News and notes on the latest from Google.
Chances are, you’ve heard of Fitbit. They’re one of the leaders in the wearable market for health and activity trackers. Today, Google announced that it will be buying Fitbit as a whole for $2.1 billion. It’s also important to note that this isn’t Alphabet, Google’s parent company, acquiring them. Fitbit will fall under the Google brand, just like Nest and all other Google products.
Continue reading “Google acquires Fitbit for $2.1 billion, still commits to investing in Wear OS”
Back in 2017, Apple kickstarted a new trend of UI navigation on our phones via dedicated navigation gestures instead of using on-screen buttons (or a dedicated button tucked in the bottom bezel in the case of the iPhones). There’s no denying the fact that there was a somewhat steep learning curve to go through before getting used to the new navigation gestures on the iPhone X. But ultimately, this became the new trend going forwards that all OEMs sought to join. Google had a go at it the following year, though Android Pie’s navigation gestures looked like a hasty attempt to announce Android as a native supporter of gestural navigation. This year though, Google went back to the drawing board and gave it a more serious thought.
Continue reading “Opinion: Android 10’s new gestural navigation is far from ideal”
RCS (Rich Communication Services) deployment over the last 3 years seems to have been progressing at a snails pace. Just recently, the big four US carriers announced the formation of the “Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative” (CCMI) with the goal of bringing RCS to Android by 2020. Most frustratingly, there are plans for a new app and the carriers don’t seem to be collaborating with Google at all.
Google’s yearly hardware event launch is now over and the ‘Made by Google’ brand of devices has now expanded. There have been a couple of big announcements, so in case you missed them, here’s a quick recap of everything released today.
Continue reading “Recap: Here’s all the new hardware Google announced today”
I could probably go on a whole rant here about YouTube Music, but let’s just save that for another day. Today, however, Google announced that the YouTube Music app would come preinstalled on all new Android 9 and 10 devices, explicitly noting the Pixel series.
Continue reading “YouTube Music will come preinstalled on new Android 9 and 10 devices”
Something that I noted in my review of the Google Pixelbook and Chrome OS was a problem with external mice, specifically with the scroll wheel speed/acceleration. I found its scrolling to be a bit too fast for my taste, and while Chrome OS does let you adjust the mouse cursor speed, there aren’t any options to adjust the mouse acceleration speed.
Continue reading “Chrome OS will soon get a toggle to disable mouse acceleration”
For years, Google devs have always included an Easter egg within Android settings. In the past, we’ve had flappy bird variants, cat games, and others. With the release of Android 10 this past Tuesday, this is no exception. This time, Google has included a Nonogram mini-game.
Continue reading “Android 10’s Easter egg features a Nonogram mini-game”
Right on cue on the 3rd of September, Google is now rolling out the next version of Android: Android 10. That’s right, gone are the desserts. This release is designed to make your life easier with features like on-device machine learning, better privacy and security controls, gesture navigation, dark mode, and more. Let’s take a look at the top new features in Android 10.
Over a decade has passed since the first version of Android was released to the public. Many things have happened since then, but today, the Android brand is changing.
Continue reading “Android is switching from desserts to numbers and getting a new brand look”
Back in early June at Google’s first Stadia Connect, the company laid out the logistics of the service, including pricing, game availability, and launch details. Today, Google announced more games coming to Stadia along with new trailers.
Continue reading “Google announces more game titles coming to Stadia”
