Category Archives: Google

The logo of Google is seen at the high profile startups and high tech leaders gathering, Viva Tech,in Paris, France May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo/File Photo

Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google said on Thursday it would open its first physical store in New York City this summer, mirroring a retail approach that has helped Apple Inc (AAPL.O) rake in billions of dollars in the last two decades.

The Google store will be located in the city's Chelsea neighborhood near the its New York City campus, which houses over 11,000 employees.

Google, which has set up pop-up stores in the past to promote its products, said it would sell Pixel smartphones, Pixelbooks and Fitbit fitness trackers along with Nest smart home devices at the retail outlet.

Visitors will also be able to avail customer service for their devices and pick up their online orders at the store. (https://bit.ly/3wrqXjX)

The announcement signals the internet giant has taken a leaf out of Apple's play-book of operating physical stores and providing in-person services to boost sales.

Apple, which opened its first two retail stores in Virginia in 2001, has 270 stores in the United States and many more around the world that drive its sales and also provide shoppers hands-on customer service.

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Google to open first physical store in New York this summer - Reuters

James Martin/CNET

Google had big ambitions with its wearable software, Wear OS. But for the past few years, it's stagnated and Apple has taken an even bigger lead in the global smartwatch market. A new partnership with Samsung announced on Tuesday at Google I/O could give Wear OS the attention it needs to stay relevant. But it won't catch up to Apple unless it seriously addresses some of the biggest issues that have plagued its smartwatches over the past few years.

Here are the things Google's new Wear OS needs to do to be a viable competitor to the Apple Watch.

Now playing: Watch this: Samsung and Fitbit are making Google watches. Here's...

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The first major complaint about Wear OS from most users is battery life. While it depends on the specific watch, its processor and usage patterns, some of the Wear OS watches I've worn have struggled to get me from breakfast to dinner. Add a resource-intensive task like a GPS workout and it's not unusual to see your battery life drop even further. You shouldn't have to turn off features or nix notifications just to get through the day.

While Google hasn't provided any specific numbers for its next-generation watches beyond a general "better battery life" spec, at least it's on the radar. The Apple Watch Series 6 can last almost two days with raise-to-wake enabled instead of the always-on display, so the benchmark isn't particularly high.

Wear OS watches, on the whole, have been pretty slow. Even basic smartwatch tasks like scrolling through menus or raise-to-wake can take ages. There are exceptions: The Ticwatch Pro 3 addresses some of these performance issues as it's running Qualcomm's latest chip, the 4100 Plus. But if you've used a Wear OS watch in the past, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Samsung's current watches use its own Exynos processors. While we don't yet know what chipset the new Wear OS watches will use, it makes sense to leverage the power of what Exynos can already do when it comes to cellular connectivity and performance.

Then there's the question of Google apps. One of Google's biggest strengths on the Android side is the power of its Assistant. But when it comes to Wear OS, it misses the mark. It took months for the "OK Google" wake phrase to get fixed when users reported it stopped working, and even basic tasks, like using the Assistant to send a text message, can be hit and miss. Thankfully, it looks like we'll finally be gettingoffline YouTube Music support and be able to use Google Maps without a phone, but a lot of this feels like catch-up for features we should have had years ago.

Most Wear OS watches don't really focus on health features. Wear OS can do the standard stuff like track basic workouts and calories burned with Google Fit. But third-party apps have had to fill in a lot of the gaps for people looking for more of a fitness focus, like specific training programs.

Apple's health and fitness tracking is incredibly strong, not only because of its intuitive system of rings and workout programs like Fitness Plus, but also because of potentially life-saving features like fall detection on the Apple Watch.

Fitbit, now a part of Google, has really strong sleep and fitness tracking, as well as a great social component for its users. The Fitbit app is also one of the best out there to help interpret your fitness metrics and give an overall picture of your health goals. The new Wear OS will have a Fitbit app that will bring in activity snapshots and exercise modes, but won't have heart-rate tracking or sleep tracking yet. And for the time being, Google Fit and Fitbit's health platforms aren't merging.

