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• Android
• Google
• Samsung
• Google Chrome
• Chromecast

9to5Toys Lunch Break: Galaxy Note 3 (unlocked) $265, Acer Chromebook 15 $336, Chromecast $24, more

Stephen Hall Jun 1 2015 - 12:47 pm PT

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Keep up with the best gear and deals on the web by signing up for the 9to5Toys Newsletter. Also, be sure to check us out on: Twitter, RSS Feed, Facebook, Google+ and Safari push notifications.

Today’s can’t miss deals:

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 32GB (unlocked): $265 shipped (Reg. $500)

Acer Chromebook 15 C910-C37P 16-Inch Chromebook: $337 shipped (Reg. $400)

Google Chromecast (refurb) $24 shipped (Reg. $35) + free movie rental, UFC Fight Pass, and more

Samsung Class 10 microSD Flash Memory Cards w/ Prime shipping: 16GB EVO $7 (Reg. $15), 32GB Pro $18 (Reg. $37)

Kindle for Kids Bundle: Kindle e-reader + kid friendly cover + 2yr. warranty $99 shipped ($140 value)

GoPro’s new HERO+ LCD brings a touch display to its entry-level action camera

Father’s Day Gift Guide: top picks, exclusive discounts and a $482 giveaway

More new gear from today:

Daily Deals: Samsung 55″ Smart HDTV $800, Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard $27, more

• New! Games/Apps: Mortal Kombat X $39, Final Fantasy Type-0 $28, more
• New! Headphones: Jabra Move Bluetooth on-ears $70 (Reg. $100), more
• New! Samsung microSD cards: 16GB EVO $7 (Reg. $15), 32GB Pro $18 (Reg. $37)

More deals still alive:

PlayStation Plus free games for Junes: Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes, more

Xbox Live free games for June: Massive Chalice, Just Cause 2, Thief, more

• App Store Free App of the Week: Hyper Square puzzle game ($2 value)
• Lenmar’s ChugPlug gets you 4 hours of MacBook battery life: $68 shipped (Reg. $130)
• Classical music albums $0.99 ea: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, many more
• Multi-year magazine subs from $4.75/yr: ESPN, Wired, Men’s Health, many more
• Pioneer speakers: SP-BS21 Bookshelfs $50 shipped (Orig. $100), more
• Headphones: Philips Bluetooth $31, Audio-Technica (refurb) $39, more
• TP-LINK 150Mbps wireless N portable travel router $15 shipped (Orig. $30)
• Harman Kardon & JBL Factory Recertified up to 80% off
• Get a month of geek and gaming gear from Loot Crate for $17 shipped (15% savings)
• Complete Arduino Starter Kit & 3-Course Bundle: $76 (Orig. $520, CA Tax Only)
• Get a minimum of $175 towards a PlayStation 4 with an eligible PS3 or Xbox 360 trade
• AirPlay content from your iOS devices to your Mac w/ Airserver: $10 (Orig. $15)
• HUSKK Quickdraw iPhone 6/6+ Leather Wallet Case: Shipped $25 (Orig. $49)

New products & more:

Splatoon for Wii U inks the scene with colorful gameplay and an exclusive bundle

• Bluelounge’s new extension cord brings style and USB power
• Amazon Prime adds free same day delivery in select markets across the United States
• WD upgrades its popular My Passport Ultra portable HD
• New game from former BioShock devs puts players in the shoes of a blind protagonist
• Neato’s next gen robotic vacuums might be its quietest and best looking yet
• SanDisk’s new SSDs offer improved performance at a “cost-effective” price
• Screentendo can turn any part of your screen into a playable Super Mario Bros. level
• This retro style amiibo display is going to give you flashbacks
• OXBOARD blends a skateboard and Segway for a unique rechargeable transportation option
• The new Yeair quadcopter can go as fast as your car for 60 minutes without landing

• Android
• Google
• OnePlus
• OnePlus 2
• OnePlus One

OnePlus One drops to $249 this week with flash sales

Tom Maxwell Jun 1 2015 - 8:25 am PT

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We can’t be sure whether or not this was what OnePlus meant when they said they’d “shake up the industry” on June 1st, but either way the company is holding flash sales on the OnePlus One at different times today through this Sunday, June 7th.

Here’s the full schedule of the next times the sale will go live:

June 2 – 2:00 GMT (10 pm EST -1 day)
June 3 – 12:00 GMT (8 am EST)
June 4 – 2:00 GMT (10 pm EST -1 day)
June 5 – 12:00 GMT (8 am EST)
June 6 – 2:00 GMT (10 pm EST -1 day)
June 7 – 12:00 GMT (8 am EST)

During the flash sales (devices may go fast, so you’ll have to be quick) OnePlus is offering the 16GB Silk White OnePlus One for $249 and the 64GB Sandstone Black model for $299. That’s a pretty good steal for a solid alternative to the Nexus 6, which was priced unusually higher than its Nexus predecessors.

OnePlus long ago confirmed that they were working on the OnePlus 2 and said it was slated for “sometime in 2015,” but that’s all we know about that device.

