It’s only been a few months since the arrival of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge on the market — and, more recently, the rugged S7 Active sibling as well — but while the rumor mill is in full swing regarding the ever-closer Galaxy Note 7, reports keep coming regarding next year’s flagship too…
There certainly is a lot happening in Samsung‘s hardware department. Following a general slowdown of the immense growth smartphones have enjoyed over the past lustrum in particular, OEMs are preparing for a new wave of next-generation devices.
Amid the numerous experimental projects the company is working on, however, we can expect that a more ‘safe’ Galaxy S8 will hit the market some time in the first half of 2017, and rumor has it that its display will move to a jaw-dropping 4K resolution (via KoreaHerald) …
Huawei‘s ambition are not small. At the Wall Street Journal and f.ounders-held Converge technology conference in Hong Kong, Huawei director Richard Yu — who heads the company’s consumer electronic business — made it clear that the firm’s short term plan is more than aggressive…
A few days ago, it was revealed that most of today’s best and most powerful phones won’t support Android N’s seamless updates feature. Sadly, in order for updates to install in the background, the phone needs a special partition in its memory to make that possible. As it happens, it’s also very unlikely that any of the current crop of flagships will be certified ready for Daydream VR either, but for different reasons.
UPDATE: It happened really fast, but the 30,000 Loop VR headsets are already gone. However, as per Carl Pei, some of the orders placed didn’t go through fully, and pending, missed payments will result in cancelled orders.
If there is a big trend going on now in mobile, that’s virtual reality. Last week at Google I/O, we saw the Mountain View company announcing its new VR-dedicated platform, Daydream, which will be compatible with Android N and a lot of the devices that will come throughout the rest of 2016 and beyond.
One of those phones will likely be the OnePlus 3, which the company’s co-founder Carl Pei today announced will repeat its virtual reality launch with, and will do so with its own newly revealed Loop VR headset…
In this week’s top stories we round up all of our coverage from Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference where it also took the wraps off a number of upcoming hardware and software products. Android N Developer Preview 3, the Play Store comes to Chrome, Google Assistant, the new Daydream VR platform and much, much more.
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At Google I/O‘s keynote yesterday, one of the highlights of the final unveiling of Android N was all about Virtual Reality. While no “Android VR” headset was announced, the search giant introduced Daydream, a VR platform that will be available within Android N.
According to Clay Bavor, which debuted Daydream on stage, as many as eight big-name partners are already onboard: Samsung, HTC, LG, Xiaomi, ZTE, Asus, Alcatel and Huawei, and today, the latter OEM is giving us some more information about its integration with Google’s VR vision…
Google shared some updates on company stats today while kicking off its Google I/O developer conference including updates on Chromecast, active users, new Android phones, Google Play installs and more.
In addition to showing off its new chatbot-style Google Assistant, Amazon Echo-like Google Home device, new Allo and Duo messaging apps, and Daydream VR platform, the company also announced 25 million Chromecasts sold, 200 million Google Photos users, 600 new Android phones launched over the last year, and 65B Google Play installs.
Head below for the roundup of all the numbers Google announced during I/O today and check back for more as the event unfolds.
VR head Clay Bavor took to the stage today at Google I/O to announce that more (unannounced until today) virtual reality features are coming to Android N. Specifically, the company announced the Daydream platform for high quality mobile VR that will be available this fall…
This afternoon, Google has updated its Google+ app for Android with a couple of new features and enhancements (via Droid Life). First off, the app now supports Android Beam. This feature will allow for users to share photos from within the Google+ app to other devices via NFC. The app also now supports DayDream. This is feature, which has been available in some third-party apps for a while, is essentially a screensaver for devices while they are being charged or placed in a dock. Now that the Google+ app supports this feature, it will work with pictures stored within the app.
What’s New:
This update is a staged rollout, which means it may take a little while for it to rollout to every device. Keep an eye on the Play Store to see if your device has received the update.
In addition to updating its Android app, Google has also enhanced cover photos on the web version of Google+. Now, cover photos will show the entire image, as opposed to just a select portion. Photos are still the same size, so you don’t need to change anything in order to enhance your profile.
Today, alongside the launch of Nexus 4 and Nexus 10, Google is officially making the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean SDK available to developers. Included in the release are the lock screen widgets, the Daydream interactive screensaver mode, enhanced support for external displays, and more. Developers can download the Android 4.2 platform from the Android SDK Manager. Google also has an overview of what’s new on its website and an API overview here.
The full release notes from Google (via the Android Developers Blog) are below:
