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Wednesday 27 June 2012

Video: Nexus Q Social Streaming Media Player [ 27-06-2012 19:34 ]

Author: Irina Turina Source: Google Translation by: Paul Smith

The Nexus 7 was the big expectation on the hardware front at today's I/O event, but Google have unveiled another piece of kit, the Nexus Q. Billed as a 'social streaming media player' the device can stream content from the likes of Google Play and YouTube to a television set and speakers. You can control the device using your Android smartphone or tablet as long they are running at least Gingerbread (Android 2.3). Availability is scheduled for the next 2-3 weeks and you will be looking at parting with $299.99 if you want it. Check out the promo video below:

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Nexus 7 Goes Public At Last [ 27-06-2012 18:19 ]

Author: Ivanov Konstantin Source: Google Translation by: Paul Smith

Google today announced the launch of their first own-brand tablet device, the Nexus 7. Not that this was any great surprise to anyone who has even a passing interest in Android given the number of leaks and rumours that have been swirling around ahead of today's announcement. Even so let's take a quick recap of the specifications:

1280x800 HD display
Quad-core Tegra 3
GeForce 12-core GPU
NFC support
1 GB RAM
Battery life of 9 hours for video playback

The Nexus 7 will no doubt be seeking to take some market share from the tablet scene dominating iPad, but it might also grab some of the share currently being enjoyed by its Android brethren. In a sign of that the Nexus 7 is being setup with a model not wholly unlike that used for Amazon's Kindle Fire. Google stated that the "Nexus 7 is made for Google play" and Play store content is going to be brought right to the front of the Nexus 7 user experience with a new recommendations engine and recommendations widgets that can be plopped down on the device's homescreen.

The Nexus 7 will be using Google's mobile version of Chrome, the first such device to do so in fact. That means the current Android web browser we all know and love/hate will be replaced. Google Maps will also be coming along for the ride in its latest form, which means that it will feature offline support. As you would expect the operating system is the newly announced Jellybean.

Now as for the price this is where things get really interesting because the Nexus 7 will start at just $199. Pre-orders start right away and at such a low price its hard to see that this won't immediately gobble up some tablet buyers. The U.S., Canada and Australia will be the first to actually see the device from the middle of next month.

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Google Now Activating 12 New Android Devices Every Second [ 27-06-2012 17:08 ]

Author: Ivanov Konstantin Source: Google Translation by: Paul Smith

With Google hawking its wares at its annual I/O event today it's a fitting time to look at the state of Android through Google's numbers on the OS. At the conference the Big G revealed that Android has now notched up an extremely impressive 400 million devices worldwide. That's a pretty big number of course and cements Android's position as the number one smartphone operating system, but perhaps more impressive is the number of activations per day. Google is saying that Android is now seeing a million new devices activated each and every day. Looked at another way that's 12 new Android devices coming online every second of every day. In the time it's taken you to read this approximately 360 new Android devices have been activated.

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Google Now: Killer Feature? [ 27-06-2012 16:31 ]

Author: Ivanov Konstantin Source: Google Translation by: Paul Smith

Google's unveiling of Android 4.1 today brought a lot of new features to the table for Android users. One of the most exciting, potentially anyway, is Google Now. Essentially this feature gives your Android smartphone awareness of where you are and constantly feeds you relevant information that you might need as you go through your day. Now at this point you may be thinking that this just sound slike GPS and notifications, but hold on a moment because it's a bit more than that.

For example, making your way to a train station might prompt it to let you know when the next train is about to arrive. Another great example of the sort of behaviour you can expect is that it can offer you recommendations from a restaurant menu once you have arrived. Essentially this little puppy looks to see where you are, what you are doing and provides you with whatever information you might need to make that location and/or experience better.

We've seen some of this sort of behaviour before from services such as Siri, but this seems to be a bit more involved. Indeed it seems to be a bit more developed towards anticipating the user's needs whereas other services, like Siri, are more reactive based upon a user's input each and every time.

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Google Unveils Android 4.1 (Jellybean) [ 27-06-2012 16:00 ]

Author: Serge Novikov Source: Google Translation by: Paul Smith

Google's I/O event today (Wednesday) has seen the unveiling of Android 4.1 aka Jellybean. This latest iteration of Google's mobile operating system brings with it a slew of new features as you would expect. One of the bigger ones is known as Project Butter at Google. This was an effort to speed up Android and by the sounds of it it's succeeded with overall performance going up and a frame rate of 60 fps now being the norm. There's also a power saving measure tucked in there as well that sees the handset's processor bumped down a notch, only for the frequency to be bumped right back up when the user actually touches the screen.

Also of note is some progress in the voice input department. First of all we have Google's Speech Recognizer, which will allow Android devices running it to offer users the ability to dictate text input whether the handset has a data connection or not. Apparently this service will be tuned for U.S. English only at launch. Google's web search is also getting a bit of a boost in the voice department with users now able to ask Siri like questions of it and have corresponding answers spoken back to them.

Notifications is another area getting a makeover with Android 4.1. Coming into the mix are images and live updates, as well as more information in general. A two finger gesture will expand and collapse them. Android was the first of the mobile OS to offer notifications as we know them today so it shouldn't be much of a surprise to see them forging ahead here. Indeed it brings Android and Windows Phone Live Tiles more in line with each other and sort of leaves iOS out in the cold with, what is now, a pretty archaic looking notifications system.

Jellybean should be arriving on the Google Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Motorola Xoom around the middle of July with a SDK being made available to developers immediately.

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