Galaxy S6 Edge
A new trademark filing with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) seems to suggest that Samsung might be considering creating a larger-screened version of its Galaxy S6 Edge, the dual-curved variant of the flagship Galaxy S6.
For many of us, email is a necessary evil. Necessary because most of the business world still uses email to communicate important information, evil because it can end up controlling your life. When someone emails you with a question, or a request, or whatever else, they’re putting you on the offensive – giving you tasks to accomplish and things to do. But there’s one selfish act you can take to make the experience a little better for yourself – scheduling.
Well, things change fast. Earlier today we reported on comments from Motorola’s David Schuster that a soak test of 5.1 Lollipop was rolling out for the DROID Turbo, and only hours later Verizon has unexpectedly announced that the update will roll out over-the-air to device owners starting tomorrow.
The Android version of Google’s Chrome browser has a neat new feature in it, if you’re willing to use a beta build of the mobile browser.
Now when you long-press on an image in the browser, a new menu will appear which includes the alt-text of the image in question. Alt-text, or alternative text, is a way to describe what an image is of in the HTML of the webpage. This is particularly helpful for those with vision impairments, as screen readers which can read webpages out loud are able to tell them what images on the pages they visit are depicting when alt-text is attached.
This new feature, shared on Google+ by none other than Chrome evangelist François Beaufort, could be useful, for example, when viewing any images with writing on them that have been scanned and posted online, where the text on them may be hard to read. Including what they say in the alt-text would make reading old texts easier. Chrome Beta for Android can be downloaded from Google Play.
WordPress, the popular content management system which powers approximately 19% of all websites on the Internet (including this one), has released version 4.2 of its Android app with some nice new changes.
R.I.P., Beats Music. With Apple Music – Apple’s new streaming service that takes its recently acquired Beats Music and mashes it with the company’s home-grown iTunes – having officially launched today, the Android app has received an update that kills off the ability to start a free trial. Above are pictures before and after the update. The first image is of Beats Music 1.2.5, released on April 21st, and the second is of Beats Music 1.2.6, released today.
In a first for Apple, and alongside a recently released application that makes it easy to switch from Android to iOS (ugh, I know), the company will be pushing out an Android version of Apple Music, expected sometime in the fall. And Apple Music for iOS includes a migration assistant that makes it super easy to transfer playlists and saved music from Beats Music over to the new service, so we expect that to be in the Android version, too. If you, however, aren’t a huge fan of Apple, maybe now is the time to give Google Play Music All Access a try?
After some false starts and an accidental reveal, Motorola’s David Schuster posted last night to his Google+ account to confirm a soak test of Android 5.1 has begun for the Verizon DROID Turbo. Here’s what he said:
I know this is going to make some people happy…. we have started the DROID Turbo soak test for the Android 5.1 upgrade this evening with our forum registered users. If all goes well we will open it up later this week.
The full release notes are up on Motorola’s website as well. Aside from the normal stability improvements and 5.1 features like ‘interruptions’ for deciding which apps can make your phone buzz with notifications, there’s some Motorola-specific stuff in there like the Moto Action that turns the flashlight on and off with two chopping motions.
Expand
Expanding
Close
I honestly can’t think back far enough to remember the days when people had to rely on paper maps to navigate to places, but I can still appreciate how the combination of Google Maps and the Google-owned Waze makes life much easier than ever before. The one dedicated GPS I ever owned couldn’t even beat my Nexus 5 because it’s arrival estimates always seemed completely off-base. Unsurprising really, because unlike Google Maps, it didn’t have real-time information about traffic density on the roads my route would take me on. Now, Maps users in 12 cities in India will be able to enjoy the same real-time traffic information we have stateside.
After research firm comScore released data last month indicating that Android’s share of the US smartphone OS market dropped 1 percent during the three months ending in April, Kantar Worldpanel has its own research out which says the OS is gaining momentum stateside again.
Facebook is on a warpath to take over the digital advertising space, capturing 10% of the total $50 billion digital ad spend in 2014 with 50% year-over-year growth at the time, and today it’s making it easier for advertisers large and small to manage, track, and launch campaigns straight from their Android phones with a new app.
The app, simply called Facebook Ads Manager, launched initially as an iOS-only product back in February with the company saying at the time that an Android app would be coming later in the year. At the time of writing, Facebook hasn’t publicly announced the launch of this Android version – we noticed it show up on APKMirror. There isn’t too much crazy going on here, though, and it’s nearly identical to the iOS version.
The full feature line-up includes the ability to edit ads, get notifications when campaigns are about to end or run out of funds and how they’re performing, keep track of spending and update both payment methods and spending limits as needed, and create new ads or sponsored page posts.
As more than 50% of Facebook’s total advertising revenue now comes from mobile advertisements, and more attention moves to mobile in general, it only makes sense that the tools to make such ads are making their way to mobile screens. By making its ads products accessible on Android, Facebook is reducing the friction to spending money on its platform of 1.2 billion monthly visitors just that much easier.
