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– via The Verge
It’s Huge, it’s great and its near to PERFECT. And above of all it won’t BEND
After watching Apple unapologetically release the gigantic iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung release the fourth iteration of its massive Galaxy Note, getting a 6-inch phone from Google seems almost par for the course. Huge phones are the new normal, but the Nexus 6 somehow manages to feel supersized even by today’s surreal standards. The basic stats are already known: a Quad HD screen, a powerful Snapdragon 805 processor, a 13-megapixel camera, and a battery big enough to power it all. But the stats don’t tell the real story. The real story is simple: this Motorola-made phone was code-named “Shamu,” and it’s entirely appropriate. Even in this age of big phones, the Nexus 6 is a whale.
It looks very much like an oversized Moto X, with metal edges and a hard plastic back that actually feels pretty good, like a very hard and unbreakable eggshell. Like the Moto X, it has a curved back that adds a little more thickness than you may want in a phone this size — but that’s likely a bigger problem for your pocket than it is for your hand. It actually feels really natural once you get used to the size. The edges are not exactly curved, but they’re not too sharp either, so you can almost believe you can use this thing with one hand in a pinch. Almost.
We’ll have more to say about Android Lollipop in the coming days and weeks, but for now suffice to say it looks great on the Nexus 6. I’m especially happy with the new multitasking and notification options — they’re really a lot more clever than you might expect. It also runs fast on this device. Even face unlock seems to work better than it used to, thanks to some software trick that has it running in the background while you look at your notifications.
Google’s also added other small touches like a feature that redacts certain information from incoming notifications that may include sensitive items, so that someone won’t get the whole story if they glance at your phone. Another feature uses NFC pairing and then Bluetooth to let you transfer the entirety of your old Android device into your new one while they sit side by side. One other hardware trick is Turbo Charging, which will get a nearly dead battery back up to 6 hours of life with 15 minutes of charging at an increasingly higher voltage.
THE BIGGEST THING TO GET EXCITED ABOUT IS THE NEXUS 6’S CAMERA
But the biggest thing (besides the screen, of course) to get excited about with the Nexus 6 is the camera. We’ll obviously need to spend a lot more time with it to give it a proper review, but at first blush the 13-megapixel setup here is wildly better than last year’s Nexus. The shutter is instant and the results — if only on this bright AMOLED screen — are really solid.
Photography by Josh Lowensohn.
– via The Verge
When Samsung released its Chromebook 2 earlier this year, it shipped with the company’s own Exynos 5 Octa chipset. And you can still buy those 11.6 and 13-inch models — though better Chromebooks exist. Today, Samsung’s adding a third option: a second 11.6-inch Chromebook 2 powered by an Intel processor. To be more specific, it’s a fanless Celeron N2840 chipset that can run at up to 2.58GHz. The Intel Chromebook 2 has 2GB of RAM, whereas the models running Samsung’s own chip feature 4GB of memory, so you may need to occasionally cut back on the number of tabs you’ve got open. If you’re set on an Intel chip, Acer’s C720P with an i3 processor is another option. Storage remains the same at 16GB; obviously Chrome OS places a huge focus on keeping your documents, music, photos, and other content in the cloud.
THIS CHROMEBOOK 2’S MORE DURABLE THAN THE OTHERS
Samsung says it’s made improvements when it comes to the Chromebook 2’s durability and construction. Each of the four corners is now reinforced by metal, as are the USB ports. There’s also a metal frame behind the display, which should contribute to the laptop’s overall rigidity. So the Chromebook 2 should be able to endure daily travels and the occasional bump just fine. But don’t spill anything on it; Samsung’s made it more resilient, but there are still no protections against liquids. That seems like the next logical step — but maybe not for a $250 product. Elsewhere, it’s still the same ugly design we saw before with fake leather stitching intact. (If you’re going for the leather look, then why is it silver?) This one features the 1366×768 resolution display, which has pretty subpar viewing angles and just doesn’t look as nice as the 1080p screen in the 13-inch, non-Intel model.
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Since a lot of consumers remain unfamiliar with Chromebooks, Samsung has collaborated with Google for a new “Google Help” app. It’s essentially Amazon Mayday for Chromebooks; click a button and you’re connected over video chat to a support representative at Samsung’s North Carolina operations center. From there, they can take control of your screen to show you how to accomplish common tasks, change settings, or fix any problems you might be experiencing. Samsung’s reps don’t work around the clock like Amazon’s people, though; you can talk to them Monday through Friday from 10AM to 7PM ET.
