Google reportedly purchased six office buildings from Starwood Capital Group LLC and Blackstone Group LP for $585 million, according to Bloomberg. The facilities are located at the Pacific Shores Center office park in Redwood City, California and are about 11 miles away from the search giant’s Mountain View headquarters.
The New York City Police Department is about to distribute 41,000 mobile devices under a new $160 million program known as the NYPD Mobility Initiative. Financed by criminal asset funds, the project will equip New York’s finest with 35,000 mobile devices and 6,000 ruggedized tablets will be added to patrol vehicles.
It seems like every major US wireless carrier went double data crazy this month and the madness doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Today, Sprint announced a new low-cost plan targeting casual data users. For $20 a month, the carrier is offering 1GB of sharable data that can be divided among 10 lines through one of its family plans.
Last week, Amazon started accepting pre-orders for the Nexus 9 and now the giant online retailer is taking orders for the tablet’s official accessories. If you plan on picking up Google’s HTC-made slate, but would like to add some physical buttons to your setup, check out the Nexus 9’s Keyboard Folio. That is if you can get over its $130 asking price.
About as quick as Google added its Nexus Player to Google Play, the company quickly pulled its new media player from its online store due to issues with the FCC. However, over the weekend, documents for the upcoming Android TV set-top box were spotted in an FCC database and today the search giant has restored Google Play pre-orders.
Sol Republic, makers of a wide variety of speakers and headphones, announced in August 2013—alongside the announcement of the Moto X—that it would be partnering with Motorola “to redefine the music experience,” and “change the way music fans experience and share music.” 9to5Google has learned, however, this partnership may not have worked out so well. According to people familiar with the partnership, Motorola will soon be dropping its affiliation and contract with Sol Republic.
The Obama Administration recently nominated former Google patent counsel lead Michelle Lee to be the new director of the Patent and Trademark Office. The position has been vacant for nearly two years and Lee who has been occupying her time as the current deputy director of the USPTO is now pending Senate approval. The government has been working to reform the US patent process, which has been flooded with firms known as “patent trolls” that milk the system by purchasing old patents and filing frivolous lawsuits against other businesses.
Google recently announced the availability of .SOY, a new web domain extension specifically for Latinos. If your Spanish is rusty, allow us to translate. Soy means “I am” in Español. The company has also set up a new web portal (available in English and Spanish) where people can search for new .soy domain names and purchase them from a list of partners.
Samsung revealed its new Exynos 7 Octa today, a 20nm setup loaded with four ARMv8 Cortex A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. This allows any of the chip’s cores to be active as needed, which also contributes to the Exynos 7 Octa’s efficient performance.
Google is set to report its third-quarter financial results today after the market closes at 4pm EST. The tech juggernaut has been extremely busy, recently making a few acquisitions, facing regulatory challenges in Europe, competing with Amazon and preparing for new hardware releases. Yep, the internet’s reigning search king definitely had its hands full this past quarter. Hoping to make things a little easier to follow, we’ve put together a quick overview of a few key items that may come up during today’s big call.
From the Cha Cha to the HTC First, the idea of a Facebook phone has been lingering for several years. Perhaps not giving up on the dream, the uber popular social media outlet is reportedly ready to take another shot at creating a smartphone and this time the company is looking for a new hardware partner. According to multiple Korean news outlets, Facebook frontman Mark Zuckerberg recently met with Samsung’s leadership to discuss a hardware partnership.
Teenagers talk on the phone a lot, but you know what else they do? Talk to their phones. Google published a study today looking at that voice search habits of American smartphone users and to no one’s surprise, teens use the feature more than adults. According to Mountain View’s findings 55 percent of teens ranging from 13 to 18 years old use voice search every day.
The Xperia Z3 may be coming to Verizon and T-Mobile, but sadly Sony has yet to announce plans to bring the Z3 Compact to any US carriers in the near future. However, if you’ve had your eyes on the company’s pint-size powerhouse, you can now buy it directly from Sony’s online store for $530.
Samsung recently revealed plans to sell mobile devices equipped with 60GHz WiFi tech capable of data transfers of up to 575MB per second. The company didn’t provide an exact release date for products supporting this type of technology, however it did say that it would also be applied to medical equipment and home automation systems.
Today, Sprint announced that it’s now offering a mobile-focused variant of Google Apps for Work that will feature cloud-based single sign-on powered by Ping Industries. This collaboration will help give the carrier’s enterprise customers the ability to sign on to all of their business applications with a single username and password while maintaining high security standards.
Today, Chinese phone maker OnePlus revealed a new set of earphones for its hard to purchase smartphone, but unlike its homegrown offering, this ear gear is a byproduct of a partnership with JBL. Listed as “coming soon” at the company’s online store the aptly named the JBL E1+ Earphones are premium branded buds that will eventually set someone back $40 whenever they go on sale.
If expressions like “Big Brother” and “The Man” make you feel uneasy, there’s a slight chance that you may have ponied up $629 for the security-focused Blackphone. But if your 4.7-inch Android PrivateOS handset isn’t quite big enough to meet your anonymous web browsing needs, Silent Circle co-founder Jon Callas is working on a solution.
AT&T’s known for snagging exclusive devices and while the carrier’s latest efforts probably didn’t pay off too well, it’s still trying to land the next big thing. Today, Ma Bell announced that it will exclusively offer the recently announced HTC Desire EYE and that it will also sell the Taiwanese manufacturer’s new RE camera. AT&T’s press release was mum regarding pricing and launch dates, only saying that it will carry the Desire EYE later this holiday season and that the RE is expected to follow later this year.
Google is still battling Oracle over code used in the search giant’s Android operating system.The Mountain View-based software company recently petitioned the US Supreme Court, arguing that the high court needs to protect innovation. Google is trying to overturn an appeals court ruling that Oracle has the right to copyright portions of the Java code found in Android.
If you’re a Sprint customer holding on to an old WiMAX smartphone or tablet, the end is nigh. The carrier is officially shutting down its retro 4G network on November 6th 2015. Sprint stopped producing WiMAX phones several years ago after making the jump to LTE like the rest of the world, but agreed to support the devices for an extended period of time.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQzqjPx-50Y]
After weeks of leaks and speculation, HTC publicly unveiled its new RE camera accessory and Desire EYE smartphone during its Double Exposure event yesterday in New York City. If you happened to miss the festivities and still shots aren’t enough to satisfy your appetite for gadgets, the company has published a video of the event in its entirety on its official YouTube channel.
Google started accepting PayPal payments for Google Play app purchases earlier this year in 12 countries, including the US, France and Germany. Today, the company has expanded this payment option to Australia, Greece, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore and Sweden.
Samsung is now offering a new protection service for its handsets that will cover select devices against accidental damage, including spills, drops and cracked screens. In addition to accidents, the company’s new Protection Plus Mobile Elite plan covers mechanical and electrical equipment failure for up to two years. Samsung says it will replace a damaged or defective phone within two business days and that it will offer customers three claims for the duration of their service agreement.
Google Now, Siri and Cortana all have their respective followings, but which application is the best at answering real world questions? Recently, the folks at Stone Temple Consulting pit the three platforms each other in a 3,086 query challenge packed with questions that required direct answers.