Amongst those who regularly publish content to YouTube, the video site is known for picking favorites and being a black box in terms of the communication it holds with the community when it comes to anyone other than the site’s biggest stars. The company has as of late been trying to change that perception, though, by using the YouTube Creators channel as an outlet to recognize and acknowledge the feedback and concerns of its users. Today it published a new video outlining changes and new features coming soon to the video platform.
Owners of Android Wear watches: Does your device, without your intention, regularly go to menu for choosing a watch face? Maybe you’re crossing your arms and you feel a buzz thinking it might be alerting you to a new text message only to see your watch on that darned menu again? I don’t have a real fix for you, but there’s something you might want to try that may alleviate your frustration.
The number of railroad crossing accidents that occur in the United States has declined 80 percent since 1970, but last year that number inexplicably rose 9 percent to approximately 1,100, 270 of which resulted in deaths. Today Google and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced a partnership in which Maps users will receive audio and visual alerts when they’re coming close to a railroad crossing in their route, according to a report in the New York Times. The FRA has a vast database of every rail crossing in the country.
While other competing browsers have long had special modes that strip all extraneous content from the pages of articles so as to reduce distraction, Chrome has thus far only seen this option, commonly referred to as “Reader Mode,” appear as an experimental version. That’s even though the base Chromium browser has had an implementation of it available built-in for over a year now, and the Google Chrome team having had added an experimental toolbar icon for it to its mobile browser more than a year ago. It looks like the Chrome team might be close to a wide rollout, however.
Google Chrome has a neat experimental mode called Data Saver that, when enabled, will purportedly cut your browser bandwidth usage by up to 50%. You can download a beta of Data Saver from the Chrome Web Store. Now the browser tool has a new ability in the dev channel build of Chrome to replace images.
Chrome evangelist and ex-leaker François Beaufort shared the info to Google+, explaining that Data Saver mode is intended for mobile users on very low bandwidth networks. It works by sending your requests to visit a site through Google server’s which then runs the webpage through a compression technology (more info here) that removes anything that isn’t crucial to the webpage. Data Saver Lo-Fi, a flag that can be enabled for Data Saver, specifically removes images, replacing them with placeholder colorful graphics, and the images can be forced to load by long tapping one of the placeholders and pressing “Load image.” Google recently began rolling out the Data Saver compression technology to Android users in India and Brazil, both emerging markets where data reception is still spotty and unreliable. The technology only works on sites requested over HTTP, so sites where HTTPS is required won’t be compressed.
To enable Data Saver in your desktop version of Chrome you first need to switch your version of the browser to the developer channel (instructions here), install the Data Saver extension, and then visit chrome://flags/#data-reduction-proxy-lo-fi and toggle “Data Saver Lo-Fi mode” to “Always on.”
Typically desktop users already use much more bandwidth than mobile users, and this tool won’t be as big of a deal for those in developed nations with high caps on their broadband usage, but it could come in handy in places like hotels or on in-flight WiFi where data is either capped really low or just slow, or both. Some may be wary to use the tool, however, as it sends the pages you request to Google’s servers for modification before they reach the user.
Google employs a lot of engineers. Most software engineers know that when you have a box which can contain a variable amount of content – say, an input field or the title section of a blog post like the one above – that you need to make a decision as to what happens when more content than can initially fit into the box is inputted. Maybe you take the lazy way out and simply limit what the user can do so that their input doesn’t end up exceeding the character limit of the box, for example. Google has done something even lazier in Chrome for Android.
Let me preface this by saying that what I’m about to show you isn’t new, but I just learned about it so I’m sure it’ll be new to some of you too. Also it’s Friday, so why not see some neat stuff. With that out of the way, here’s what it looks like when you have any amount of tabs open in Chrome for Android under 100 tabs (images courtesy of Reddit user /u/Hamsna):
Normal, right? Right. Here’s what it looks like when you have 100 or more tabs open:
Let me help in the event that you haven’t noticed anything different in that second image:
It seems that someone at Google decided that it’d just be more work than it’s worth to come up with a more pragmatic solution, so it used an emoticon instead to say¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And how many people actually use more than 100 tabs, in a mobile browser no less? Only psychopaths, probably.
The Motorola update train continues rolling on. Today, we’ve got more information on updates to two of the company’s 1st-generation budget phones, the Moto E and Moto G.
Google is known for historically having a goal with search to get people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Search engines by design are intended to get you what you’re looking for on the first try, so it makes total sense that Google optimizes ruthlessly in hopes that you don’t have to click the next page link. But ever since the company introduced search cards it’s been evident that it wants to be the host of the information you’re looking for whenever possible. A new small change today adds on that.
The United States Supreme Court ruled today in favor of the union of same-sex couples, effectively giving new civil rights to LGBT couples by declaring that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, and Google is going all-out in its celebration.
