Android

The Verge observes that Samsung’s new 2014 Sustainability Report shows that the company has a lot of work to do to get its manufacturing in order.

As part of its 2014 Sustainability Report, Samsung commissioned independent inspections at 100 of its suppliers in China and the results make for grim reading …

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Samsung has officially announce its Galaxy S5 mini smartphone. This compact device retains everything you know and love about the original version, but with a slight decrease in specifications. The good news is, this is the best “mini” revision of a device that Samsung has released to date. Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to pick one up right away.

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Google this afternoon started rolling out an update to its Play Music app on Android that bumps it to version 5.6. While the update is not all that big, it does coincide well with the recent announcements at Google I/O this week. One of the biggest changes comes to how device authorizations are handled. You still get to have 10 devices active on your Google Music account, but now only five of them can be phones. The other five can be any combinations of tablets, computers, and other devices. This is obviously not a huge deal for the average user, but could cause issues for power users. The account switcher UI itself has also been updated.

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Google recently showed its developer community what it can expect in the next few months and today the company has given investors notice that its Q2 2014 earnings call will be taking place on July 17th at 1:30pm PDT. In addition to ratting off its performance numbers, the company will also have a Q&A session with participants as well as a live web broadcast of the call.

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Samsung this afternoon announced a quartet of new budget-focused Galaxy smartphones, that in reality, are pretty forgettable. Firstly, the South Korean company unveiled the Galaxy Core II, which features a 4.5-inch WVGA display. The device is powered by a 1.2GHz processor paired with a 2,000mAh battery. Next up, Samsung announced the Galaxy Ace 4, which is slightly less powerful with a dual-cire 1.2GHz processor. It features a 1,800mAh battery coupled with LTE connectivity. A slightly less powerful 3G model is available with a 1GHz processor and a 1,500mAh battery.

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Precision guided firearm maker TrackingPoint has already demonstrated Glass being paired with guns and today the outfit is literally taking things further. The smart-weapon company recently published a video of its ShotView software being used to broadcast a rifle’s image feed through a set of Smith Optics I/O Recon goggles laced with Android. In this demonstration a marksmen is tasked with hitting an explosives-filled soda bottle from 500 yards away without looking directly through his scope.

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Android Wear doesn’t just show you notifications. In at least one developer session at I/O, Google made it clear that its new smartwatch platform will actually be capable of running standalone applications, even further extending the possibilities of what the device will be able to do in the near future. But now, some of these apps are already hitting the Play Store.

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T-Mobile is now accepting pre-orders for the LG G3 and will begin selling the device at its retail locations on July 16th, the company announced today. In addition to revealing its release plans for LG’s new flagship smartphone, the carrier boasted about its successful early release promo of the handset, which racked up over 74,000 entrants. As a reminder the entry-level LG G3 features a 2,560 x 1,440 display, a quad-core 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB storage and Android 4.4.2 KitKat out of the box.

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Recently at Google I/O 2014, LG and Samsung launched their new Android Wear smartwatches. The LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live are available now on the Google Play Store, but which one should you buy? Both devices have differences and similarities and today we’re taking a quick look at all of them. Check out our comparison video below for a closer look…

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Way back in 2012, Google announced that it was acquiring the mobile document editing company Quickoffice. At the time, Google said that it had no intentions on shutting the service down, but would also work to integrate the unique features of QuickOffice into its own suite of editing apps. Following the announcements of new features for Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets at I/O, the company has announced that Quickoffice will soon be shutting down (via The Google Operating System Blog).

“With the integration of Quickoffice into the Google Docs, Sheets and Slides apps, the Quickoffice app will be unpublished from Google Play and the App Store in the coming weeks. Existing users with the app can continue to use it, but no features will be added and new users will not be able to install the app.”

Quickoffice for Android was last updated on February 14th of this year, while the iOS client hasn’t seen an update since January 6th. We knew that eventually, Google would be forced to shut down Quickoffice to focus exclusively on the Google Drive suite of apps. Google never promised to keep Quickoffice running forever.

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At Google I/O this year, the company unveiled a trio of new operating systems, Android TV, Android Auto, and Android Wear. All of these operating systems, of course, run with an interface designed by Google itself. There was doubt, however, surrounding whether manufacturers would be allowed to overlay their own interface on top, like many do with Android. While speaking with Ars Technica, Google’s engineering director David Burke put an end to our doubts and confirmed that OEMs will not be allowed to overlay their interfaces on top of Android Auto, Android TV, or Android Wear.

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I was debating which Android Wear watch to get at Google I/O between the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch. Sadly what won out overall was probably the look of the Gear Live (which looks like a Tizen-powered Gear 2 minus the camera and a few other minor details). Samsung’s offering also has heartbeat monitor and a higher resolution OLED display but LG has a bigger battery and LCD display (which didn’t help much with outside viewing from my brief usage).

I’ll say what everyone else was saying: We’d all rather have the Moto 360. But those come later this summer – which ends in September. Both the industrial design and the almost round face put the Moto 360 in another league but will probably put it in another price league as well. Both LG and Samsung will come in around $200.

How was the experience with the Samsung Gear Live?
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After an interview this morning on how Google came up with idea for Material Design, Google vice president of design Matias Duarte sat down with The Verge for another interview. In the talk, Duarte discussed a variety of things that Google set out to achieve with Android “L” and the Material design aspect of it.

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If you’re feeling down because your phone isn’t eligible for the Android L dev preview and you’ve been quietly drowning in a pool of jealousy, allow us to throw you a small life preserver. While there’s not yet a clean build of L for non-Nexus devices, those crafty folks at XDA Developers have managed to pull its fancy Material Design-themed keyboard and port it to other smartphones.

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In a sit down interview with Gizmodo, Google’s Vice President of Design Matias Duarte talked about the company’s “L” release of Android in extensive detail. Duarte talked about a variety of aspects of the new design language and how it came to be. Duarte said that the idea of Material Design originated when Google realized that it had a very big problem. The company wanted to design an interface that anyone, developers and users, could take advantage of.

We had a really big problem. It wasn’t just a problem about going beyond phones and tablets, which was clearly something we wanted to do—we wanted to design for all these different screen sizes. And it wasn’t just the problem of going to multiple platforms and form-factors, right? It’s not just Android and web across all these form-factors. And it also wasn’t just the problem of “We want a design system that’s good for Google.” We wanted it to be a design system that anybody can use to really express their brand and their identity and their needs and capabilities.

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Google this morning rolled out an update to the Maps app on Android with a feature that will certainly make Google I/O 2014 attendees happy. Bumping the app to version 8.1.1, the update resolves the issues surrounding Android Wear’s compatibility with Google Maps.

Many Google I/O attendees noted that the Maps integration with the new Android Wear devices was entirely nonexistent, despite Google’s on-stage demos. Today’s update, however, adds integration between Wear and Maps like Google showed us during its keynote. With Maps on a smartwatch, you can search for a location and start navigation directly from your wrist. The watch, of course, still communicates with your phone for the data.

Now that Google has officially released the full Android Wear SDK, we expect to see a lot of apps updated with Android Wear support over the coming days and weeks. You can download the Google Maps update on the Play Store now.

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Samsung has a history of releasing tablets that overlap each other and it looks like the company is extending this practice to its smartphone lineup. For several weeks we’ve been hearing about a handset referred to as the “Galaxy F” and after dark pictures and a case of mistaken identity, the phone that threatens your GS5’s relevance has resurfaced.

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