Wear OS has also lagged behind on medical-grade sensors like an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG). While Samsung and Fitbit both added an ECG app on their flagship watches in 2020, it came two years after Apple rolled it out on the Apple Watch Series 4. And in the case of Samsung's Galaxy Watch 3 and Watch Active 2, the ECG only works if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone. (It's worth noting the Oppo Watch that runs Wear OS does have an ECG, but that version was only offered in China.)

The Oppo Watch.

Apple on Wednesday announced Assistive Touch, a feature that lets people who have the use of only one arm control the Apple Watch. You can use gestures like pinching or clenching to control watch functions. It will roll out in the next version of WatchOS, likely to debut in the fall.

Wear OS does have some accessibility features like TalkBack, which lets you hear audio feedback so you don't need to see the screen, but there's room for much more.

This is the greatest strength of the new Wear OS partnership, but also the biggest potential risk. How do you unify three completely different platforms and take the best parts of all of them to create the ultimate smartwatch experience, or as CNET's Scott Stein put it, the Justice League of wearables?

Take the responsiveness of Samsung's Tizen, the fitness tracking and battery-life management of Fitbit, plus the third-party app support of Wear OS and Google could be on to a winner. But it's a huge challenge. Let's hope that the new Wear OS lives up to expectations.

Discover the latest news and best reviews in smartphones and carriers from CNET's mobile experts.

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Can Google and Samsung's Wear OS take on the Apple Watch? It's complicated - CNET

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the company's 20201 Google I/O conference.

Google

Google announced a slew of updates to its developer products Tuesday at its first Google I/O event since 2019.

Though Google makes most of its money from advertising, the annual event is a way to excite its developer ecosystem with updates ranging from software and artificial intelligence moonshots to shopping features. The company cancelled the annual developer conference last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year's event was mostly virtual, with a few in-person attendees at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Here's a roundup of some of the more interesting announcements from the day's event:

This year's event was pretty light on hardware announcements no big unveiling or refresh to its Pixel phones or home speakers. It did, however, announce some updates to existing products.

Most notably, Google said it now has a whopping 3 billion active Android devices, globally, well ahead of Apple's claim of 1 billion iPhones. However, Android devices are widely divergent in terms of the version of the platform they run, with some relying only on the core open-source code and others relying on custom apps and skins issued by hardware makers and carriers.

The company announced its latest operating system update called Android 12, which works on a reduced server CPU time by 22%, essentially meaning "basically, everything is faster," said Google's Vice President of Android and Google Play Sameer Samat said.

Google executives said it's combining Wear, Google's wearable tech software platform, with Samsung's Tizen software. It will aim to streamline the smartwatch OS for the Android platform along with faster load times and battery life improvement.

The company also said it will be bringing YouTube Music app for Wear OS later this year.

Fitbit CEO James Park said that Google Wear will include Fitbit popular features such as tracking healthy progress with plans for more. Google parent company Alphabet finally closed its $2.1 billion acquisition of the fitness-tracking company in January after regulators took more than a year to sign off on the proposed deal.

"In the future, we'll be building premium smart watches based on Wear that combines the best of Fitbit's healthcare expertise with Google's ambient computing capabilities," Park said, referring to Google's aim to place computing in all spaces.

The company announced a few updates in its push for e-commerce as it aims to compete with Amazon.

The company announced a deepened partnership with Shopify, by letting the company's more than 1 million merchants make their products more discoverable in Google Search and elsewhere. It will allow Shopify businesses to appear across Google Search, Maps, Lens, Images and YouTube "with just a few clicks." Shopify's stock popped as much as 4% on the news.

Separately, the company announced other enhancements to its e-commerce functionality: For instance, Google's Chrome browser will persistently display shopping carts when people open new tabs, so they can return to shopping after doing other tasks.

