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.
The Google Cultural Institute is a partnership between hundreds of museums and the Mountain View company, allowing countless works to be preserved digitally. This collection is growing today with the addition of a Street Art section (via TheNextWeb), housing more than 5,000 different images of art from a variety of locales around the world.
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It doesn’t come at any surprise, but Alamo Drafthouse — a large American movie theater chain — has decided to implement a company-wide policy banning customers from using Google Glass (via Deadline) once trailers have begun rolling. CEO Tim League just today made the policy official, but he deserves some major respect for the amount of patience he had before making the call on this new technology.
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At Sony’s E3 press event tonight, the company announced that the PS4 will be receiving the ability to upload game footage directly to YouTube later this year. While the console was previously capable of uploading directly to Facebook (and thereby indirectly to YouTube via a video downloader), the ability to upload to Google’s service directly has been a long-requested feature.
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If you can believe it, Google Glass was announced nearly two years ago at Google I/O 2012, becoming available to “Explorers” for the steep price of $1,500. The device didn’t actually ship until nearly a year later, in February 2013, but multiple beta versions of Glass have been in these select few hands since. As for a date when the device would finally go public, Sergey Brin recently said at the Code Conference that Glass would be released this year “plus or minus,” leaving the question as open-ended as ever.
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As has happened every June for the last several years, Google has dressed up searches for many LGBT-related queries with a rainbow design. We’ve tried a variety of searches, seeing the above banner when typing queries such as LGBT, LA pride, SF pride, gay pride, marriage equality, and more. June was declared LGBT Pride Month by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, as well as this year. Also worth noting is that this is Google’s second move (at least) of support for the LGBT community; the company put a doodle up earlier this year showing support for LGBT olympians.
Shop X, the Glassware brainchild of Glass Explorer Ryan Kopinksy, is a great way to create and view shopping lists on Google Glass. The app has been widely praised by the Glass community for quite some time, but it previously had to be sideloaded if you wanted to install it. No longer, as Shop X can now be grabbed on MyGlass along the likes of Noble Ackerson’s LynxFit and well-known apps like Foursquare and Facebook.
To use the app, all you have to do is say “Ok, Glass” followed by “Take a Note.” List as many items as you want across a wide variety of grocery categories, and then give the app a second to process the information. Once it’s done, you’ll receive cards on your Glass home screen that are made up of all the items you listed sorted into categories. Check out the video embedded below showing the basics of how the app works.
As listed on the software’s official MyGlass listing:
Shop X enables you to create your shopping list by voice command. The items in your shopping list are sorted by category and can be checked off whenever you are done with the category. Shop X will sync your shopping list with the cloud so you can access and manage it from any device.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i7IWmRhOIU
Update: Statement from the USAA after the break…
Google Glass continues to receive a lot of press attention, with much of it being in a negative light due to the device’s camera. And this may be the beginning of yet another saga of Glass bannings, as 9to5Google has learned that USAA, provider of home, life, and auto insurance as well as banking for families of military members, has banned Google Glass from being used by its employees.
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Following the release of the Sony Smartwatch 2, the company has now pushed its latest wearable product to the United States market: the Sony SmartBand SWR10 (via Android Central). The device may look familiar if you’re a Fitbit user, and that’s because it basically does the same thing. The device features an accelerometer for tracking your steps, LED and vibration alerts for phone notifications, controls for media, and an app that works only with Android.
This Lifelog Android app is where the true functionality of this device comes, however:
Lifelog collects data from both the SmartBand and your smartphone to tell a broader story of what happens in your life — fitness, location, weather, photos, music, personal notes (life bookmarks) and more. Lifelog displays the information in a colorful, versatile interface that helps you reflect on what you did each day and set goals for the future. Lifelog displays your activity in a colorful, multi-faceted interface that lets you view your information in various ways.
You can get the SmartBand SWR10 straight from Sony for $99.99, and it comes with the removable main unit as well as two wristbands of different sizes. Alternatively, you can purchase the device on Amazon for $10 less, at $89.99.
Yesterday we mentioned the boot logo for the LG G Watch that had leaked to the Internet, and with it came what might be the next official Android logo. This information surfaced from an LG G Watch system dump leaked on Twitter last night, and a quick dig through it reveals some more interesting tidbits of information about the device…
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Update: The XE17.3 update appears to be rolling out to Explorers now.