Google Opinion Rewards is a neat app through which anyone can earn credit to spend on anything in Google Play – so long as you’re in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, or Japan. At least, until now. According to the changelog for an update released to the app today, now owners of Android phones in Mexico and Brazil can join in on the opportunity.
The survey questions that you may be asked to answer through Opinion Rewards, which can be alerted to you through push notifications, are sourced from market researchers who run the surveys through Google Consumer Surveys. Consumer Surveys gives these marketers some of the same tools and platform reach that those advertising products and services through Google get but to instead use to get answers to questions.
Companies who run these surveys get back anonymous and aggregated response data, so they won’t know who you are, and Google says questions that contain mature content, hateful or intolerant speech, or vulgar language are not allowed.
Meerkat, the mobile live-streaming app that competes with Twitter-owned Periscope, continues to move fast with new products that make its streams more accessible, today releasing an embeddable player.
Embeddable players allow anyone with some basic understanding of how to add HTML to a website to include widget-like objects on their sites. What this means in regards to Meerkat is that anyone who live streams using the company’s mobile app can now have their streams viewable from their own websites. We could, for example, host a 9to5 live stream on Meerkat and include the stream in this very post so you wouldn’t have to download an app to see it.
One of Meerkat’s partners with this launch is Discovery Channel, the media giant behind behind Shark Week, the annual week-long programming block all about, well, sharks. And since Shark Week starts on July 5th, the partnership includes Discovery Channel streaming clips all throughout the week of shark-based festivities from their @SharkWeek Meerkat account and through an embedded player on their website. The new embedded web player looks like this:
The player can be customized before it’s embedded – comments can be shown or hidden, there are three sizing options for the player, and if you’re not live it will show your next upcoming stream if you’ve scheduled one. Otherwise if you haven’t scheduled an upcoming stream it’ll show the stats from your last stream.
Even though competitor Periscope is owned and has its salaries paid by Twitter, who’s public market value is $22 billion, Meerkat has managed to stay nimble and ahead in the race to build out features that expand the potential audience of its streams. The company back in May released a developer platform and API upon which others could build their own Meerkat experiences – maybe a full-screen, leanback experience like YouTube TV, for example. The company also released its Android app ahead of Periscope.
The company has been fighting an uphill battle against Periscope ever since the Twitter-owned product launched, however, even though it had a month head start. In many countries including the United States, Periscope ranks much higher in overall downloads as well as in the social networking category, in both Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
It’s hard to say whether mobile live streaming is a winner-takes-all space, or both can live alongside each other in harmony. Periscope has the benefit of one today being more closely integrated with Twitter’s social network, the best in the world for following real-time news. But at the same time it only has roughly 300 million monthly actives, much less than Facebook and on-par with Instagram. How much of a competitive advantage that may be is uncertain. Only time will tell.
Google wants schools to take advantage of its Apps for Education suite of productivity tools and services, but it also recognizes that proper professional development is essential to enabling educators and transforming education. The company today announced the release of a free training platform that provides interactive lessons with a focus on how to successfully complete real classroom tasks and objectives using Google products.
The new platform is called Google for Education Training Center and builds upon a recent survey by the American Federation of Teachers which found that 71% of educators and administrators surveyed cited “adoption of new initiatives without proper training or professional development” as a primary source of stress in their work lives. The new tools are supposed to help teachers apply Google’s tools in the classroom and beyond.
The lessons, like how to get students collaborating using Drive and Docs, are organized around the three themes above and range in difficulty from beginner courses to those targeted at teachers who already know their way around Google’s products quite well but might inspiration on how to differently using the products with their students.
As part of the announcement, Google says that it has brought on the Chicago Public Schools, a school district including over 600 schools and 400,000 students, as a launch partner for the Training Center. The district will use Training Center as a part of its technology professional development program, and the course will count towards its teachers’ professional development hours.
“The Training Center reflects what we value most about education, focusing on the process of learning rather than the tools themselves,” the company says. More information about the Training Center and to try the lessons, Apps for Education customers can visit g.co/edutrainingcenter.
Noticed by a tipster speaking to the (unofficial) Chrome Operating System blog, Google Translate, the multilingual translation tool, has a neat way of converting text translations to speech.
Translate’s text-to-speech function can be used on both the original text and the translated version of the inputted text, which can be helpful when you’re not quite sure how to pronounce a phrase out loud. But maybe you’re trying to get the pronunciation exactly as its spoken by the text-to-speech and you’re having trouble hearing it clearly. I know I’ve experienced that before. Interestingly, the team behind the product seems to have recognized this frustration and programmed the function to slow down its enunciation when you click “Listen” a second time for the same text. Clicking it a third time consecutively will enunciate at the original speed, however.
This seems like something that would be cool to be able to explicitly toggle on and off, rather than simply alternating like it does now. A nice detail nonetheless, however.
Amazon announced today new sharing functionality for its Kindle app that’s exclusive to the Android version until later this year. The new functionality provides the ability to share quotes, highlights, and book recommendations with friends over a host of different messaging services, and instant book previews for those who are on the receiving end of these shares.
