Google

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…

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Alphabet is known for aiming for the moon with a lot of its efforts, and its Sidewalk Labs initiative appears to be no different. Sidewalk Labs has been around for about a year now and aims to improve WiFi availability and traffic in cities, but it looks like its plans don’t stop there. Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff hinted that the company may be looking to build a city from scratch while speaking in New York at an event held by The Information.

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Drones have become very popular among consumers over the last few years, with various applications mainly in photography and videography, but their potential suggests that there soon could be a slew of additional uses that normal people could benefit from. Particularly, drones could turn out to be very helpful for delivery of physical objects or perhaps an Internet connection.

According to Quartz, a new Google patent filed recently is all about a potential medical use. While last year the idea of medical equipment-carrying drones had already been patented by the search giant, it looks like the company may have found a viable method via which users could contact the devices…

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According to a new report from The Information, behind closed doors Google is much more interested in augmented reality than it is in virtual reality. Google of course has publicly marketed its Cardboard VR product heavily, but that’s apparently not the end-goal for the company — augmented reality is.

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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…

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Today, WhatsApp is announcing that all messages, photos, phone calls and videos sent over its messaging app will be encrypted end-to-end. This means that no one can access any communications apart from the people in the conversation. This means if WhatsApp is subpoenaed by government for information, WhatsApp will not be able to help them as it simply cannot help them.

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Google has announced on its Android Developers blog that it is open sourcing its WALT Latency Timer. The company says that it has been using the tool in its Chrome OS and Android divisions to measure and minimize touch and audio latency, but now all developers will be able to take advantage of the tool.

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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…

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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)…

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Google has acknowledged that one of its April Fools jokes backfired when it started causing real embarrassment to some Gmail users. It has now pulled the joke feature.

Google added a ‘send + mic drop’ button last night, that added a GIF of a Minion dropping a microphone to an email reply, before archiving the thread. It was intended as a fun way for users to express their desire to exit an email conversation, but the company made one schoolboy UI error: it put the joke button right where the usual ‘send and archive’ one sits …

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Nobody loves April Fools’ more than the technology industry. But out of all the companies, Google spends the most time cranking out day-long features, elaborate product videos, and jokey press releases. We’ll be covering the best pranks in our updating roundup. Be sure to leave a comment if you come across a particularly funny one.

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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…

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Google Now is a powerful tool. Combining the huge databases at the company’s disposal alongside the incredible amount of information it can pull – once granted access – from a customer’s usage of its many services, there are dozens of things that Google can help you with. Its power goes from answering to simple questions and completing easy requests to solving increasingly complex tasks that require a combination of the above to give more tailored and specific results.

In a somewhat curious outcome, Reddit user barney13 asked Google to show him some pictures from his trip to Nice, France, which while promptly showing the user correct results about his question also pulled out a snippet from an email which seemed oddly and yet particularly related to the request…

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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…

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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…

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