The last Chromebox we saw from ASUS went on sale over a year ago starting at a mere $179, and now the company has announced its successor today at its Computex press conference in Taipei. For the uninitiated, Chromebox’s are desktop Chrome OS computers without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor included.
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As first reported by Android Police and listed on a Samsung support page for the Galaxy Tab S 8.4, it seems that Verizon’s variant of the tablet is now receiving an OTA update to Android 5.0.2 Lollipop.
The software version for the Galaxy Tab S 8.4 becomes T707VVRU1BOD4, and to check if the Lollipop update has reached your device you need to open your Settings app and select About device.
We would’ve hoped this update would be to 5.1.1, as earlier 5.0 versions have been known to cause a bevy of problems for many devices, but alas we can only hope that Samsung did extensive enough testing to fish out any significant problems.
One of the big additions to Android with the unveiling of Android M last week is more granular permission controls, allowing developers to ask for access to things like the microphone or GPS only once they need them, and for users to be able to revoke one or all of these permissions when they’d like. What wasn’t discussed on the keynote stage, however, is that the Chrome browser already has these features. Here’s how to use them:
We can’t be sure whether or not this was what OnePlus meant when they said they’d “shake up the industry” on June 1st, but either way the company is holding flash sales on the OnePlus One at different times today through this Sunday, June 7th.
Here’s the full schedule of the next times the sale will go live:
June 2 – 2:00 GMT (10 pm EST -1 day)
June 3 – 12:00 GMT (8 am EST)
June 4 – 2:00 GMT (10 pm EST -1 day)
June 5 – 12:00 GMT (8 am EST)
June 6 – 2:00 GMT (10 pm EST -1 day)
June 7 – 12:00 GMT (8 am EST)
During the flash sales (devices may go fast, so you’ll have to be quick) OnePlus is offering the 16GB Silk White OnePlus One for $249 and the 64GB Sandstone Black model for $299. That’s a pretty good steal for a solid alternative to the Nexus 6, which was priced unusually higher than its Nexus predecessors.
OnePlus long ago confirmed that they were working on the OnePlus 2 and said it was slated for “sometime in 2015,” but that’s all we know about that device.
The last time we saw Google’s accounts settings page receive a fresh coat of paint was last December when the company brought it up to date with the new Material design language, and it seems they’ve gone ahead and updated it again recently.
We reported back in May that Google was adding age-based ratings to all apps in the Play Store as determined by the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC), and now it seems those ratings are starting to appear like in the example above.
Some apps display “Unrated” where the rating should be, which either means the developer didn’t complete the surveys Google asked them to by the beginning of May, or the IARC hasn’t finished rating all apps in the store yet. Google warned in the announcement of age-based that by not completing these simple surveys about their apps by May, developers would risk having their apps blocked in some territories.
The IARC ratings will vary by region, as different territories like the EU and United States have their own participating bodies in the IARC who set their own standards – the ESRB in the US, for example –but they shouldn’t vary too widely. Below are the ratings for the United States.
Google says age-based ratings “will give developers an easy way to communicate familiar and locally relevant content ratings to their users and help improve app discovery and engagement by letting people choose content that is right for them.“
Google may have found itself in hot water recently over spam and offensive content finding its way into Google Maps, but the team behind the mapping service isn’t letting that stop them from celebrating its 10th birthday.
Starting yesterday at Google I/O and culminating in a final “celebration of coding” at Disney World on June 26th, the Maps team will be making its way across the country in a customized 1959 GM tour bus, stopping in 10 places along the way to hold developer meetups, show off apps built using the Maps API, and even make an appearance on Sesame Street. Stops will be in Utah, Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Georgia and Florida.
If you’d like to check out the bus on one of its stops (anyone is welcome to), there’s a website up where you can find all the information you’ll need.
Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group has been on a tear at I/O these past two days, demoing lots of new and interesting innovations that may one day hit production and make all of our lives much, much better. One of such projects is Project Abacus, which is seeking to all but eliminate the use of passwords for authentication.
Put simply, our smartphones can collect a lot of information about how we go about our day – how fast we walk, how well we type using our phone’s keyboard, how we talk – and the ATAP group thinks that using this data for authentication is 10x safer than fingerprints, and 100x safer than 4 digit PIN codes. They think that because, well, they’ve gathered lots of data on it – the company has been running trials of Project Abacus since last year in partnership with 33 universities and in total has collected 40 terabytes of data across 28 different states. They did not, however, say how much more secure they are than old-fashioned email and password combinations.
While Abacus runs in the background on your phone and collects data about you, it is constantly calculating a trust score that is basically a score of how confident it is that you are who you say you are, the owner of the phone. When you launch an app, take Netflix, if Abacus can successfully verify your identity, you’ll be logged in automatically. If it is unable to get a high trust score for you, Abacus will revert back to asking for a password. ATAP also says that different apps could theoretically require different trust scores – a banking app would most certainly want a higher trust score than that of a game.
Project Abacus doesn’t totally eliminate passwords but it’s one step closer, and makes total elimination of them a logical conclusion. And anything that will further mitigate the risk of intruders accessing my digital life is fine by me. When the world is putting this much energy into obfuscating away old-fashioned passwords (don’t forget Smart Lock Passwords) you know their time is up. A world that runs on these highly secure trust scores is on the horizon, I can feel it.
For one reason or another, roughly 4.4 billion people around the world are still without reliable, consistent access to an Internet signal. Google’s mission since its very founding has been to “organize the world’s knowledge,” but that isn’t so easy when vast amounts of information can’t even get online, which is one reason why its Project Loon balloons for spreading Internet by hot air balloons exists. The technology giant has made a lot of progress since announcing the project to the public in 2013, with recent tests seeing the balloons travel over 5,000 miles and provide hours of connectivity to locations that had otherwise never seen it before. Today Google is sharing two improvements that it has introduced to the project.
The first is that the team has created a 50-foot launcher called Autolauncher which cuts take-off time down to 15 minutes from 45 previously. The cube-shaped unit (pictured above) does this in a couple ways: it provides tall canvas sides to block winds up to 15 MPH (winds of 6 MPH or greater are prohibitive to take-off), it clamps down the balloon into place until take-off, and it provides a perch for the antenna which provides Internet so as to prevent it from swinging and setting the balloon off its trajectory.
The second improvement to Project Loon is that the balloons can now communicate with one another. Previously to beam Internet to the ground each balloon needed to be within 50 miles of the ground station of a telecommunications company that it would gain its LTE spectrum from. Now, however, the balloons can be anywhere from 250 to 500 miles from a station because balloons closer to a ground station can pass high-frequency signals between each other. This is the same idea as neighborhood mesh networks, where cheap routers can communicate with each other, share WiFi, and continue to communicate with each other even if the public Internet goes down. As a result, Google can now provide Internet to an entire region like West Africa with fewer expensive ground stations than before.
The hope now is to successfully provide a few days of continuous service at a time within its test areas (wind has proven to be a big challenge to doing this), and once it overcomes the challenges to accomplishing that it wants to roll out service to underserved markets such as Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, ideally by the end of 2016.
Google’s Chromecast dongle for pushing digital content from ones phone, tablet, or laptop to a TV screen isn’t exactly a high-end device – the full retail price is $35, and it’s on sale constantly – but its unexpected to many been a huge success for the company. Over 17 million of the dongles have been sold, the Cast button has been pushed over 1.5 billion times, and Google says Chromecast users consume 66% more content per day than when the device launch in 2013. To push the network of Cast buttons and supported content even further, Google has released some new APIs for developers to build richer experiences.
One major barrier to adoption of new hardware and software solutions in the workplace is a top-down requirement that all communications are encrypted, secured from the prying eyes of today’s brazen hackers. It’s the reason why there are still thousands of businesses out there shockingly still issuing Blackberry phones. With more and more consumers and companies alike clamoring for a bring-your-own-device future, how can employees ensure their devices are as secure as chief information officer’s would like? Google has an idea.
Project Vault, shown off today at Google’s I/O conference, is a microSD card with full operating system, ARM-based processor, NFC chip, and antenna packed inside of it. Oh, and 4GB of storage. While that’s pretty incredible in and of itself, what really makes this microSD card special is that the OS it runs is known as a Real Time Operating System (RTOS), and is packed with a suite of cryptographic solutions for keeping data secure and messaging with others using Project Vault microSD cards encrypted. An RTOS is different from the operating systems most of us are used to (i.e. Unix) that can’t run every process we throw at them simultaneously but switch between tasks rapidly, ensuring at the very least that the computer is still responsive to its user (i.e. doesn’t freeze). Real-time operating systems have stricter deadlines to complete the tasks that are thrown at them.
