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Moto 360 (3rd Gen) review: The pioneer of Android wearables is back, sort of

Back in 2016, Motorola made the decision to abandon the smartwatch market, citing it didn’t “see enough pull in the market” for another one. The original Moto 360 and even the 2nd Gen version were major strides in a relatively small Android wearable ecosystem. They were (and still are) pretty beloved devices by (as it was called then) Android Wear users. Fast forward to now and we now have a new Moto 360 running Wear OS, but it’s not exactly made by Motorola anymore.

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Poll: How much did you pay for your current smartphone?

It’s been over two years since we did our last poll like this. Since then, we’ve had more and more $1,000 smartphones come out but also a fair amount of solid budget phones like the Pixel 3a at $399. It seems that, despite the increasing price of flagship phones, the smartphone market is still quite dispersed over many different price points, maybe even more so than before. It’s almost hard to buy a bad phone now. Anyway, how much money did you shell out for the smartphone you’re using right now. Vote and discuss in the comments below.

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Google acquires Fitbit for $2.1 billion, still commits to investing in Wear OS

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.

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Weekend Poll: What is your favorite Made by Google product of 2019?

Nearly two weeks ago, Google announced its new lineup of Made by Google hardware. This included Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming service; Pixel Buds (2nd Gen), truly wireless earbuds; Pixelbook Go, a premium yet traditional clamshell Chromebook; Nest Mini, a more powerful and versatile Home Mini; Nest Wifi, a Google Wifi router and Google Home speaker combined; and, of course, the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, Google’s latest flagship smartphones.

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Opinion: Android 10’s new gestural navigation is far from ideal

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.

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Redditor details how to enable RCS messaging on any carrier and device with Google Messages

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.

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