Remember that exciting feature that was once exclusive to Pixel device owners?
Launched with the Pixel 6 back in 2021, the Magic Eraser tool took the (Android) world by storm when it launched. Bootlegged versions even made their way to other devices where it wasn’t supposed to be.
Time, being the great healer that it is, may have made us forget about the tool as we have since moved on, accepting our reality and making do with whatever we have. Especially since Google stopped offering free unlimited storage on Google Photos, forcing everyone to pay if they wanted to use more than the 15GB that it offers for free across its services – Gmail, Google Drive (including apps like Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files) and Google Photos.
If you are one of those people that filled their available cloud storage after May 2021 and opted to purchase some more cloud storage from Google, then you are in luck. The company has announced a major incentive to keep you around as a customer: it will offer you the aforementioned Magic Eraser tool, as well as some other features, for free.
“Starting today, Google One members — on both Android and iOS — and all Pixel users will be able to enjoy Magic Eraser, a new HDR video effect and exclusive collage styles,” Google One and Google Photos product directors say in a post on the Google blog.
Google One is the name for Google’s paid cloud storage offering. For as little as Kshs 200, one can pay to have more than the 15GB free cloud storage that Google offers, getting as much as 100 gigabytes of cloud storage every month. That is Google One.
As captured in the statement above, the same is being made available to all Pixel device users, not just those of the recent models.
There are some catches, of course. The other benefit that Google is throwing the way of Google One subscribers, being able to order free prints of their photographs, is limited to a handful of countries and Kenya isn’t one of them.
Additionally, the new Google Photos features are only available to mobile (Android and iOS) applications. They are not available on the web. Also, the said mobile devices have to meet some requirements. Android devices have to be running on at least Android 8.0 (Oreo) and later versions, make sure their devices have at least 3GB RAM (this, in effect, means that these features won’t be available on Android Go smartphones) and have 64-bit chipsets as features will be limited on 32-bit ones.
The feature restrictions are understandable because while, as early as Android 7 (Nougat) several HDR codecs were supported, it is in Android 8 that a lot more refinement (like the HDR GL composition – that is a rabbit hole, if you are not a dev but you can do some quick catching up here) and playback definition happened. Obviously, we don’t expect devices that are struggling to balance the demands of the software on their already limited hardware to make the cut. I mean, HDR processing will need a lot more threading than a 1 or 2GB device can offer. The threading (learn a little more here if you have no idea what those are) will also need a lot more than a 32-bit system can provide.