The main function of Project Vault will be super-secure messaging so hackers, or the NSA, cannot snoop (which also explains why Vault uses an RTOS – all resources are dedicated to encrypting and sending/receiving messages quickly). The encryption only works when both the sender and the receiver are using Project Vault SD cards, however, but it’ll work on any device with a microSD slot – so laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. are supported. Google says the microSD card can also be used to encrypt video and as an alternative to passwords (where the card could generate cryptographic key pairs and store them securely). The company has an SDK up on Github for it that developers can use to build applications for the new project. Maybe the next Snowden will send confidential documents to journalists using his smartphone?
We reported earlier today that support for Smart Lock Passwords, a new cross-platform password manager tool for Android and Chrome/OS, was already beginning to hit major apps including Netflix. Now it seems that the greater rollout is pushing on quickly, with the web interface now live and reports spreading that Smart Lock Passwords is showing up in the Settings app of Android 5.1 Lollipop devices for some owners.
By visiting passwords.google.com you can toggle Smart Lock for Passwords on and off depending on whether or not you want to save app and website passwords to your Google account. The benefit of using Smart Lock for Passwords, especially if you’re a Google loyalist, is that it’s a simple, clean way to save login credentials for all the apps and websites you visit using Chrome and Android and log in automatically. I also imagine it’s a scary addition for apps like 1Password which, while now have many other features to differentiate themselves, initially built their businesses off saving login credentials in one place. Saving login credentials and not other things like credit card details and drivers license info is probably enough for the average person, too.
As mentioned above there have also been reports of Smart Lock Passwords hitting the Settings area of some Android phones running newer versions of Android 5.0 and Google Play Services. This would lead us to believe that it’s either a server-side change or Google had hidden Smart Lock Passwords in a recent version of Play Services, but it’s probably the former. Here is what that looks like courtesy of AndroidPolice:
Be sure to watch out for the change and let us know if Smart Lock Passwords hits your device.
The newly-announced Android Pay is pretty cool – it allows you to pay at retail stores and inside mobile apps without having to take out your wallet or punch a bunch of card details into your glass-screened phone. But the logical conclusion to reducing the friction of paying for things is not tapping my phone against an NFC reader, but rather just not having to take out my phone at all! Well, without the same fanfare that was given to Android Pay, Google said they’ll have a solution for just that.
Update: Google is holding an “Ask the Experts” session today, June 3rd, at 2PM PDT where Sebastian Thrun, Peter Lubbers, and Jocelyn Becker from Udacity and Google will be answering user-submitted questions about the Android Nanodegree program. The Q&A session will be live-streamed on YouTube and there’s also a form where you can submit any questions you may have.
Yesterday Google’s Sundar Pichai said on stage at the company’s I/O conference that 8 out of every 10 phones that shipped worldwide last year were running Android, and that 600 million new smartphone users came online over the past year. That’s a lot of devices running the company’s smartphone OS, and they really want developers to realize the potential of their apps reaching that many people. So much so that they spent over $4 million developing an extensive Android development course in partnership with Udacity.
Android VP of Engineering Dave Burke’s presentation on Android M yesterday saw quite a few huge new additions coming to the OS from granular app permissions to improved battery standby management and, of course, Android Pay (check out our roundup). But one thing that might have got lost in the noise for some of you was Google’s newfound embrace of the USB Type-C standard and what it will actually do for you in practice.
USB Type-C is both flippable and bi-directional. That first attribute means that you won’t have to fiddle in the dark with plugging the USB cable connector into your phone the right-side up, because there isn’t a right-side up with Type-C.
More interesting, though, is the bi-directional ability of USB Type-C and Android M’s new interface support for it. What this means in theory is that, while this wouldn’t be practical, you could connect your Android phone to your laptop and charge your laptop with your phone instead of the other way around. You can also send files in either direction as was obviously possible before, but the new interface you see above for managing all these abilities in one place looks quite convenient.
Finally as you might be able to make out from the image above, Google is ready to welcome in more musicians with the warm embrace of MIDI support. This is big because while because 5.0 Lollipop brought support for some audio devices like USB microphones and amplifiers, it left out a lot of musical instruments that use the MIDI standard to send data back and forth between other devices. Maybe this will encourage more musicians and music app developers to consider Android again.