Google also announced some updates to make collaboration easier within its Workplace products. The industry, which also includes Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack, saw a surge in usage during the pandemic.

A new feature in Workspace called smart canvas will let people tag other users in a documents and the call through its video platform, Google Meet, directly from a document, spreadsheet or slide.

The company also showed off an early research project called Project Starline which builds a 3D image of a person that can be used for conversations in a meeting. It appears as a type of a hologram chat.

CEO Sundar Pichai stressed that Project Starline is still in the early stages but that some employees have been testing it amid efforts to collaborate between separate locations during the pandemic. It's planning trial deployments with enterprise partners later this year.

Google is best known for its artificial intelligence technology, which powers its products from Search to self-driving cars. Executives said Tuesday that it's getting even smarter.

Pichai unveiled LaMDA, a breakthrough in natural language processing, which aims to make conversations and searches more natural while having the ability to answer more open-ended questions. Pichai gave the example of a person heaving a conversation with the planet Pluto, which gave answers to questions the user had about it.

Execs also announced a "Multitask Unified Model" it calls MUM, which they said is 1,000 times more powerful than the BERT model powering Google Search. Pulling data from texts, images and videos, MUM can supposedly answer complex questions about what a user might need for, say, a specific hike on Mt. Fuji.

Google also announced its first campus dedicated to quantum computing. The Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, Calif., includes a data center, research laboratories, and its own quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. "These new computing capabilities will help to accelerate the discovery of better batteries, energy-efficient fertilizers, and targeted medicines, as well as improved optimization, new AI architectures, and more," the company says.

Speaking at her first Google I/O, Google's chief health officer Karen DeSalvo,the former Obama administration official who joined the company in 2019, said that the company is helping create a device that uses AI to detect skin conditions. After users upload three different photos from skin, hair or nail issues and answer some questions, it'll offer a diagnosis of possible dermatological conditions along with some information about them.

DeSalvo said the product will be accessible from internet browsers and cover 288 conditions, including 90% of the most commonly searched derm-related questions on Google. It will first be available to consumers in the European Union by the end of the year, she said.

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Here's what Google announced today at its first developer conference since 2019 - CNBC

Google is testing a new feature for its Chrome browser on Android that lets users follow sites to create an updating list of new content they publish. The feature is based on RSS, an open web standard thats been the backbone of many popular web aggregation tools in the past. That includes Googles own, much beloved (and now defunct) Google Reader.

The test is small-scale: following sites will only be an option for some US users of Chrome Canary (the bleeding-edge version of Chrome that lets enthusiasts access beta features). Users will be able to follow sites from the browser menu, and updates will be aggregated in a card-based feed thats shown when users open a new tab. Its not clear whether this feed is wholly dependent on sites providing RSS support, or if Google will fill in the gaps itself.

Although this is just an early test, its nonetheless exciting for a certain sort of web user who misses the glory-days of RSS (and, by extension, a mode of internet discovery and distribution that faded years ago). At its core, RSS allows users to maintain a personalized feed of new content from favorite sites, blogs, and podcasts. And although tools that utilized these feeds were briefly very popular, they were eclipsed for numerous reasons.

Exactly why RSS fell from prominence is complicated. (Heres a story from Vice and one from TechCrunch that help explain.) But whatever the ultimate cause, many see its demise as a turning point for the web: the moment when decentralized, chronological feeds were replaced by the engagement-driven algorithms of social media giants.

Because the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and the like have had so many obviously bad effects (misinformation! Hoaxes! Nazis!), many look back wistfully on RSS as a sort of Golden Age for the web that failed from a surfeit of nobility and deficit of cunning. If only RSS had thrived! they say. All this nastiness could have been avoided. Perhaps. Whats clear is that Google is responding to a demand for new (read: old) ways of engaging with the web.

Weve heard it loud and clear: Discovery & distribution is lacking on the open web, and RSS hasnt been mainstream consumer friendly, tweeted Googles head of web creator relations, Paul Bakaus. Today, were announcing an experimental new way, powered by RSS, to follow creators with one click.