Pre-orders for the Intel-powered Chromebook 2 start today and Samsung says it will be widely available through retail channels next week. The company sells a ton of its other Chromebook 2 configurations and says it’s the leading manufacturer of Chrome OS notebooks. I see little reason to doubt those claims. You can bet plenty of people will be buying this one, too. It’s not the most powerful Chromebook out there by and stretch, but it’s built to last and runs for up to 9 hours on a charge. At $250, that’ll suit quite a few people just fine.
Photos by Sean O’Kane
SAMSUNG CHROMEBOOK 2 WITH INTEL HANDS-ON PHOTOS
– via Wired
The Segway. The Bluetooth headset. The pocket protector.
What do these three technologies have in common? They all pretty much work as promised. They all seem like good ideas on paper. And they’re all too dorky to live.
Now, far be it from me to claim that nerdiness equals lack of popularity potential. But I contend that dorkiness and nerdiness are two different qualities. While nerdiness implies a certain social awkwardness that’s ultimately endearing, dorkiness connotes social obliviousness that opens you to deserved ridicule.
Guess which category Google Glass will fall under when it goes “mainstream?”
Forget about the privacy concerns for a second. I don’t think you have to get that serious to recognize the inherent antisocialness of Google Glass. All you have to do is look at the guy in the picture at the top of this post. Or any of the rest of the guys on White Men Wearing Google Glass, a new Tumblr that serves up the data needed to transform the hypothesis “Google Glass is too dorky to succeed” into a proven scientific theory.
Disagree? The floor is open for falsification. Start your own Tumblr: People Who Look Cool While Wearing Google Glass.
Before its release, some of the smartest people in tech predicted that the Segway would change the world. And even when the world joined in a collective “Huh?” when the much-hyped secret Ginger project was revealed to be a gyro-balanced scooter, the idea still kind of made sense. If we were all riding around on Segways now, cities would probably be better places to live compared to the car-infested streets we still endure.
But that transformation hasn’t happened. And it won’t. Why? Because Segways are lame. They’re too rational. They fail to acknowledge all the irrational reasons people love their cars.
Similarly, Google Glass fails to acknowledge that walking around with a camera mounted on the side of your face at all times makes you look dorky. Think of the Bluetooth headset: it’s a really sensible way to use your phone without having to take it out of your pocket—so sensible that there’s really no reason not to keep that headset in your ear most of the time.
But you don’t, do you? There’s a reason that Saturday Night Live put a Bluetooth headset on Jason Sudeikis in its recurring “Two A-Holes” sketches.
Google Glass, like the Segway, is what happens when Silicon Valley spends too much time talking to itself. Maybe that’s even overstating the case: The rhetoric around Google Glass is what happens when important tech people spend a little too much time congratulating each other.
There’s really nothing wrong with Google Glass as a technological experiment. The future will include some kind of wearable smart technology, and it’s important for Google to be experimenting in that direction.
But Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s presentation at TED, in which he characterized wearing Google Glass as somehow more macho than pulling your smartphone out of your pocket, underscores the tone-deafness that can envelop Silicon Valley when VIPs get a little too excited about the Next Big Thing. Brin, after all, is a guy who thinks nothing of engaging in spontaneous yoga in the middle of a crowded tech conference. This isn’t a bad thing—on the nerd to dork scale, it definitely tilts toward “nerd.”
But if you’re one of the shareholders helping to keep Google’s shares trading above $800, the dork factor of Google Glass should give you pause. Google is still trying to crack the secret of monetizing mobile technology, which so far hasn’t proven as lucrative as its desktop search business. Google Glass may be a fun experiment in building another mobile platform to attract as-yet-unimagined revenue streams.
But making money on consumer technology requires that consumers embrace that technology. If Google Glass makes you look as cool as the guys in that Tumblr, that embrace is about as likely to happen as you hugging a Segway. Or Robert Scoble in the shower.
Big speakers, high-resolution display, and there’s even a built-in projector
– via The Verge
Ashton Kutcher is a Lenovo Product Engineer. I used to dismiss that as being akin to will.i.am’s honorary title of Director of Creative Innovation at Intel, but Mr. @apluskappears to honestly fancy himself a Hollywood version of Marc Andreessen: investing his time and effort into tech projects that take his fancy. Kutcher’s been flying to Beijing to meet with Lenovo designers, hosting focus groups to learn what people want, and now he’s introducing the first product of what the company calls a collaborative relationship: theYoga Tablet 2 Pro.
