Google has been slowly moving many of its stock apps to be available on the Play Store, and today marks the day that the Calculator app gets the honor. The Play Store listing, which of course offers the app for free, also brings an update to version 6.0 which includes a new Android Wear app…
We told you earlier this year about the new “Jewel” and “Elegant” variants of the Huawei Watch made for women, but Android Police has now spotted a few unannounced variants of the watch on the company’s Chinese website…
The Waze maps app— the one Google acquired a few years back to improve its own mapping services—today announced a new features that will warn drivers when they are driving over the speed limit.
Now when you’re using the Waze app to navigate, you’ll automatically see a visual warning (pictured above) if you go over the speed limit, and you can also manually set audio warnings for reaching the limit or hitting 5, 10 or 15% over.
In The Information‘s recent article about Nest and continued strife within the Alphabet subsidiary following a struggle-filled acquisition of Dropcam, Tony Fadell was dismissive of any blame for the departure of more than 50 Dropcam employees and their leader, Greg Duffy. “A lot of the employees were not as good as we hoped,” he said. He went on, saying Dropcam was “a very small team and unfortunately it wasn’t a very experienced team.”
Obviously this didn’t sit well with the former CEO of the San Francisco-based security cam company, who left Nest after a feud with the father-of-the-iPod over his brash ‘tyrant bureaucrat’ leadership style. And he took to his Medium blog this morning to chime in…
HTC’s upcoming “HTC 10” — sans the “M” of its predecessors — handset is set to be yet another well-specced entry for early 2016 and its launch could be one of many “make it or break it” moments for the Taiwanese company. Following disappointing launches of both the HTC One M8 and M9, the maker of the popular Vive virtual reality hardware and the recently-launched HTC One A9 mid-ranger is hoping to make a comeback with the “10”.
Now, thanks to some images that popped up on Chinese site TaoBao over the weekend, we have some new images to look at showcasing the phone in both black and silver variants…
Update: It’s confirmed. Google is now sending the below email to users who have a card.
A new app teardown from Android Police today reveals that the Google Wallet card — which was first announced in November 2013 after many rumors of the troubled project being scrapped — is now finally getting the boot effective June 30th. The card assumably never really took off, and it seems that I’m one of the rare few that still has one of these little now-souvenirs… Expand Expanding Close
Google is today showing off redesigned apps for its AdWords advertising service that it says bring a completely reimagined experience based on user feedback.
Huawei’s upcoming P9 flagship has pretty much been completely revealed at this point, but ten or so more leaked images of the phone in the flesh can’t hurt, right? The phone, set to be announced early next month in London, will see the addition of a dual-camera set up, a new fingerprint sensor on the back, and of course upgraded specs compared to the P8…
According to an extensive profile piece from BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan this morning, Google’s now-CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google Cardboard having not even seen the final product. The piece details how Clay Bavor, Google’s VP of VR, first showed Pichai the project just 8 weeks before I/O, and Pichai was so impressed that he wanted to give the virtual reality viewer a full debut at the company’s developer conference…
Project Ara has been very quiet this year, with the last we really heard from the Mountain View company being a “re-route” announced last year. The project was slated in early 2015 to be getting a market pilot in Puerto Rico, but that just didn’t happen. Everything seemed to be on track when Regina Dugan and co. were talking up the project during the Google ATAP event at I/O last year, but there haven’t been hardly any updates besides a new logo and a video look inside the group since.
Now, some new questions on Google Opinion Rewards seem to be polling the public on how much it might be willing to pay for Project Ara modules…
For a brief spell last night, uncensored Google search was alive and kicking within China’s borders. For roughly 105 mins, according to the South China Morning Post, residents inside the People’s Republic had free, unrestricted use of Google’s popular search domain.
Chinese company LeEco, previously known as LeTV, has an event scheduled to take place in Beijing next month, but this time things are a bit different than usual — the company is making a point of inviting US media. The company has over the last couple of years sold an impressive number of Le 1, Le 1 Pro, Le Max and Le 1s handsets — as many as 4 million in 2015. And now LeEco is getting ready to make its “grand” entrance into the United States market…
The French data protection regulator CNIL has fined Google €100,000 ($112,000) after rejecting the company’s proposed compromise over the controversial ‘right to be forgotten‘ legislation.