There was a lot to digest in today’s Google I/O keynote but one small, interesting new behavior change of note going into Android M is a new text selection floating toolbar, as you can see in the GIF above.
Whereas in the past primary actions of Cut, Copy, Paste, as well as other app-specific actions related to selecting text would probably be saved for a contextual action bar (an example of which is below), developers who want to keep their apps up-to-date with platform changes will now utilize this new toolbar which appears just above the text selection area. As you can see above, pressing the More icon will reveal a secondary menu where developers can add their own extra actions; the company in its design documents provides the example of Share, Search, and Translate actions appearing within the secondary menu in Gmail.
Another interesting system behavior change in Android M is a battery management tool called “Doze,” which we detailed in our Android M roundup, that disables most background activities when the OS detects that the device has gone unused for an extended period of time. The company says this has resulted in upwards of 2x longer standby time for Android devices running M versus those running Lollipop.
We’ve already done a roundup of the core changes coming in the next big release of Android, simply called “M,” so you should check that out. But we haven’t yet covered what additions and changes Android M brings to Google’s Internet TV platform, Android TV.
Besides improvements in surfacing family-friendly content, Google’s Play Store is getting a couple updates that developers in particular should be happy about, which we learned about today at the company’s I/O conference.
Spotify users, rejoice. Starting with a gradual rollout next month, the popular music streaming app will be available on Android Wear watches.
According to the company’s blog post, you’ll be able to navigate through and select something to play from all the music you’ve saved to Your Music as well as find new stuff in Browse. We don’t have much information on the Wear app yet as it hasn’t been released and the image above is the only one Spotify provided, but we’ll post more as soon as we get it.
As a big Spotify fan and power user I’m curious to see what the Browse section will look like on such a small screen, as Browse on smartphones contains sections for mood-based playlists, new releases, top charts, and more. Are you excited to get Spotify on your Wear watch?
Life is about seeing the wonders of the world for yourself, but Google thinks that the experience you get from reliving these moments later on through the tiny windows that today’s cameras produce is pretty limited. Which is why the company today at its I/O conference announced the release of an open-source VR camera rig specification called “Jump” which will make it much easier for creators to capture, process, and share 360-degree virtual reality video for the whole world to enjoy.
Google knows that most developers building mobile apps only have one or two devices in their possession to actually perform real-world tests of their apps on, which is why at Google I/O today it announced the launch of the Cloud Test Lab platform to automate the testing of mobile apps.
All developers need to do is upload their Android application to Cloud Test Lab and Google will run tests against it across the top 20 Android devices from around the world. When Google is finished running the tests, developers will receive a free report with screen videos of the app running on these devices as well as crash logs.
Cloud Test Lab will be coming to the Google Developer Console “soon.”
Update: Developers can find the preview images of Android M for Nexus 5 (GSM/LTE), Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Nexus Player on the Preview SDK page. Google has said updates to the preview version will roll out regularly and that they’ll come down over-the-air, so you won’t have to flash your phone again each time it’s updated.
Google has announced the next major iteration of Android, called Android “M,” which Android VP of Engineering Dave Burke emphasized has a “focus on quality end to end.” Here are the six core changes coming to Android with this release.
Thanks to a Reddit user in /r/MotoX who posted the image above, we’re now pretty sure that Android 5.1 Lollipop is rolling out OTA to owners of the Moto X Pure Edition.
Multiple users have entered the thread to confirm that the update has been hitting their 2014 Pure Edition devices this morning, mostly owners on T-Mobile.
This update comes shortly after 5.1 began rolling out to Moto X (2nd gen) and Moto E LTE users on U.S. Cellular. Unlike that rollout, we haven’t heard much from Motorola Senior Director of Software Development David Schuster on whether or not this rollout to the bloatware-free variant of the Moto X is wide or happening in some sort of soak test, but it seems like at the very least T-Mobile has green-lighted the update.
One user has also already posted the OTA link here which you can download and then install using our guide.
The well-reviewed (click here for our review) and hotly anticipated LG G4 is almost here for most major carriers here in the United States, but the exact date when you can pre-order the phone along with its launch date, pricing, and customization options vary across all of them. We’ve covered the announcements on this information from each carrier as they’ve trickled in, but thought it’d be helpful to collect everything we’ve got as of now into one post.
