Netflix brings its rich content library offline for Android and iOS downloads

Posted on by Adrian Diaconescu

Has Netflix become too big to fail, even as video streaming competition intensifies, and its subscription fees rise? The American multinational entertainment company doesn’t want to find that out the hard way, keeping DirecTV Now at bay with a long overdue mobile app update.

Starting today, both Android users on platform version 4.4.2 or later, and iOS device streamers running at least 8.0 can download their favorite TV shows and movies for offline viewing. As Netflix puts it, the market-leading VOD service finally features an “airplane mode”, “road trip mode”, “stuck-in-the-subway-for-20-minutes mode” to bring your “favorite stories” just one tap away at all times.

No extra costs, no strings attached, no download or playback limits and restrictions (we presume), and yes, offline viewing capabilities are “included in all plans” and available for all relatively new Android and iOS phones and tablets.

It’s also extremely simple to locate the download button on the details page of a film, TV or web series, and while parts of Netflix’s ginormous content library can’t be watched when disconnected from the internet yet, “Orange is The New Black”, “Narcos”, “The Crown”, “House of Cards”, “Stranger Things” and “Master of None” headline the list of downloadable shows right off the bat.

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GoTenna Mesh evolves off-grid network to extended ranges

Posted on by Jules Wang

Consumer-side mesh networking solutions have been popping up more often recently. Perhaps the idea of spreading stronger, singular networks has met its time and price, right?But what about a solution that takes things off the grid when the situation strikes, be it in a foreign country or in a humanitarian crisis?Well, GoTenna, the makers of a namesake product that enabled peer-to-peer ...

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Google Translate for iOS gets offline, one tap away for Android

Posted on by Jules Wang

Google Translate gets a tiny bit more global and much easier to use.In celebration of its tenth year plus one week, the dev team have updated the app for both iOS and Android, this time adding Word Lens capability to translate Chinese characters you see through your camera’s viewfinder.On the Android side,

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Apple outage takes down App Stores, iTunes, iMessage for an hour

Posted on by Jules Wang

As if the Mac App Store certificate issue wasn’t enough for Apple this week, it seems that a service outage has taken down several of Apple’s online services this evening.Those officially include the App Store, Apple TV, the iBooks Store, iTunes Match, the iTunes Store, the Mac App Store and Radio. There were also unlisted issues going on with Apple’s Online Store as Down Detector has registered a spike in problem reports for the latter.

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Google Maps Offline completely misses the point, but it’s a great feature

Posted on by Joe Levi

For those of you who didn’t already know, I just got back from an epic road-trip vacation that covered more than 2,500 miles (4,000 km), and took me through four states. What’s more, the route I selected took us through some very out-of-the-way locales and far from cellular data coverage. Being the tech nerd that I am, I loaded up my smartphone with Google Maps and went about pre-loading areas for offline use.When offline ability first came to Google Maps it was a pain to use. You’d select an arbitrary area, and ...

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