This is a 13.3-inch Android tablet with a difference. Inside the large, grip-friendly cylinder that runs along one of its sides is housed a pico-projector. It’ll mirror whatever content you have on screen and actually performs very respectably. It falls short of Lenovo’s ambitious claim of delivering “an instant 50-inch theater experience,” but is just good enough to be an intriguing extra for niche use instead of a pure gimmick. A set of stereo speakers and the first subwoofer built into a tablet augment the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro’s credentials as an entertainmen hub. As Kutcher recited excitedly during last night’s presentation, Lenovo’s data shows that as much as 80 percent of tablet use occurs at home, so giving people more while sacrificing some portability is a trade the company is willing to make.
TRADING AWAY SOME PORTABILITY FOR MORE OF EVERYTHING ELSE
The Yoga Tablet 2 Pro will never be mistaken for an iPad Air, but it’s also not as heavy or awkward as one might expect from a 13-inch tablet. An integrated kickstand allows it to rest at a variety of angles and includes a cutout that can be used to hang the entire device up on a wall. Unfortunately, with the power button on one side and the projector-activating switch on the other, the Tablet 2 Pro won’t happily stand up in a vertical orientation. It has a bright, attractive display with decent viewing angles and a QHD (2,560 x 1,440) resolution that comes in a lot more useful at this size than on smaller devices like the LG G3. Alas, the projector is limited to a mediocre WVGA resolution, so you’ll never get the highest image fidelity out of it, but it can still be a neat way to watch a movie with someone else. Plus, the speakers do indeed pack a bigger punch than you’d get from any other tablet. The best way to look at this tablet is as a portable, projectable TV that can also run the full gamut of Android apps.
– via Mashable
The top secret experiments at Google’s skunkworks operation, known asGoogle X, now reportedly include a strange new approach to display technology.
Google’s experimental displays will come in all shapes and sizes and fit together in modular pieces, much like a set of Lego blocks, sources told The Wall Street Journal.
Once connected to each other, the smaller screens will have the ability to form one seamless, larger display.
The effort is said to be led by former MIT professor, Mary Lou Jepsen, Google X’s head of display research, who also founded Pixel Qi, a company focused on developing low-power mobile screens you can read in direct sunlight.
Little else is known about the modular screens at this point, but one source with knowledge of the project did offer a comment as to its development. “
The big challenge is to electronically, and through software, do the stitching between the seams
The big challenge is to electronically, and through software, do the stitching between the seams,” the source told the Journal.
Given the mixed responses to Google’sNexus smartphones and Chrome notebooks, the notion of more hardware from Google isn’t necessarily packed with promise.
Still, if you imagine a wide array of modular smart screens distributed throughout a hotel or airport, allowing you to connect your small, portable screen to larger stationary ones, all equipped with Google Now, suddenly the modular screen idea gets a lot more interesting.
Despite the success of Google’s overall business and its ambitious approach to innovation, the Google X lab pedigree is no guarantee of mainstream traction for any of its new creations. Google X projects Google Glass and the company’s self-driving car have both garnered a good deal of attention, but neither has managed to gain any significant foothold as a commercial venture.
However, a recent Google X creation, Project Wing, an autonomous, drone-powered delivery system, indicates that the company’s research remains aggressive in its approach toward innovation — regardless of commercial considerations.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by Mashable for comment on the report.
– via Gizmodo
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Nexus tablet. 2013’s Nexus 7 was a wonderful if underpowered little device, and there hasn’t been a bigger version since 2012’s Nexus 10. But a newcomer is almost certainly on the way soon, a 9-inch tab that could be the best of both worlds.
Up to this point Google has anointed ASUS and Samsung with Nexus tablet status, but all signs point to HTC this time around.
It’s an interesting choice; HTC’s last tablet was the Flyer, a 7-incher that came out back in 2011, cost $500 at launch, and ran Android Gingerbread 2.0 out of the box. It wasn’t exactly a success, and as a result HTC has stayed out of the tablet game entirely. But while it’s been a while since HTC tried its hand at a tablet, its design sense has come a long, long way in those intervening years. It’s about time to try again.
Reports from the WSJ, The Verge, and Android Police all point to HTC as the maker of the Nexus 9. And if that wasn’t quite enough to convince you, Nvidia explicitly mentions an HTC Nexus 9 in some legal documents that surfaced as part of a patent battle with Qualcomm. And an HTC device just recently passed through the FCC.
Probably “Nexus 9.” Leaks repeatedly refer to the tablet as such, when they aren’t referring to it by a codename “Volantis” or sometimes “Flounder,” a codename once rumored to be for a Nexus 8. And of course “Nexus 9” also lines up with Google’s traditional “Nexus [screensize]” naming scheme for tablets.
