Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. You can find his current work at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google 9to5Toys, Electrek, and more. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.
As we told you earlier this month, Xiaomi is holding an event in San Francisco today. While we aren’t expecting any new products to be announced, the company definitely has some interesting information to share with us as those of us stateside get an opportunity “to get to know the company and leadership a bit more.”
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Get last minute gifts in time for Valentine’s Day with free 1-day shipping from Amazon http://t.co/HoENzwqS21 pic.twitter.com/zknbYOMLdE
— 9to5Toys (@9to5toys) February 12, 2015
New products & more:
OnePlus teased its OxygenOS custom Android ROM late last month, and now the company has come out with a few more interesting details about how it’s being made and what the company’s goals are for it. Specifically, OnePlus today revealed that it’s bringing on several people from the Paranoid Android team, including co-founders of the project Aaron Gascoigne and Jesús David Gulfo Agudelo.
Oh, and the ROM is scheduled for release “next month.”
Today Dell is launching the next generation of its education-aimed Chromebook 11, and the laptop comes with many improvements—durability and affordability were the focus with this device according to the company—that make it a worthy upgrade. The device packs an 11-inch, 1366 x 768 resolution screen (which is definitely nothing special), but there are a few things about this laptop that set it apart from the rest (and from its predecessor).
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The latest numbers from Canalys suggest that Android Wear is definitely not taking off as fast as many would have hoped, and that devices running Google’s smartwatch operating system haven’t exactly sold like hotcakes. Over the entirety of 2014, somewhere in the realm of just over 720,000 Android Wear device were grabbed up by consumers, making up almost 1/6 of the total 4.6 million smart wearable bands shipped.
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New products & more:
The latest build of Chrome Canary for Mac packs a great new feature that’s likely familiar to those who use Safari on a daily basis. While current stable builds of Chrome have a jaggedy pinch-to-zoom functionality that only zooms in 10% increments, the latest build of Chrome Canary provides a smooth buttery zoom experience like Apple’s browser.
As of right now, it looks like the feature works a little bit less fluidly than Apple’s offering, but that’s to expected in the most experimental public release version of Chrome. Zooming works the same way that it does in Safari and current versions of Chrome, so all it takes is pinching two fingers on the Trackpad.
If you’re sticking with Safari on your Mac for this reason or others (battery life, anyone?), it looks like this feature—once it makes its way to the stable release—will give you one more reason to switch over to Google’s browser. If you want to give it a try, head over and download the latest build of Chrome Canary.
As Apple took the mobile payments market by storm last year with the introduction and hard push of Apple Pay into retailers, Google has started looking beyond its Google Wallet offering to provide new ways for people to pay for things with their Android phones.
Google has today announced the dates for this year’s Google I/O developers’ conference, with the annual event being set for May 28th and 29th, 2015. According to the event’s website (which is notably completely plastered with Material Design), registration begins March 17th, 2015 at 9 AM PDT.
Update: It appears that Android Lollipop is also hitting the US Cellular Moto X (2014) today as well.
According to various reports from Android users around the internet today, the Android 5.0 Lollipop update is finally making its way to some of the most important 2014 flagships on some carriers. Specifically, today marks the day the update seems to be landing on the AT&T LG G3 and T-Mobile has confirmed that the update is also today hitting its HTC One (M8).
The update has been very slowly rolling out over the course of the last few months, starting off in December with Google’s own Nexus devices. Most recently, the update started rolling out to the Sprint Galaxy S5, that same device on Verizon, and Google’s own cellular models of the Nexus 7.
It looks like the update is going to clock in somewhere in the realm of 400 to 600 MB in download size, depending on which device and carrier you’re using. Be sure to let us know if you have an AT&T LG G3 or a T-Mobile HTC One (M8) and you’re seeing the update.
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Belkin Fusive slim portable Bluetooth speaker $54 shipped (Reg. $90)
Sony has quietly introduced to the world this morning a new low-end smartphone dubbed the Xperia E4. Touting a “high-quality yet affordable design,” the phone sports a 5-inch IPS display, a humble 1 GB of RAM, a 1.3 GHz Quad-core processor, a 5-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, and—what might make this cheaper phone attractive to some—two day battery life.
Sadly, this phone isn’t going to sport LTE connectivity. What it will have, though, is a dual-SIM version. According to the specs pages on Sony’s website, the phone will weigh 144 grams, packs a display with a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels, and the phone will be the first from the company to launch with Android 5.0. As for that two day battery life I mentioned—it’s going to be brought by a 2300 mAh battery.
