES 2022, Fast Pair support is rolling out to the Chromecast with Google TV “in the next month.” This seamless Bluetooth pairing with an onscreen “Connect now” prompt for headphones is coming to “more Google TV devices later this year.”
↫ Abner Li for 9To5Google
Bluetooth pairing is an unpleasant experience, so seeing fast pairing become more popular is good news.
Return of HDMI….anyone….anyone?
Totally serious, I want this feature added back to android and it should have never gone away.
Alfman,
This seems like a Google thing. Samsung phones including recent ones still support HDMI. Even Apple started supporting HDMI connection on type-C, but for some unexplained reason Pixel phones no longer seem to have that capability.
sukru,
I had the last pixel phone that had HDMI, where it worked fine. It was disabled in the next model and some internet sleuths tracked down the cause to a google patch that removed hdmi support despite official support for it at the CPU level. Google didn’t really admit it but the consensus was that HDMI got removed to create more demand for chromecast.
Unfortunately several android manufacturers were affected by google’s feature removal, but I’m glad at least some like Samsung resisted the HDMI patch and added it back in. It’s still a remarkably useful feature to have and my dad ended up switching to an iphone to connect to the TV because HDMI was disabled on his android phone. 🙁