What happens next is anyones guess. Will Google follow through and push RSS-powered features to all Chrome users? Or will it get bored of a product thats not integral to its bottom line? (As it did with Google Reader.) Bakaus, at least, suggests theres more to come. This is only the beginning of a bigger exploration, and to get this right, we need your feedback, he tweeted. Hit us up via @WebCreators to let us know what we need to build for you. Im very excited about it!

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Google rediscovers RSS: tests new feature to follow sites in Chrome on Android - The Verge

Lets talk about some big changes announced to the platform where many of us get a lot of work done: Google Workspace, home to the suite of cloud-based tools that includes Docs.

The relative stagnation of Docs in a rapidly evolving world of productivity tools has been an ongoing fascination for me. When Im writing for myself, I use slick, modern tools like Notion, Bear, and (more recently) Substack. But when I write for others, its most often in Docs, which launched 15 years ago and looks more or less the same as it has since the late 2000s.

Create a new document in any other digital writing tool and you see an infinite canvas; in Docs you see a picture of an 8.5 x 11-inch sheet of paper, since Google assumes that any document you create is going to be printed eventually. On paper. To me, the skeuomorphism of Docs has long been a sign that Google has fallen behind the times.

And so I was happy to learn, at long last, thats changing. Heres Dieter:

Ultimately, Google is working to make every single part of its Workspace suite of apps interconnected. Youll be able to start a Meet video chat directly within Docs or share your Doc directly into a Meet call with a button in the doc. All of that integration will be useful, but it also has the benefit (for Google) of perhaps enticing users away from using competing products like Zoom or Slack and instead using Googles cohesive suite.

There is a smattering of other small updates: emoji reactions in Google Docs in addition to traditional comments, a new timeline view in Google Sheets for improved project management, and best of all: a new pageless view in Google Docs that does away with the assumption that your document is meant for an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. It dynamically resizes the doc to the size of your web browser the way a web app ought to.

The changes are part of a suite of updates to Workspace that, I would argue, represent the biggest set of changes to Docs in more than ten years. While the shift away from printed pages is perhaps the most symbolic move here, the larger idea is to create more dynamic, interactive documents that are integrated with other Google products.

As Dieter notes, this will offer a lot of practical convenience for average users: starting quick video chats from inside a document; creating polls to help colleagues make quick decisions; and quickly assigning tasks to colleagues via the @-mentions that are already standard across most enterprise software. Together, they create what Google is calling a smart canvas in Workspace, built on individual objects called smart chips.

Notably, smart chips can include file formats other than Googles own youll be able to embed document previews from Microsoft Office docs, for example. Modern enterprise software is built on these kinds of useful integrations Slack raced out to an early lead mostly because it let you monitor events across an entire suite of third-party products, including Googles but they have been next to nowhere inside Docs.

For casual users of Docs, the entire conversation can end here: Google is making a series of minor helpful changes to Docs, making the overall experience 10 or 15 percent better for you. Great! I wish every product I used got 10 to 15 percent better every year.

At the same time, Googles incremental approach to improving Docs also reveals a dilemma that the company often faces when trying to improve its most-used products. Introducing lots of changes is appealing to designers, developers, and the tech enthusiasts like me that they serve, but often causes average users to revolt. And Google is so big that even well-funded startups with great ideas can fail to gain traction. The result is that the safest path at Google and other big companies is almost always to change things very little. The more users the product has and Workspace has hundreds of millions of users the more true this generally is.

Just look at Gmail, which has changed relatively little over the past decade. The companys noble attempt to build a new email experience from scratch, a standalone product called Inbox, won praise from reviewers for its more innovative features. But it failed to get much traction and was eventually ended. Gmail is still thriving in large part due to indifference from the startup world, which sees a daunting challenge in trying to build a new email service from scratch. But its telling that when Basecamp tried last year with its email service Hey, it was overflowing with novel ideas.