While the company has launched an entire splash page for the new device(s), Sony has yet to mention any timeframe for release or pricing details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phmu_Vra_bw
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is expected to be unveiled next month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain, and the Korean company has already sent out press invitations for their own event happening there, teasing “what’s next”. What’s next is almost surely going to be the Samsung Galaxy S6 (and the company’s variations of it), and now we have evidence that the phone recently went through AnTuTu—and the benchmark that resulted shows previously rumored specs and some surprisingly good test results across the board.
Google-owned Boston Dynamics seems to have a fascination with building robotic animals, and today they’ve posted a video showing off their latest creation. It’s called “Spot” and it’s a smaller version of the four-legged robot “WildCat” that the group showed off last year.
While the technology is astounding, the robotic dog is definitely equally as disturbing. Its ability to walk so naturally like a real animal is amazing to say the least, but watching it do things like recover when being kicked over and climb stairs definitely puts it in “uncanny valley” territory.
Check out the video:
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If you’re still using the Google Talk app for Windows, it might be a good idea to make your way over to Hangouts. According to a message that some users are receiving when logging in, Google Talk is going to stop working in about a week (via BI India).
Google Talk app for Windows will stop working on 16 Feb. 2015. It is replaced by the new Hangouts Chrome app. Install the Hangouts app from http://goo.gl/yglfk6
Chances are that you stopped using the service, called Gtalk by its loyal users, years ago. But it looks like even those who still do—and, trust me, there’s a loyal fanbase that does exist—will be forced to move over to Hangouts effective February 16th.
This message is very similar to others that we’ve been seeing over the last year. Here’s one from November of 2014 (via Mark’s PC Solution):
We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation.
OnePlus told us in December that the One would be getting MaxxAudio—which will supposedly improve sound performance—in a future update, and that update to the phone’s software has finally arrived. But today’s update also packs a plethora of other features that users of the One will greatly appreciate, and as the company told us would be happening, the update includes the addition of SwiftKey as a default keyboard as well.
OnePlus has been dragging out the release of the OnePlus One for months now, and it appears today that the company is dragging it out even more—making yet another small incremental step toward it actually being available to the public. Starting with tomorrow, the company will begin publicly selling both models of the One without an invite every Tuesday.
An app called Odysee has been acquired by Google, and the “Platform Team” behind it will be joining the Google+ team. The app, while definitely not all too well known, let users automatically back up their photos and videos from their smartphones to the cloud as well as a home computer.
The team will continue to work on “building amazing products” at Google, but it’s not exactly clear yet what the team is going to be doing—or what parts of Odysee may or may not be making it into Google+. Auto-upload of photos to Google+ has been pushed in the company’s official app for quite some time now, so maybe the team is coming on board to flesh out and expand that functionality of the service…
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Google has used its Hangouts technology in many ways over the last couple of years, and one big way was the introduction of a new service called “Helpouts” that lets people sell their expertise to others over video conferencing. Now, it looks like Google is bringing Hangouts to a new area: customer service on the Google Play store.
If you’ve been waiting for CyanogenMod 12 to hit the Nexus 9, you’re in luck. A nightlies release from earlier today packs support for “flounder” (the code name for the Nexus 9), and you can download it right now. This news comes following the announcement in early January that Cyanogen had enabled nightly releases for the latest version of its ROM.
As you know, CyanogenMod 12 (unlike CyanogenMod 11) is based on Android 5.0 Lollipop, so you’ll still get Material Design and the other benefits of Google’s latest official release with this build. That said, it’s worth remembering that this is a very early version of the software, so if you go ahead and flash it, don’t expect it to run perfectly (this can be said about basically any build of CM 12 currently).
Direct download below:
(via Android Police)
It’s been a long time coming for the Nexus 6 on Verizon. Earlier this week, it was discovered that the carrier had updated one of the pages on their website with a banner saying that the device would be “coming soon,” and now we have a bit of confirmation that “soon” might mean “before the end of February.” A new image that has surfaced this morning (via Android Police) shows purported release dates for both the Nexus 6 and the Galaxy Core Prime.
HTC’s current flagship One M8 smartphone is currently available from qualitycellz via eBay Daily Deals at a new low, shipped for $299. These usually retail around $500 ($499 at Newegg) or more (around $700 for the Developer Edition on Amazon), so this deal is going to knock at least $200 off the standard price. The HTC One M8, as you may know, comes packed with a Snapdragon 800 processor, 4G LTE connectivity, 32 GB of flash storage, 2 GB of RAM, and a 5-inch Full HD display.
Update: Added official app description and Glassware directory link.
CamFind’s technology is exciting because it’s a big step toward truly accurate and reliable visual search, and while their Android app has been on the Play Store (and the App Store) for quite some time now, it’s been a long time coming for the app’s launch on Google Glass.
First shown off to the world in September of last year, CamFind—and its ability to recognize most objects in your daily life and give you more information about them hands-free—is finally making its way to the Glassware Directory today.