Google has been releasing updates to Google Glass continuously after the dry spell that occurred before XE 16, and yet another one surfaced on the internet last night. While Google hasn’t officially pushed the new software to Explorers via the device’s over-the-air update mechanism, it does pack at least one interesting feature: ‘Notification glance’ (via Android Police).
A calibration menu for the feature was seen previously in a teardown of the KitKat-bringing XE16 update, but it was at the time completely inactive, did nothing of use, and required a bit of a workaround to activate. Now, in XE17.3, “Notification glance” lets you simply glance at the screen when a notification is received to view it. Sadly, though, the feature only works with notifications, and activating the device normally still requires some neck strain (or a tap of the touch pad).
Notably, this leak most likely means that the update will be hitting Explorers’ devices soon. An OTA download is already live on Google’s servers; it’s only a matter of time before someone at the Mountain View company hits a switch.
It may not be the Samsung Galaxy Mega 2 that has been rumored widely, but a new smartphone/tablet dubbed the Galaxy W has now been made official in Korea (via Engadget). Clocking in at 7 inches, its screen size isn’t far off from other Samsung phablets — like the Galaxy Mega 6.3 — and ultimately, holding it up to your face will feel dorky as ever. But this phone in particular hopes to be the best tablet-smartphone blend yet, promising to be more comfortable than other 7-inchers in the market.
We reported on a 7-inch mystery device that passed through the FCC late last week, and it’s clear that this may very well be that device when comparing specs. Both that FCC filing as well as this press release describe the phone as having a 7-inch display (sadly at just 720p), a 1.2GHz quad-core processor, 1.5GB of RAM, and a camera duo made up of a 2-megapixel front-facing lens and an 8-megapixel primary lens.
The device is going to ship with almost-year-old Android 4.3, and will have an off-contract price tag of approximately 499,400 won — or $489.
The very same guy who brought us video footage of the Samsung Galaxy S5 Active more than a week before it was officially released has today published a bit of information about the upcoming HTC smartwatch, tentatively named the “One Wear.”
It’s been an interesting few days here in Taiwan. Sources have provided more than rumors but a actual demo of the HTC smart watch. I did ask for a name. Tentatively it’s called the One Wear, slated to launch late august early September of this year. The design is round much like the Moto 360, will be available in a polycarbonate and metal flavors.
While these Taiwan-sourced rumors should probably be taken with a grain of salt, none of this supposedly leaked information sounds particularly out of place. First of all, Google has already told us that they’re working with a wide variety of manufacturers, one of which being HTC. And with a tentative name like “One Wear,” it’s likely that the device being referenced is indeed HTC’s foray into Android Wear.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 has been around for a bit more than a month now, but the much-expected ‘Active’ version of the phone was only just this morning released to the public—and, for better or for worse, it’s available exclusively at AT&T’s website and brick-and-mortar stores.
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Google announced on its Google Apps Updates blog today that cloud-based email migration for Google Apps is being rolled out over the course of the next 2 weeks, making it much easier for businesses to move from their own mail servers to Google’s Gmail servers.
Starting this week, we are making it easier for businesses to migrate email into Google Apps using our cloud-based data migration service. The data migration service can be configured via the Admin console to connect to your mail server and migrate email over to Google’s Gmail servers.
Notably, this means that those wishing to migrate no longer need to download migration tools and install them on local servers, moving the process entirely to the cloud. Google says that currently this service is only for mail, but that support for calendar and contact migration is in the works.
A support page for the service is also now online if you’re looking for more information.
According to a new report from Forbes, Microsoft’s rumored smartwatch is going to be compatible with not only the Redmond, Washington corporation’s own Windows Phone operating system, but Android and iOS as well (via The Verge). Other details from the report include a release date for the watch potentially slanted for this Summer, as well as battery life that lasts upwards of two days.
Microsoft has been rumored to be working on a smartwatch for quite some time, but today’s report corroborates some information that was previously assumed, and adds a few details that we haven’t yet heard. The device will apparently be a sensor-rich device (as is expected from Apple’s iWatch as well), featuring a heart rate sensor that synchronizes data to the above mentioned variety of devices.