Googles dilemma with Workplace is even more acute, since the company is fighting a two-front war. On one side you have Microsoft, the original target that the products once called G Suite were designed to antagonize. (That project was a tremendous success, and ultimately dropkicked Microsoft into cloud-based subscriptions for Office five years later.) A huge part of Googles attention remains occupied by the picayune needs of current and former Office users and can enforce a kind of slow, linear progression in the product roadmap.

On the other hand, though, you have the upstarts: beautiful, feature-rich, fast-iterating products like Notion, Coda, and Airtable. What these products lack in the lowest-common-denominator simplicity of Google Workspace is more than made up for in power and flexibility. The learning curve is real I think I tinkered with Notion for six months before I figured out how it really fit in my life, which isnt much of an endorsement but before the Google I/O announcements, using Docs has come to feel like going back in time.

But unlike new email apps, productivity tools are getting real traction. Coda raised money at a valuation of $600 million last year. Notion raised $50 million at the start of the pandemic, and by April 2020 was valued at $2 billion. As of March, the spreadsheet-based Airtable was valued at $5.77 billion.

Its clear that these startups ability to move fast is drawing in new users at a rapid clip. And because they arent serving legacy user bases in the millions, they can afford to have a learning curve. Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra himself a former Googler, having run product at YouTube told me Docs could only afford to evolve so much.

I think theyre gonna get stuck at what I call the Dropbox Paper point, Mehrotra said, referring to the file-storage companys tepid attempt to improve digital documents. Which is like, theres like a set of things you can do without fundamentally changing the paradigm. And itll be good I think a lot of people will love @-mentions and so on. Theyre clearly trying to cherry-pick attractive features they highlighted voting and reactions, which are two of our most popular features. Theyre clearly trying to pull individual things in. But if you dont want to fundamentally change the product, theres only so far you can go.

Toward the end of the day, I hopped on a Meet with Javier Soltero, who has run Google Workspace since October 2019. Soltero has seen both sides of the tech giant / startup divide he founded the great mobile email app Acompli, sold it to Microsoft, and then successfully transformed it into the mobile Outlook app during a productive stint in the Office organization.

Soltero took exception to my suggestion that the Workplace team hasnt been shipping lately he pointed to the roll-out of AI-assisted smart compose features over the past couple years, for example. But he acknowledged that the company had a lot of infrastructure work to do free customers and paid customers have been using different versions of the apps, for example, and Google is spending a lot of time migrating them to a more similar set of features.

Ultimately, though, Soltero told me what I wanted to hear: that the changes would herald the arrival of a world where Docs would start to iterate faster.

Im excited because today actually represents a big step toward continued acceleration, he told me. Its not to say that were going to get everything right, or that everythings going to be an earth-shattering, Marvin the Martian-style kaboom, but we are guided, I think, by the right set of things as a team. And Im seeing the organization get really excited.

Of course, Coda and its peers are also accelerating. And despite the welcome moves, Google still has a lot of catching up to do.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

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Google is reinventing Docs to fight a two-front war - The Verge

California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks at the opening of the country's first federal and state operated community vaccination site during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Los Angeles, California, February 16, 2021.

Mike Blake | Reuters

California Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to a recent flood of tech IPOs and Google's forthcoming development project in San Jose as examples of a California comeback, as a recall campaign and complaints from departing residents draw attention to the state's troubles.

Google chief legal officer and global affairs SVP Kent Walker joined local and state officials, including Newsom, as he signed California bill SB7 at an event in San Jose. The law changes zoning to allow denser housing and speeds up the state's environmental review process for construction projects, which would include Google's proposed mega campus in San Jose.

Newsom and officials thanked Walker several times during the event. "Kent, thank you for highlighting this this bill is about the investment in the state of California," Newsom said in a press conference in San Jose Thursday. "This bill is about our comeback. This bill is about our renewal."

