9to5Google

Amid COVID-19, people unsurprisingly turned to watching a lot of video for entertainment. YouTube Gaming in particular touts its “biggest year, ever” in 2020. 

Google today announced a multi-year strategic relationship with a big game developer that spans various parts of the company. Google Cloud will become Activision Blizzard’s preferred provider for game hosting as YouTube becomes the exclusive live eSports streaming partner.

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One of YouTube’s first standalone services was YouTube Gaming to capitalize on streaming games to a live audience. With the explosive rise of an Amazon-owned Twitch, Google is now integrating gaming into the main YouTube site and mobile apps.

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Google has today announced that the biggest and baddest of the Google Home family, the Home Max, is now available in Canada. You’ll be able to purchase the device in both “chalk” and “charcoal” at both the online Google Store and at Best Buy for $499 CAD.

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As you may well know, Android Pay, Google’s mobile payments service, hasn’t launched in Canada quite yet. But that might be changing soon, Canadians will be glad to hear, as we’ve found that the latest version of Android Pay, which started rolling out today, includes early references and assets for Canada’s largest debit card network, Interac…

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SwiftKey launched its Neural Alpha keyboard in October of last year, and today — almost a year later — the company is introducing neural network-powered word predictions to its namesake main app. This means better word predictions and autocorrect, since the app now better understands the context of what you’re trying to say…

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Dropbox is getting some notable updates today for both the mobile apps and desktop that bring a number of new productivity tools and features to the service. It’s also changing its mobile camera uploads feature for basic users to require they have the desktop app installed or a paid Pro account.

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I remember back in the day when VLC was just the necessary media player for pretty much any Mac owner. Since then, the free and open source cross-platform multimedia player has expanded beyond Mac and PC to mobile devices running Android and iOS. Today, the VideoLAN organization has pushed out VLC for Android 2.0, and it’s probably the app’s biggest release since its first out-of-beta release in February of last year…

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OnePlus has had an interesting history to say the least. Yesterday the company launched its fourth smartphone, the OnePlus 3, and it’s actually really impressive. It packs powerful specs, great hardware, and an incredibly low price tag. The company still has some serious work to do, however.

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Nest today has added some new views to the Farsight feature of its flagship thermostat product. Rolling out to all thermostats soon, users will soon be able to show the current temperature and a new animated weather screen from across the room:

People love Farsight. But we heard from a lot of customers who wanted it to show the current temperature in big numbers you can see from across the room. So now, it can. And we’ve also added an animated weather screen. (You know, to satisfy meteorology fans.) Just go to Display Settings on your thermostat and choose your view.

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Apple took the stage today at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California to announce the latest new features — for developers and consumers alike — for its four main platforms: watchOS, tvOS, macOS (previously called OS X), and iOS. There is tons of new stuff in these releases set to go public later this year, but one thing that became increasingly clear as the event progressed was that the Cupertino company is playing a lot of catch up.

It’s not a new trend, really. Google has always introduced features and potential products to the public not long after they become barely workable experiments, leaving other companies like Apple to appear behind at times — whether or not they actually are “behind” in reality. It goes without saying that there are always things being worked on in the background (that’s why I put “copied” in quotes), but with many of today’s announcements, Apple brought those things to light.

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The Nvidia Shield set-top box is about to become the “first all-one Plex box” as Plex announced today the Android TV-based device will gain full media server support later this month. That’s in addition to the Android app offering it currently has and will make the Shield the first device other than a dedicated PC, Mac or NAS with full support for the popular Plex Media Server.

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It’s no secret that Google has struggled to get people to upgrade the software on its phones (but perhaps more accurately, the software on other companies’ phones). It’s one of the most blatant examples of an area that Google and its OEMs are just so far behind, especially compared to the adoption rates of iOS on Apple’s devices. And with every passing month, it just doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

It’s been about 8 months since its release, and the latest Android distribution numbers reveal that the newest version of Google’s mobile OS, Marshmallow, has just now passed 10% adoption. Google’s most popular version of Android at this point, Lollipop, lost 0.2 percentage points this month and KitKat, which was announced in 2013, still holds more than a 30% share…

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Update: In a blog post, Google details new features currently available in English and rolling out soon to other languages. Now on Tap now officially works in the camera app and for images. For instance, users can open the camera app and initiate Now on Tap to identify landmarks. It can also be used in apps like Pinterest to identify artwork.

Rolled out last night to all users, Now on Tap has a new interface and the ability to manually select text from anything in a screenshot to perform a search. Due to a number of factors, Now on Tap has yet to become a hit feature and today’s update is a meaningful change to the product.

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