Stay up to date on news from Google headquarters. Be the first to learn about plans for Android, Google Plus, Google Apps, and more!
Stay up to date on news from Google headquarters. Be the first to learn about plans for Android, Google Plus, Google Apps, and more!

Google has today made some replacement facepads available for its Daydream View VR headset. You can pick them up right now on the Google Store for $15.

Removing 3.5mm headphone jacks has been a bit of a trend with flagship devices on the market, but now it seems there’s a possibility that Google could also be ditching the jack with the next-generation Pixel. The big question about this rumor is obvious: Would you still consider purchasing the “Pixel 2” if it didn’t have a headphone jack?
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It’s hard to think of a job more important that determining whether or not a patient has cancer. Yet the magnitude of the task facing pathologists is so vast that agreement between different clinicians studying the same slides can be as low as 48%.
There can be many slides per patient, each of which is 10+ gigapixels when digitized at 40X magnification. Imagine having to go through a thousand 10 megapixel (MP) photos, and having to be responsible for every pixel. Needless to say, this is a lot of data to cover, and often time is limited.
Which is why Google is working on automating the task with a Deep Learning AI project – with incredibly exciting results …

Game advertisements are one of the more common ads we see on mobile devices, and sometimes, they do actually work. But for the most part, we just don’t want to stop what we’re doing, go download or even buy an app, then eventually get back to what we were doing. Now, Google wants to fix that with “Playables.”

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain has been in full gear all week, and that means almost all of the biggest Android OEMs are getting together to show off their latest phones, tablets, and other gadgets. Now that things are winding down here in the last couple days of the show floor being open, let’s take a look at all the devices that were announced by Samsung, LG, Sony, Huawei and others…

Google has a lot invested in VR, specifically in mobile VR. Its Daydream platform has been the star of the show for the past several months, but before that came Google Cardboard, an affordable VR experience for every phone. Believe it or not, that system debuted almost three years ago, and today Google is announcing that it has shipped over 10 million Cardboard headsets.

Update: Google has acknowledged that they experienced an issue with the Google Accounts engine which reverted some user’s Google Wi-Fi and OnHub routers to their initial state. Unfortunately, if yours was reset, you will have to set it up again for it to work.
For the last couple of hours, users have been receiving Google account notifications stating that account action was required. If you’re like us, we immediately thought that someone was trying to hack into our emails. Thankfully, Google has now confirmed that they’ve received reports of these incidents but not to worry as it isn’t due to suspicious activity…
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Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL are both fantastic devices, but they aren’t without flaws. Since launch, we’ve seen several issues pop up on the devices, including the speaker and problems with the camera. Google has been able to fix some of those via software updates, but now another issue is popping up ─ random Bluetooth disconnects.

Oreo has today rolled out a new mobile game — or marketing campaign, depending on how you look at it — called the “Oreo Dunk Challenge”. Essentially, the game uses a variety of mobile web technologies, including some from Google, to let players fling a virtual Oreo across the world for the ultimate dunk into a glass of milk thousands of miles away.
It’s an amusing concept, but it’s all the more interesting when you realize just how much the Mountain View company had to do with its inception…

Prepare for a cuteness overload-induced meltdown. Because if this letter (whose veracity has been certified by Business Insider), sent by 7-year old Chloe Bridgewater, doesn’t make you go all “awwwww”, then you’re probably a terrible human being. But the best part of it is still its receiver, who actually got to read it and eventually responded, too…

Aside from having the Google Assistant built-in, having a Google Home around the house is great because it features a pretty loud and good sounding speaker. And in Google’s opinion, if you’re going to ever play music on the Home, you might as well stream everything from the company’s streaming service, Play Music.
To demonstrate how well the Home and Play Music work together, Google has announced that it is hosting a couple of block parties in LA and NYC…

Getting tickets for the Google I/O developer conference has always been a thing of difficulty. In 2014, Google changed up ticketing for the conference and started a lottery system. Google would randomly select roughly 5,000 applications and grant these developers the opportunity to purchase a ticket for I/O.
We’re not sure how things are going to go this year, but chances are it will be the same lottery system we’ve seen over the last couple years. This year’s application period is going be between February 22 10 am PST through February 27 5 pm PST…
Google Brain’s work with neural networks has led to a plethora of interesting projects. Over the past several months, the team has been working on using these neural networks to enhance images, and now, it has been able to bring the infamous “zoom and enhance” abilities from sci-fi to reality…