"To be here with Google and the incredible private sector investment and the faith and devotion to the future of this city and this region and this state is exactly where we want to be and it's why we are here," Newsom said, adding that he opted to "celebrate" in-person instead of with a Zoom call originally scheduled for Friday.

The law comes as critics say the state is losing its grip on tech thanks to high housing costs and poor governance, which were exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The state has also seen an increasingly hostile climate with wildfires and drought. A recall effort against Newsom recently collected enough valid signatures to qualify for the voter ballot.

When the press asked him about Californians migrating out of state, Newsom pointed to the tech industry, IPOs, Google and the high density of engineers, researchers and scientists.

"Eat your heart out, all those other states," Newsom continued. "The state has enjoyed 99 IPOs year to date. We've had record-breaking venture capital last year in the state of California. We're the No. 1 innovation state in America," he said. "Those that write our obituary they've done so every seven to ten years are proven wrong over and over again, and once again, they'll be proven wrong about their current assessment."

Google's chief legal officer and global affairs SVP Kent Walker spoke at a SB7 bill signing in San Jose, California, alongside Governor Gavin Newsom.

Screenshot

California startups raised $84.2 billion in venture funding last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Google vowed to spend $7 billion on U.S. data centers and office space in 2021, especially in California where it has several campus sites.

Thursday's event also comes one week ahead of the city council's decision next week on whether to approve Google's massive South Bay campus in partnership with the city of the San Jose called "Downtown West." The 80-acre campus in downtown San Jose will have more than 20,000 employees and a portion of it will be allocated for residential and public space, including what it hopes will be one of the country's largest transit sites. The company has recently added $200 million in community benefits to help the deal along.

"As we start to bring our employees back to our offices throughout the state, throughout the country, we're looking forward to investing more in California," Google's Walker said Thursday. "We want to invest throughout the United States but we have a special love and affection for California and a belief that California can enable the next generation of innovation. We're well on our way to economic recovery and we look forward to working with all of you in the years to come."

Newsom pointed to Google's proposed housing development, which will include a proposed 4,000 housing units, 25% of which will be designated for "affordable" housing. He also said the sustainability features of the campus are examples of a solution to "Mother Nature's challenges" in the state.

Watch Now: The California tech exodus: How big is it and what can be done to reverse it?

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California Governor Newsom gushes over Google as he signs real-estate bill on site of future mega-campus - CNBC

At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a slew of updates to its Firebase developer platform, which, as the company also announced, now powers over 3 million apps.

Theres a number of major updates here, most of which center around improving existing tools like Firebase Remote Config and Firebases monitoring capabilities, but there are also a number of completely new features here as well, including the ability to create Android App Bundles and a new security tool called App Check.

Helping developers be successful is what makes Firebase successful, Firebase product manager Kristen Richards told me ahead of todays announcements. So we put helpfulness and helping developers at the center of everything that we do. She noted that during the pandemic, Google saw a lot of people who started to focus on app development both as learners and as professional developers. But the team also saw a lot of enterprises move to its platform as those companies looked to quickly bring new apps online.

Maybe the marquee Firebase announcement at I/O is the updated Remote Config. Thats always been a very powerful feature that allows developers to make changes to live production apps on the go without having to release a new version of their app. Developers can use this for anything from A/B testing to providing tailored in-app experience to specific user groups.

With this update, Google is introducing updates to the Remote Config console, to make it easier for developers to see how they are using this tool, as well as an updated publish flow and redesigned test results pages for A/B tests.

Image Credits: Google

Whats most important, though, is that Google is taking Remote Config a step further now by launching a new Personalization feature that helps developers automatically optimize the user experience for individual users. Its a new feature of [Remote Config] that uses Googles machine learning to create unique individual app experiences, Richards explained. Its super simple to set up and it automatically creates these personalized experiences thats tailored to each individual user. Maybe you have something that you would like, which would be something different for me. In that way, were able to get a tailored experience, which is really what customers expect nowadays. I think were all expecting things to be more personalized than they have in the past.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also improving a number of Firebases analytics and monitoring capabilities, including its Crashlytics service for figuring out app crashes. For game developers, that means improved support for games written with the help of the Unity platform, for example, but for all developers, the fact that Firebases Performance Monitoring service now processes data in real time is a major update to having performance data (especially on launch day) arrive with a delay of almost half a day.

