Stephen Hall

You might think it’s an unlikely source for Google leaks, but the Google Store has accidentally published many pages over the last few years revealing unannounced products and product details. Here’s a full list of every time Google has accidentally leaked a product on its own retail store…

An official render of the Google Pixel 4a has appeared on the Google Store ahead of launch. See above… and below for more details.

Way back in February, we started tracking a few Pixel codenames (as we do), and it wasn’t until today — in early July — that we had some sense of what these phones actually are. Google put their retail names in the Google app, and for those of us who have followed the Pixel series for several years, they might seem like a bit of a curveball. Google’s definitely switching things up this year — but here’s how you can start to make sense of the Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G, and Pixel 5…

Google just sent us a picture of the new Nest-branded smart speaker. See above..and much more below.

In lieu of Google I/O 2020 (Google opted not to hold a virtual event this year), the various arms of the company that would have otherwise had announcements at the event are trying to hold virtual conferences. That continued this week with the “Hey Google” Smart Home Virtual Summit. The big news was Google bringing Home/Away triggers to Assistant Routines with ‘presence detection’, but another minor tidbit surfaced: a new “Works with Hey Google” brand we hadn’t seen yet. Let’s overanalyze this, shall we?

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Every year at WWDC, Apple copies Google. But also, every year at Google I/O (or, this year, nothing really), Google copies Apple. Whatever. It’s a cliche at this point; the two major mobile platforms are so mature that it’s rarely a matter of which features one will have and the other will not, but rather which will get them first. But today, Apple showed off what might be the most stereotypically Android release of iOS yet…

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Google is planning to launch a new Nest-branded smart speaker, sources familiar with the matter tell 9to5Google. The device will look unassuming and familiar, we’re told, and will fit in nicely with the fabric-based design language of the Nest Mini, Nest Hub, and the still-not-renamed Google Home Max.

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For a long time, I’ve hoped for the ability to use a custom hotword/phrase on my Googles Home (that’s plural for multiple of them, obviously). But being stuck at home for the last couple months has even further highlighted just how exhausting it is to repeat the name of a mega tech company when trying to set a timer for my dinner.

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It’s Earth Day 2020, so there’s no better time than now to think about how your Google Pixel or other Android device will affect the planet when they reach the end of their life. It might be an original Google Pixel sitting in your desk that you want to recycle, or maybe even a Pixel 3 that you’d like to sell to upgrade to the another phone. Whatever the case, here’s how to ensure your devices get recycled well.

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Hangouts Meet just got its much-needed rebrand to Google Meet amidst the surging popularity of videoconferencing tools in general. Alongside a trademark for that term, there’s another Hangouts product whose fate has yet to be decided. Hangouts Chat, the teams-focused Slack competitor from the Mountain View company, might also be getting a rebrand that does away with the troublesome Hangouts branding.

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According to Google Trends, searches for ‘good news’ have reached all-time highs on Search. In fact, searches for good news have reached levels that are more than double that of any time since Google began publishing search data in 2004.

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Google has secured a Proggy 2020 (froggy… proggy… progress… get it?) award from PETA for its 3D animals augmented reality feature in Google Search, the non-profit announced today. PETA’s “Proggy” awards typically recognize people and brands that are helping to create a more humane world.

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It’s April 14th, and that means the latest OnePlus event has arrived. 9to5Google’s OnePlus 8 Live Blog + News Hub will be updated regularly throughout the day with the latest announcements. The event kicks off at 11AM ET/8AM PT, so read on for quick links to our roundup coverage over the last few weeks, tweets, and all the latest news as it develops…

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Last week, a sketchy rumor surfaced on the web suggesting that Google had collaborated with Samsung to build its own silicon — presumably for future Pixel devices. Now, a report from Axios corroborates some of those details, adding that the chip, codenamed ‘whitechapel’, could appear in Google’s flagship smartphones as soon as next year and, eventually, Chromebooks.

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We don’t know the real sales figures for the Mountain View, California company’s Pixel line of flagship smartphones, but we do occasionally get hints. For one, Google reported “declines in hardware” sales during its Q4 2019 earnings this past February. We went digging into 9to5Google’s own analytics to see if maybe we could glean some insight for ourselves, and found similarly pessimistic numbers…
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