It wasn’t that long ago that I thought the two smartwatches Google is set to introduce were actually going to be solely Google-branded, just like the Pixel phones. It would make sense with Google’s new hardware division — which is surely but slowly becoming a more serious business — that the Mountain View company would go all-in on smartwatches, offering a top-to-bottom lineup just like Apple.
It very well may have been the plan at one point for these to be “Nexus” watches, but today we learned exactly how they’re not going to be Nexus watches. We already knew that they would be LG-branded, but now we know where the Google comes in: a “Designed with our friends at Google” label. At the very least, this is interesting to consider in the broader realm of Google & OEM partnerships…

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project, otherwise known as AMP, has made a huge difference for users of the mobile web by providing a streamlined, super quick browsing experience. However, it’s not perfect. One of the biggest flaws for many with AMP is that you have no way to share links to articles viewed in AMP to other services. Starting today, though, you can.

New York Fashion Week starts this Thursday and to celebrate, Google has partnered with the digital fashion house, Ivyrevel, on a new project. “Coded Couture” uses Google’s Awareness API — which launched last summer — to monitor a user’s daily habits and activities. The Coded Couture application takes that awareness data and creates a custom Ivyrevel dresses made specifically for the wearer…
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Right from the start, Google had inventory issues and delayed Pixel orders because the company hadn’t expected the high demand for its smartphones. The delays have been so bad, in fact, that rumors started going around that Google had even stopped production. While this obviously isn’t true, Verizon has started to give away Daydream View headsets as an apology to customers who had their shipments delayed…

When Google unveiled the Google Home, the company talked about the ability to customize the home assistant’s look and feel by simply swapping out different colored bases. However, priced at $20 to $40 a piece, these bases were overpriced for many potential customers. If you’ve been holding out from purchasing one, now might be the time to buy, as Google is currently offering all bases for 50% off.

We’re constantly on the search for the “perfect” smartphone, but it’s still impossible — and will likely remain as such — to even get close in that endeavor. Google’s Pixel smartphones came as close as any smartphone before, in my eyes at least, but they were still very flawed phones with tons of room for improvement.
What made the Pixel so great? As we detailed in our review, it really came done to the software and performance. Google created a phone that offered performance and reliability on Android like we had never seen before. Combine that with a clean Android interface, useful features like “Moves” and Google Assistant, and top it all off with one of the best cameras ever on a smartphone, and it becomes clear that you’ve got an amazing smartphone….

Yesterday, several publications across the web reported that T-Mobile — which launched its own RCS platform in the form of “Advanced Messaging” all the way back in 2015 — has begun rolling out support for Google’s RCS offering in the Messenger app for Android devices. Sadly, it seems that this was just a wild and substanceless rumor that has no actual basis in reality…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been very outspoken about President Donald Trump’s recent immigration executive order, having just a few days sent a memo to Google employees saying that “it’s painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues.” Now he has come out (via an interview with Walt Mossberg at The Verge) to speak more broadly — albeit briefly — about immigration in Silicon Valley…

Millions of businesses pay for Google’s G Suite each month, and for good reason ─ Google’s collection of productivity apps are excellent. Today, the company is enhancing G Suite with G Suite Enterprise Edition and several new security and management features.

Executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet Eric Schmidt last week told employees that the Trump administration will do ‘evil things,’ reports Buzzfeed.
Schmidt’s remarks were made during the company’s weekly meeting at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, on January 26 [when he said the Trump administration] is “going to do these evil things as they’ve done in the immigration area and perhaps some others” …

Google has announced that the next version of Nougat will be Android 7.1.2. While it doesn’t introduce anything major, it features performance optimizations and bugfixes. While a stable version of 7.1.2 won’t be available for a couple of months, Google is allowing customers with a Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel C, Nexus 5x, and Nexus Player to join the Android Beta Program to test it out early…