Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. You can find his current work at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google9to5Toys, 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.
Update: We’ve now been told that his LinkedIn profile is referring to YouTube Accelerator, although YouTube is not within the Access group at Google.
Back in November of last year, Re/code’s Mark Bergen profiled Google’s/Alphabet’s ‘Access and Energy’ group, which includes a lot of projects and products focused on helping bring people online. Of course Google Fiber falls into this category, but so does Project Link, a RailTel partnership, Project Sunroof, Project Titan, as well as the consumer OnHub router product. Now, the recently updated LinkedIn profile of Global Operations head Joe DeMike at the Alphabet group might have accidentally revealed the name of another product: Accelerator…
Huawei today announced two new flagship smartphones for several countries outside the US, namely the P9 and P9 Plus. The two phones, while obviously pulling a lot design-wise from Huawei’s previous Nexus 6P, are definitely attractive offerings from the up-and-coming Chinese manufacturer. And with it comes a definitely flagship-level spec sheet including 64-bit Kirin processors, a powerful set of cameras (including a Leica dual-camera set up), and a respectable price point.
Read on for the complete rundown on the phones’ specifications, and don’t forget to let us know which of the two phones you would prefer in the poll below…
Alongside its two new flagship phones, Huawei this morning also announced the TalkBand B3, a wearable device that sports both productivity and fitness features in what looks to be a pretty attractive package. As the name suggests, this is a band rather than a smartwatch — pretty close in form factor to the Fitbit Alta.
Reuters last month reported that Google has been bolstering its self-driving car team as of late, and now as April rolls in, we’ve uncovered some more information on new hires as the team continues to expand. In one case, Google has added an ex-Apple global supply manager for the iPhone and the Apple Watch to the self-driving car supply management team…
Very often, Google realizes that there’s a common search query that it can make more convenient for users by adding its own content directly to the search engine. The perfect example was last year, when Google effectively sherlocked dozens of lyrics-dedicated websites by adding its own lyrics directly to the top of search results for many songs. I don’t think as many websites are going to feel the brunt of this change, but Google has now added animal sounds to Search… Expand Expanding Close
“24.0.6 Feedback applied. More feedback will be provided soon,” Samsung says to open up the changelog for a substantial update rolling out for its alternate Good Lock UI today. Besides a less-than-perfect translation, the changelog also features a huge list of much-requested bug fixes and additions. Among other changes, this update adds a swipe gesture to delete in the recent apps view, fixes an issue that caused the SD card to stop working, removal of the permanent location prompt, and more…
Today Google has announced a new faster API for its NoSQL database for web and mobile apps. It goes without saying that this is read as a foreign language to anyone without a development background, Google says that it has “redesigned the underlying architecture that supports the cross-platform API for accessing Datastore outside of Google App Engine, such as from Google Container Engine and Google Compute Engine“…
Google/Alphabet published its self-driving car report for March over the weekend, and besides of course the latest numbers (including the number of cars in each city, the total number of autonomous and manual driven miles, etc.), there are also some new details on the system the company uses to map the cars’ surroundings, and mention of a mundane accident that happened in Austin, Texas involving one of the company’s Lexus vehicles…
Things aren’t looking good for Nest. We told you last week about fallout happening within Alphabet’s smart home products maker, including the departure of Dropcam’s former CEO Greg Duffy and 50 of his former employees, and now the story continues. According to a report from Re/code, citing multiple sources, Nest has now lost its director of hardware design and engineering Shige Honjo as well Scott Mullins, a senior engineering manager…
This is a pretty cool tidbit to come out of Microsoft’s Build conference. Probably thanks to some much more exciting news from Tesla, it went under the radar entirely. Apparently, the Redmond, Washington-based company is planning to soon let a future version of Windows 10 mirror your Android phone’s notifications by way of the Cortana app (via The Verge)…
Alphabet, obviously, has a lot of mainstream products that bring in a huge amount of revenue. Google’s ads business is clearly the front runner by a long shot, but there’s also Android, its hardware offerings (like the Nexus line, OnHub, etc.), Play Store digital content, as well as revenue from subsidiary companies like Nest (er.. Dropcam?), Google Fiber, and others.
But what usually excites people the most at Alphabet are the company’s moonshots under the umbrella of “X” — projects that usually cost hoards of money to keep alive and bring in nothing (or next to nothing) in return. The self-driving car project, Project Loon for worldwide internet, Project Titan drones, Makani‘s wind turbines, and Project Wing air-delivery are just a few, but there are even more exciting projects that have “graduated” to be their own unit at the company.
Google has often I/O as a showcase for its favorite moonshots. The company’s huge Google Glass extravaganza from 2012 is the most obvious example that comes to mind, but the company has used the stage at I/O to introduce to the world some just-as-exciting technologies with much less fanfare. Google ATAP, for example, gave a separate keynote at I/O 2015 introducing a handful of projects arguably more exciting than the things Google announced on the main stage. Technically not the same as the “moonshots” in the X division, but they’re in the same category in my opinion.
While you might be familiar with some the following projects (and that wouldn’t surprise me, considering they’ve all already been announced), they’re all ambitious experiments that have been recognized, announced, and made public-facing, but have since dropped off the radar; a lot of them have gone dormant, at least from our perspective. These are projects that excite me, and I want to hear what’s new with them come next month’s developer conference in Mountain View…
Google I/O is coming up in just a couple of months, and Google recently launched their I/O 2016 site with a really cool countdown clock. And while it may not be as strictly Material Design-inspired as the one from last year (might I say the new one even reminds me a little of iOS?), I think it’s a really nice looking design. Now, you can get an unofficial I/O 2016 watch face featuring the same font as the new countdown clock…
We reported last week that Tesla is using wearable tech to increase production efficiency at its factory, and cited knowledge of a promotional video that Google made in collaboration with Tesla as reason to believe that the company was using Glass hardware. Now, we have clips to share from that video to prove that, indeed, Tesla Motors did at one time trial using Google’s wearable at its Fremont factory…
According to a report this morning out of The Information, AT&T is in talks with Cyanogen to launch a phone running a version of Android made by the company, purportedly on ZTE hardware. This is notably the first time that a US carrier has considered selling a phone running the less-Google-controlled version of Android that powers phones like the Yu Yutopia and the WileyFox Swift…
Google has been slowly moving many of its stock apps to be available on the Play Store, and today marks the day that the Calculator app gets the honor. The Play Store listing, which of course offers the app for free, also brings an update to version 6.0 which includes a new Android Wear app…
We told you earlier this year about the new “Jewel” and “Elegant” variants of the Huawei Watch made for women, but Android Police has now spotted a few unannounced variants of the watch on the company’s Chinese website…
In The Information‘s recent article about Nest and continued strife within the Alphabet subsidiary following a struggle-filled acquisition of Dropcam, Tony Fadell was dismissive of any blame for the departure of more than 50 Dropcam employees and their leader, Greg Duffy. “A lot of the employees were not as good as we hoped,” he said. He went on, saying Dropcam was “a very small team and unfortunately it wasn’t a very experienced team.”
Obviously this didn’t sit well with the former CEO of the San Francisco-based security cam company, who left Nest after a feud with the father-of-the-iPod over his brash ‘tyrant bureaucrat’ leadership style. And he took to his Medium blog this morning to chime in…
Hit the road w/ TP-LINK’s 802.11n Portable Travel Router 