That said, if Google wanted to switch things up, now would be the time; there hasn’t been a new Nexus tablet in over a year, and rumor has it that Google’s confusingly conflicting “Nexus [iteration]” naming scheme for Nexus phones might stop short of “Nexus 6” because Blade Runner. So if there’s a time to start from scratch, or just to let a Nexus be a Nexus, full stop, it’s now.
The most we have to go on for looks come from a render from Android Police, created from some (pretty bad photos of) leaked product materials. The leaked press materials show the Nexus 9 looking very iPad mini-y from the front, with some very Nexus 5-ish styling on the back.
The leaked info also mentions zero-gap aluminum construction, and front-facing speakers that aren’t quite visible in the poorly lit leak. But given HTC clearly has a love of front-facing speakers (and rightly so) it wouldn’t be a surprise at all to see them.
When it comes to dimensions, the leak puts the Nexus 9 at 7.9mm thick, and 14.7 ounces for the Wi-Fi only model. That makes it slightly thicker but also about a bit heavier than the (smaller!) 7.5mm and 11.7 ounce iPad mini. It’s almost as heavy as Sony’s 10.1-inch Xperia Z2. Of course, all that says nothing about how it will actually feel, which makes all the difference.
Update: A leaked image from upleaks shows the back of the Nexus 9 sporting that characteristic Nexus 5 design and an HTC logo. It looks a bit more squat than we’d expected, but at 9 inches, it’s going to have to be a a bit wider than the iPad mini. No confirmation on the front-facing speakers, but if you look closely you can see a lack of grills at the bottom. Here’s to hoping!
The Nexus 9 is expected to run on Nvidia’s new Tegra K1 chip, the same brain that makes Nvidia’s Shield tablet so great. This is mentioned in the leak from Android Police, and all but confirmed by the same Nvidia legal documents that reference the tablet by name.
HTC’s fresh new Nexus will probably have 4:3 aspect ratio with a 8.9-inch, 2048 x 1440, 281 PPI screen. That’s a just slightly lower resolution screen than the retina iPad mini, which gets up to a PPI of 326 while using roughly the same resolution, thanks to a smaller 7.9-inch screen. As for the rest of the specs, you can expect 2GB RAM with options for 16GB and 32GB of storage, a 3MP front-facing camera and a 8MP rear-facer with OIS, and an option for an LTE data connection.
It’s worth noting here that the info on Nexus 9 specs come pretty much entirely from a single source: Leaked promotional materials obtained byAndroid Police. That said, they seem pretty reasonable, and the fact that Nvidia’s involvement with the Nexus 9 has been confirmed elsewhere lends some credence to this info.
According to the big Android Police leak, the Nexus 9 could be a $400 for the 16GB Wi-Fi model, and $500 for its bigger 32GB cousin. That sounds like a lot compared to the $230 Nexus 7, but it’s on par with the original Nexus 10 and the retina iPad mini (despite being bigger). It’s also $100 cheaper than 10-inchers like the Galaxy Tab S, Xperia Z2, and iPad Air that all start at $500 for 16GB.
Soon and very soon. Reports from the WSJ and The Verge suggest its release is imminent, and those leaked Nvidia legal docs point to a Q3 release which would put it somewhere at the end of this month. Android Police’s leak, on the other hand, puts the release at early Q4. A few hard dates have bubbled up—including October 8th and October 16th—but neither come from especially reliable sources.
That the Nexus 9 is coming very soon is almost certain though. The final launch of Android L is due for this fall, and it would make perfect sense for the Nexus 9 to accompany it. Not to mention that the Nexus 7 has been out of stockon the Play Store for months now.
We’re definitely due for a new Nexus tablet, and if the rumors are right it looks like the Nexus 9 could land with a serious splash. And considering that Google has established something of a habit of announcing its new Nexus devices in a flurry of press releases with no accompanying event, you can expect it any day now.
– via Gizmodo
Google’s slew of fall releases is coming any time now, including the final version of Android L, a new behemoth Nexus phone, and the Nexus 9, Google’s first tablet in years. Now, thanks to upleaks, we may have gotten a glimpse of the latter.
We already know a lot about the Nexus 9, But until now, we’d barely seen a glimpse of the thing. The best we had to go on was a render by Android Police. This purported actual product shot from upleaks is showing the thin little sucker looking a fair bit more squat than we’d imagined, but complete with the Nexus branding a HTC label.
There’s still no look at the front side, where the Nexus 9 is rumored to sport front-facing speakers, but otherwise this looks legit. We should find out for real later this month.