Supposedly, Microsoft is pulling some engineers from the Kinect side of the company to make sure this feature is running 24 hours a day. Microsoft was already rumored to be working on a health rate monitor called the “Joule” in 2012, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Microsoft is taking advantage of Xbox experts to help put this product together.
The report suggests that the device may land as early as this Summer, but Forbes — as might be expected — says that the timeline is “unclear.”
Image: The Independent
In its first non-luggage acquisition, Samsonite announced thursday that it is buying Speck products, maker of cases for a wide variety of mobile devices, for $85 million (via re/code).
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A new app for Google Glass has been released today, which essentially hopes to turn the head-mounted computer into a Karaoke machine. The real value that this app has — especially considering that Glass is still beta, and $1,5000 — can’t really be quantified at the moment, but there’s no doubt that the idea is intriguing.
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Yesterday, we reported on a rumor from a Korean website claiming that the up-and-coming LG G Watch will include an embedded, unremovable SIM card. While nothing is conclusive, a dig through the FCC website has unearthed some documents making up a filing for what we believe is the upcoming LG G Watch, and—unsurprisingly—there isn’t any mention of Wi-Fi or cellular radios.
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LG’s upcoming Android Wear watch has been mostly revealed, but a new report from Korean news website iNews24 claims that there’s one feature that LG is keeping a dirty little secret: a non-removable SIM card. The watch, although already officially announced and sporting its own splash page on the LG website, is said to be getting a bit more attention at the upcoming Google I/O press event — potentially alongside the Moto 360, another device debuting Google’s Android Wear operating system.
This rumor seems suspicious, as the Android Wear operating system is made to be an extension to Android smartphones, not to be used as a standalone device. LG is going to be one of the first devices released made to run Android Wear, and it would be odd for the company to go against Google’s own guidelines. That said, if this rumor turns out to be true, LG might just be preparing for a future version of Android Wear that supports more standalone devices. Even though a SIM in this waterproof device would mean it couldn’t be replaced, LG wouldn’t be the only ones at least considering a standalone cellular-capable smartwatch.
A new app for Google Glass has been prototyped, which intends to bring the conveniences of online reading — namely, quick definitions and translations — to the offline hard-copy book reading experience. The app is called Reader for Glass (not to be confused with Google Reader), and is being developed by Jacob Funch, a graduate school student working on his master’s thesis …
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Spotify took to the company blog this morning, warning its users that one — yes, just one — user had their Spotify profile hacked recently. But, as you would expect from a company like this, they’re taking matters into their own hands and approaching this with caution. The company will be asking users to reenter their passwords when opening the app for the next few days, but they also made clear that they aren’t aware of any increased risk for users:
Our evidence shows that only one Spotify user’s data has been accessed and this did not include any password, financial or payment information. We have contacted this one individual. Based on our findings, we are not aware of any increased risk to users as a result of this incident.
Also, Spotify says that it plans to release an updated version of the service’s Android app over the coming days as an extra measure of caution. Sadly, the company notes that any offline playlists you’ve downloaded in the app are going to have to be downloaded again after the update is released. iOS and Windows Phone Spotify users can rest easy, as Spotify says they don’t have any recommended action at the current time.
We told you about the rumored HTC One M8 “Ace” in previous reports, but now some leaked specifications from sketchy Chinese website ifanr say that the purportedly cheaper phone will sport the recently-popular Snapdragon 801 processor, 2 GB of RAM, a high-resolution 5-inch display, and the latest versions of Android as well as HTC’s Sense technology (via Android Central).
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Motorola announced a contest earlier this week asking the community to submit watch face concepts for a chance to win a Moto 360 smartwatch. Well, now the contest is udnerway, and the Moto 360 Design Face-Off community on Google+ is blowing up with submissions. Head past the break for some of the best we’ve seen so far …
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A surgeon in the U.K. is now the first to live stream video of a surgical operation via Google Glass (via The Telegraph). The landmark surgery, which removed cancer from a 78 year-old patient’s liver and bowel, was viewed in live time by 13,000 medical students from 115 countries, and is clearly yet another example of a situation in which this innovative device doing good for humanity …
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