• Google
• Google Maps
• code the road
• Sesame Street

For its 10th birthday, the Google Maps team is going on a cross-country road trip

Tom Maxwell May 29 2015 - 6:39 pm PT

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Google may have found itself in hot water recently over spam and offensive content finding its way into Google Maps, but the team behind the mapping service isn’t letting that stop them from celebrating its 10th birthday.

Starting yesterday at Google I/O and culminating in a final “celebration of coding” at Disney World on June 26th, the Maps team will be making its way across the country in a customized 1959 GM tour bus, stopping in 10 places along the way to hold developer meetups, show off apps built using the Maps API, and even make an appearance on Sesame Street. Stops will be in Utah, Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Georgia and Florida.

If you’d like to check out the bus on one of its stops (anyone is welcome to), there’s a website up where you can find all the information you’ll need.

• Google
• google atap
• project abacus

Smart Lock Passwords is cool, but Google Project Abacus puts us closer to a password-free world

Tom Maxwell May 29 2015 - 4:33 pm PT

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Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group has been on a tear at I/O these past two days, demoing lots of new and interesting innovations that may one day hit production and make all of our lives much, much better. One of such projects is Project Abacus, which is seeking to all but eliminate the use of passwords for authentication.

Put simply, our smartphones can collect a lot of information about how we go about our day – how fast we walk, how well we type using our phone’s keyboard, how we talk – and the ATAP group thinks that using this data for authentication is 10x safer than fingerprints, and 100x safer than 4 digit PIN codes. They think that because, well, they’ve gathered lots of data on it – the company has been running trials of Project Abacus since last year in partnership with 33 universities and in total has collected 40 terabytes of data across 28 different states. They did not, however, say how much more secure they are than old-fashioned email and password combinations.

While Abacus runs in the background on your phone and collects data about you, it is constantly calculating a trust score that is basically a score of how confident it is that you are who you say you are, the owner of the phone. When you launch an app, take Netflix, if Abacus can successfully verify your identity, you’ll be logged in automatically. If it is unable to get a high trust score for you, Abacus will revert back to asking for a password. ATAP also says that different apps could theoretically require different trust scores – a banking app would most certainly want a higher trust score than that of a game.

Project Abacus doesn’t totally eliminate passwords but it’s one step closer, and makes total elimination of them a logical conclusion. And anything that will further mitigate the risk of intruders accessing my digital life is fine by me. When the world is putting this much energy into obfuscating away old-fashioned passwords (don’t forget Smart Lock Passwords) you know their time is up. A world that runs on these highly secure trust scores is on the horizon, I can feel it.

• Google
• Loon
• internet
• mesh network

Google’s Loon balloons can now launch faster, act like a mesh network

Tom Maxwell May 29 2015 - 3:35 pm PT

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For one reason or another, roughly 4.4 billion people around the world are still without reliable, consistent access to an Internet signal. Google’s mission since its very founding has been to “organize the world’s knowledge,” but that isn’t so easy when vast amounts of information can’t even get online, which is one reason why its Project Loon balloons for spreading Internet by hot air balloons exists. The technology giant has made a lot of progress since announcing the project to the public in 2013, with recent tests seeing the balloons travel over 5,000 miles and provide hours of connectivity to locations that had otherwise never seen it before. Today Google is sharing two improvements that it has introduced to the project.

The first is that the team has created a 50-foot launcher called Autolauncher which cuts take-off time down to 15 minutes from 45 previously. The cube-shaped unit (pictured above) does this in a couple ways: it provides tall canvas sides to block winds up to 15 MPH (winds of 6 MPH or greater are prohibitive to take-off), it clamps down the balloon into place until take-off, and it provides a perch for the antenna which provides Internet so as to prevent it from swinging and setting the balloon off its trajectory.

The second improvement to Project Loon is that the balloons can now communicate with one another. Previously to beam Internet to the ground each balloon needed to be within 50 miles of the ground station of a telecommunications company that it would gain its LTE spectrum from. Now, however, the balloons can be anywhere from 250 to 500 miles from a station because balloons closer to a ground station can pass high-frequency signals between each other. This is the same idea as neighborhood mesh networks, where cheap routers can communicate with each other, share WiFi, and continue to communicate with each other even if the public Internet goes down. As a result, Google can now provide Internet to an entire region like West Africa with fewer expensive ground stations than before.

The hope now is to successfully provide a few days of continuous service at a time within its test areas (wind has proven to be a big challenge to doing this), and once it overcomes the challenges to accomplishing that it wants to roll out service to underserved markets such as Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, ideally by the end of 2016.

• Google
• MicroSD
• Encryption
• BYOD
• b2b

Project Vault is a super secure, isolated computing environment from Google

Tom Maxwell May 29 2015 - 1:23 pm PT

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One major barrier to adoption of new hardware and software solutions in the workplace is a top-down requirement that all communications are encrypted, secured from the prying eyes of today’s brazen hackers. It’s the reason why there are still thousands of businesses out there shockingly still issuing Blackberry phones. With more and more consumers and companies alike clamoring for a bring-your-own-device future, how can employees ensure their devices are as secure as chief information officer’s would like? Google has an idea.