– via Gizmodo
It’s been years since Google has given its Android platform as fresh a face as this. The mobile platform’s new look doesn’t have a name yet (lollipop?), but it’s here to tie things together.
What we’re seeing today are mostly the design highlights from Android L. Android’s Matias Duarte outlined his team’s concept of material design, which will work to bring together tablets and phones, mostly by using cards, it seems like.
It’s pretty! It relies on an exposed navigation bar and material that can pop out and reform intelligently. App developers can specify an “elevation value,” and has guidelines that lets the UI adapt to different screensizes, of where there are dozens and dozens for Android hardware.
The UI also includes rich, animated touch feedback, to make for a more responsive experience and more seamless transitions. Here are a few looks at what that means in practice.
If all of that sounds like jargon (basically if you’re a non-dev), here’s a walkthrough of what Gmail looks like now. It’s got new typography that works as effectively on small screens (think smartwatch) and large (think giant tablet), with the same designs on every screen.
Thanks to Polymer, which Google announced last year, it’ll find its way easily to desktop applications as well. They’ll all work at 60FPS on the web.
The first of the new features Google wants to highlight is the one you’ll care most about: UI. Expect more animations, more touch feedback. Your interactions don’t exist in two dimensions, but three.
Case in point, the phone dialer, which has ripple touch effects and material colors that really pop.
We’ve obviously seen animations before, but in action here it actually looks zippy instead of slowing the device down. Your mileage is going to vary depending on your device, of course. It may spell trouble for aging handsets.
Notifications are getting some tweaks as well; they’ve been streamlined so that you can have access to everything—and be able to interact with it—from the lockscreen. Double tap on a notification to launch the app, swipe to dismiss, and swipe away to access your device.
It’s definitely more visually appealing! There are also “heads up” notifications now, that appear on the top of the display (as in iOS) that you can swipe away.
PINs and lockscreens pattern unlocks are almost never not dumb and annoying. Android L is adding something called “personal unlocking,” which knows if you’re wearing an Android (Wear)-powered watch and keeps your phone unlocked, because it knows you’re there (or that someone stole your watch, too).
It’s not just look and feel that are getting an update; Chrome is getting a lot of love on mobile as well. It’s getting a major redesign—including some of that material design fanciness—which means more cards!
There are some nice touches; if you search for Starry Night, colors from the painting will be applied to the test bars you see. Open multitasking, and you get a card for each of your tabs. Which will be pretty panic-inducing if you—like me and maybe everyone—has way too many tabs open at any given time.
There’s also a new App Indexing UI (pay attention devs!), the main takeaway for Android users being that if you’re in Chrome and click an OpenTable link, you’ll get sent straight to the restaurant page in the OpenTable app. But because everything is a card, it all feels seamless.
Another benefit of apps communicating even better? If you’re looking up the Ferry Building in Google Earth, the Google Search bar will remember, and show you the Google Earth result. That’ll work for any apps that want to join in, not just Google products.
Another more dev-facing development, but you should see the benefits as an end user. There’s a new runtimem called ART, which was written from the ground up to support ARM, x86, and MIPS, and gives a 2x performance benefit without devs having to lift a little dev finger.
It’s also 64-bit compatible, more memory efficient, and has a pretty relatable name.
Google’s committed to catching up with Direct X 11, and is including Android expansion packs with things like shaders and tessilations. A look at Unreal Engine 4 running on some Nvidia hardware looked great, but when do graphics demos not!
The claim is PC-level graphics performance in devices coming as soon as this fall, which would be great, but maybe worth unpacking that grain of salt you have handy.
Project Volta has the best name-for-something we’ve seen so far, possibly this year? It’s a way to make battery life more efficient. It provides lots of stats so devs can see what’s sucking power and why, while the job scheduler API keeps apps limited when power’s running low.
There’s also a new Battery Saver mode, which cuts off Wi-Fi and display power. Like airplane mode with superpowers. It reportedly will squeeze out an extra 90 minutes of battery time for you.
What Google also made clear is that L isn’t just about your phone or tablet. It’s about bringing together a broad range of products—including some that don’t exist yet—whether they’re watches or cars or home gear.
So far they’re short on details, which is understandable; a lot of the parts involved are still unknowns. But Google definitely has the pieces in place to make that happen; voice recognition, context awareness, and now a unified design that helps devices of not just different sizes but entirely different purposes communicate more easily.
So far the L release is just a quick preview, so we can expect a whole lot more once it finally actually launches this fall (including a real name). But in the meantime, it looks like the biggest gains are going to be in that unified design, one that’s flat and layered and animated, in ways that are definitely fun to look—and hopefully not a strain on your system.
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