Alongside the Xperia 1 III, Sony also officially launched the Xperia 5 III and Xperia 10 III to complete the Japanese firm’s smartphone lineup for 2021. The Sony Xperia 5 III is more like the Xperia 1 III Lite, with a step down in the display size from 6.5 to 6.1 inches and resolution from 4K to FHD+ — with a 120Hz refresh rate intact. As the affordable Sony smartphone for 2021, the Xperia 10 III takes a few more bumps in the specifications department compared to the Xperia 5 III. Both the Xperia 5 III and Xperia 10 III will come with Android 11 pre-loaded, along with all of the added Sony Pro camera tweaks and extras.

With more people now consuming podcasts than ever before, it kind of makes sense that Google Podcasts would see an uptick in downloads. That does mean that a “download” of the Google Podcast app is merely letting you access a specific portion of the Search app on your smartphone. Features like auto-downloads and the ability to add custom URLs have been welcome additions and no doubt helped boost the Google Podcast download figure over the past six months. The ability to manage your subscriptions from desktop and mobile is one reason we highly recommend the Google Podcasts app even over many more “fully featured” alternatives.

A core feature of the Sony Xperia 1 III will undoubtedly be the Zeiss-powered quad camera setup at the rear. The Sony Xperia 1 III telephoto sensor can shift between 70 and 105mm focal lengths without losing focus. Other notables include the ability to use the Sony Xperia 1 III as an external camera monitor in a similar manner to the vastly overpriced Sony Xperia Pro. It was also launched alongside the more affordable Xperia 5 III and Xperia 10 III.

YouTube Music is now implementing those plans in search by distinguishing between Featured and Community playlists. YouTube Music has long categorized search results by top result, songs, albums, playlists, videos, and artist. Google is now separating the fourth item into “Featured playlists” and “Community playlists.”This change marking Featured and Community playlists is widely rolled out to YouTube Music for Android, iOS, and web today.

Alex Spinelli is the CTO and EVP of product, technology, and operations at LivePerson, and he broke down what that dance should look like, and how A.I. As Spinelli explained, LivePerson is a set of tools, technologies and platforms, that enable businesses to have conversations with customers through messaging channels, and to detect where customers may be getting stuck or frustrated. As the dance moves from a smooth-flowing automated conversation toward a more frustrated customer, a small immediate intervention from LivePerson’s A.I. Because I think we as consumers have gotten very lazy — it’s just like, ‘I want to scroll and you’re going to send me stuff.’ I think we’re going to have to be asking consumers for a little bit more work to define those things and tell us more so that we can give them things that are much more open, honest and transparent.”

With the Galaxy S21 series in our rear-view mirror and likely months to go until it’s time for new foldables, Samsung’s teaser tonight has us scratching our heads. Samsung just announced a new Galaxy Unpacked event for April 2021, teasing something “powerful.”Without revealing much, Samsung’s teaser confirms that a Galaxy Unpacked event will take place on April 28, 2021, specifically at 10 a.m. An event from Samsung is certainly exciting and could lead to some other releases, maybe even the company’s next Galaxy Watch, but that’s all speculation at this point.

After months of silence it seemed all but certain that CCMI, a project from all major US carriers to bring RCS to the masses was probably dead, but now a report seems to confirm as much. The Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative for RCS is — probably — dead. The death of CCMI doesn’t mean that US carriers are done with efforts to bring RCS to the masses, though.T-Mobile recently announced a deal with Google that would bring RCS to all of its Android customers through the Google Messages app, which has also rolled out carrier-independent RCS to every Android phone in the world as of last year.

To that end, Nvidia and MediaTek have announced that they are now working together on bringing RTX graphics to future Chromebooks. According to the announcement, the two companies are partnering to create a “reference platform” that supports “Chromium, Linux, and NVIDIA SDKs.” More specifically, MediaTek’s Arm-based systems on a chip (SoCs) will be combined with Nvidia’s RTX GPUs to bring ray-tracing graphics and more to Chromebooks. Thus far, MediaTek has been best known for being in devices like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet that excellently balance performance and affordability, while the premium and flagship level Chromebooks including Google’s Pixelbook line have generally been powered by Intel. For now, no specific OEM has been confirmed as developing such a MediaTek and Nvidia RTX powered Chromebook.

Now, Samsung is rolling out the April 2021 security update to its huge lineup of smartphones including Galaxy S21, S20, A52, and more. On April 2nd, the Galaxy S10 Lite joined the fray and the update was also spotted on the Galaxy S20 Ultra on T-Mobile and, days later, the rest of the Galaxy S20 lineup started seeing the update in Germany. On April 13th, Samsung started rolling out the April security update to one of its other budget lineups, the Galaxy F series. On March 29 the Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+ saw rollouts begin for the April patch and on April 1st, the update started rolling out Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra in select regions including on US carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

We are now ready to gather up all of today’s best Android game and app deals. Don’t forget about the 16 classic Xbox games now available on Android along with everything else in our Android hardware deal hub, then head back here for all of this afternoon’s best price drops on games and apps. Hit the jump for a complete look at today’s best Android game and app deals. Today’s Android hardware deals are headlined by this OnePlus Nord N10 5G promotion as well as ongoing deals on the OnePlus 8T Smartphone and TCL’s 10 Pro unlocked model.