The legislation gives individuals the right to have ‘outdated or irrelevant’ information about them removed from Google’s search results. Google at first offered to remove the results from Google’s local domains on a country-by-country basis, in this case google.fr, before saying that it would also remove them from google.com when a search was carried out from within France …
Very few people are allowed inside one of Google’s data centers, but you can at least take a virtual tour thanks to a 360° video. We should warn that the narration is basically just one extended plug for the company’s technology, but it’s fun to take a look around.
The 360° view is available on both mobile and desktop platforms …
“Be together, not the same” is the mantra Google has been spreading for quite some time now. It’s a good reflection of its intent and purpose; with 1.5 billion active users and a myriad of OEM partners contributing to its growth, the OS couldn’t ask for more diversity. Among Android enthusiasts, however, a vastly shared belief is that the stock, unadulterated, ‘vanilla’ experience delivered by Google is generally superior to basically any of the offerings brought to the table by third parties. This mainly stems from a bad history that saw manufacturers continuously deliver sub-par experiences and often lag far behind in the update cycle, not to mention the numerous design inconsistencies which added up to Google’s own often messy and unclear aesthetics. When Material Design was introduced back in 2014, however, a few things started to change.
For one, notoriously ill-designed UIs such as those from LG and Samsung (as well as from HTC, Sony, and most others) started to follow Google’s now precise and definite guidelines more closely, giving Android an overall sense of basic consistency at least across major instances. Samsung’s TouchWiz, in particular, got often criticized over the years because of its excessive bloatware and poor design choices, but with the massive hardware overhaul brought by the Galaxy S6 last year, software too got a considerable Lollipop-based facelift which went a little under the radar. The Galaxy S7 brought the whole thing one step further, and even coming from a long series of stock Android devices, I have to admit that my experience with TouchWiz wasn’t just not bad, but left me thinking of it as an outright smart, good-looking and overall well designed ‘skin’…
A new report (paywalled) from The Information today told us that Google is working on a competitor to the Amazon Echo, but it also detailed in-depth Nest’s struggle as an Alphabet subsidiary and the apparent horror that was its acquisition of smart home security camera company Dropcam. Before eventually ending his time at the Alphabet company, Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy apparently told Nest CEO Tony Fadell that he runs the company like a “tyrant bureaucrat”…
Google is updating its Google Sheets and Slides apps for iOS today with new features that allow changing themes, filters and layouts on the fly from within the mobile apps.
For Google Sheets, the update brings the ability to view and change existing filters applied to a spreadsheet.
Google is rolling out a new feature that allows users to more easily access one of the most commonly searched terms. With this rollout, if a user searches for the weather in their location or another location, Google will ask if that user would like to add a shortcut to their homescreen to “access weather instantly from your homescreen.”
Google is apparently kicking off the April Fools’ Day jokes super, super early this year. As has been noticed by several Android developers (via Android Police), the company seems to putting a new section called “Reviews from Space” in the developer console. The review, as you can see above, comes from one “Alex Scott”, sports 5 rocket ships, and was written on April 1st, 2029. Oh, and the device and physical conditions of the user are hilarious, too…
According to a report from The Verge, Google is building its own third-party keyboard for iOS and has been doing so for “months.” While it’s unclear when or if the keyboard will be released, the report notes of several features Google has been working to implement as employees test it.
LG revealed details of two Android Marshmallow-powered phones called the X screen and X cam just about a month ago, and now the Korean company has announced that they’re beginning to roll out first in South Korea and then following in other markets including “Europe, Latin America and Asia.” It’s not exactly surprising, but LG seems to be taking a pass on these phones for North America…
About a year after the United States’ historical renewal of its relationship with Cuba, which among other things allowed American firms to do business in the country, it looks like things are looking bright for Cuban people interested in getting online.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, President Obama stated that ‘change is going to happen’, and notably mentioned Google as one of the first companies about to make the internet a reality for more and more people in the country…