Project Vault, shown off today at Google’s I/O conference, is a microSD card with full operating system, ARM-based processor, NFC chip, and antenna packed inside of it. Oh, and 4GB of storage. While that’s pretty incredible in and of itself, what really makes this microSD card special is that the OS it runs is known as a Real Time Operating System (RTOS), and is packed with a suite of cryptographic solutions for keeping data secure and messaging with others using Project Vault microSD cards encrypted. An RTOS is different from the operating systems most of us are used to (i.e. Unix) that can’t run every process we throw at them simultaneously but switch between tasks rapidly, ensuring at the very least that the computer is still responsive to its user (i.e. doesn’t freeze). Real-time operating systems have stricter deadlines to complete the tasks that are thrown at them.

The main function of Project Vault will be super-secure messaging so hackers, or the NSA, cannot snoop (which also explains why Vault uses an RTOS – all resources are dedicated to encrypting and sending/receiving messages quickly). The encryption only works when both the sender and the receiver are using Project Vault SD cards, however, but it’ll work on any device with a microSD slot – so laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. are supported. Google says the microSD card can also be used to encrypt video and as an alternative to passwords (where the card could generate cryptographic key pairs and store them securely). The company has an SDK up on Github for it that developers can use to build applications for the new project. Maybe the next Snowden will send confidential documents to journalists using his smartphone?

• Android
• Google
• developers
• Android development
• Udacity

Google has partnered with Udacity to offer a nanodegree in Android development (Update: live June 3 Q&A)

Tom Maxwell May 29 2015 - 10:14 am PT

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Update: Google is holding an “Ask the Experts” session today, June 3rd, at 2PM PDT where Sebastian Thrun, Peter Lubbers, and Jocelyn Becker from Udacity and Google will be answering user-submitted questions about the Android Nanodegree program. The Q&A session will be live-streamed on YouTube and there’s also a form where you can submit any questions you may have.

Yesterday Google’s Sundar Pichai said on stage at the company’s I/O conference that 8 out of every 10 phones that shipped worldwide last year were running Android, and that 600 million new smartphone users came online over the past year. That’s a lot of devices running the company’s smartphone OS, and they really want developers to realize the potential of their apps reaching that many people. So much so that they spent over $4 million developing an extensive Android development course in partnership with Udacity.

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• Android
• Google
• Android 6.0 Marshmallow
• Google I/O
• USB

Thanks to USB Type-C support in Android M, you’ll soon be able to send power in both directions

Tom Maxwell May 29 2015 - 9:06 am PT

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Android VP of Engineering Dave Burke’s presentation on Android M yesterday saw quite a few huge new additions coming to the OS from granular app permissions to improved battery standby management and, of course, Android Pay (check out our roundup). But one thing that might have got lost in the noise for some of you was Google’s newfound embrace of the USB Type-C standard and what it will actually do for you in practice.

USB Type-C is both flippable and bi-directional. That first attribute means that you won’t have to fiddle in the dark with plugging the USB cable connector into your phone the right-side up, because there isn’t a right-side up with Type-C.

More interesting, though, is the bi-directional ability of USB Type-C and Android M’s new interface support for it. What this means in theory is that, while this wouldn’t be practical, you could connect your Android phone to your laptop and charge your laptop with your phone instead of the other way around. You can also send files in either direction as was obviously possible before, but the new interface you see above for managing all these abilities in one place looks quite convenient.

Finally as you might be able to make out from the image above, Google is ready to welcome in more musicians with the warm embrace of MIDI support. This is big because while because 5.0 Lollipop brought support for some audio devices like USB microphones and amplifiers, it left out a lot of musical instruments that use the MIDI standard to send data back and forth between other devices. Maybe this will encourage more musicians and music app developers to consider Android again.

• Android
• Google
• Apps and Updates
• Android 6.0 Marshmallow
• Google I/O

This is what text selection actions look like in Android M

Tom Maxwell May 28 2015 - 10:05 pm PT

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There was a lot to digest in today’s Google I/O keynote but one small, interesting new behavior change of note going into Android M is a new text selection floating toolbar, as you can see in the GIF above.

Whereas in the past primary actions of Cut, Copy, Paste, as well as other app-specific actions related to selecting text would probably be saved for a contextual action bar (an example of which is below), developers who want to keep their apps up-to-date with platform changes will now utilize this new toolbar which appears just above the text selection area. As you can see above, pressing the More icon will reveal a secondary menu where developers can add their own extra actions; the company in its design documents provides the example of Share, Search, and Translate actions appearing within the secondary menu in Gmail.

Another interesting system behavior change in Android M is a battery management tool called “Doze,” which we detailed in our Android M roundup, that disables most background activities when the OS detects that the device has gone unused for an extended period of time. The company says this has resulted in upwards of 2x longer standby time for Android devices running M versus those running Lollipop.