Firebase is also now finally adding support for Android App Bundles, Googles relatively new format for packaging up all of an apps code and resources, with Google Play optimizing the actual APK with the right resources for the kind of device the app gets installed on. This typically leads to smaller downloads and faster installs.

On the security side, the Firebase team is launching App Check, now available in beta. App Check helps developers guard their apps against outside threats and is meant to automatically block any traffic to online resources like Cloud Storage, Realtime Database and Cloud Functions for Firebase (with others coming soon) that doesnt provide valid credentials.

Image Credits: Google

The other update worth mentioning here is to Firebase Extensions, which launched a while ago, but which is getting support for a few more extensions today. These are new extensions from Algolia, Mailchimp and MessageBird, that helps bring new features like Algolias search capabilities or MessageBirds communications features directly to the platform. Google itself is also launching a new extension that helps developers detect comments that could be considered rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable in a way that will make people leave a conversation.

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Google updates Firebase with new personalization features, security tools and more - TechCrunch

Google is one of the major companies behind the upcoming interconnected cross-platform smart home standard Matter, and today, the company has explained how itll work to support Matter with its Android devices and Nest smart home products.

To start, the company is promising that all of its Nest displays and speakers will be updated to enable them to control Matter devices. That means once the update arrives (Google isnt giving a timeframe yet), youll be able to use Google Assistant to control any Matter device, whether it was previously part of Googles smart home platform or not.

Additionally, newer Google smart home products with Thread built in, like the Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Hub Max, and second-gen Nest Hub, will also serve as Matter connection hubs. That will make it easier to set up and use Matter-branded smart home products throughout your home.

And in what might be the biggest piece of news: Google is promising that itll update the latest Nest Thermostat to support Matter, meaning users will be able to in theory control their A/C and heat setups with other Matter-certified platforms (like Siri or Alexa, pending Apple and Amazons own updates). Disappointingly, Google is only making that promise for the entry-level Nest Thermostat, not the more powerful Nest Learning Thermostat (at least for now).

Googles support for Matter is also coming to Android phones. The company promises that itll add built-in support for Matter, making it easy to set up and control Matter-enabled smart home gadgets through Android apps, Google Assistant, the Google Home app, and more with just a few taps.

As part of that support, Thread-enabled Matter devices like Nanoleafs Essentials Bulb will be supported on Android, which could open up a wave of new smart home devices based on the local connectivity standard to Google (and other smart home platforms). Right now, there are still products like Eves HomeKit-exclusive lineup that rely on Thread but cant be used with Android devices at all. Matter could potentially change that.

If everything works as well as promised (again, theres plenty of software updates and agreements that will still have to be followed through), Matter could be the magical solution for smart home owners: a set of devices that is easy to set up and use with any (or all) smart home software setups.

In addition to Matter details, Google is also announcing a new Google smart home directory, which will include a list of Assistant-compatible products, Q&As, educational videos, and reviews. Lastly, the company also announced that it will add Nest cameras to its automated routines, allowing owners to automatically toggle on (or off) their cameras when theyre coming and going.

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Google details how interconnected Matter smart home standard will work on Android and Nest - The Verge

Google announced a bunch of new features for Google Maps at its 2021 I/O developer conference today, including upgrades to its handy Live View tool, which helps you navigate the world through augmented reality.

Live View launched in beta in 2019, projecting walking directions through your cameras viewfinder, and was rolled out to airports, transit stations, and malls earlier this year. Now, Live View will be accessible directly from Google Maps and will collate a lot of handy information, including how busy shops and restaurants are, recent reviews, and any uploaded photos.

It sounds particularly handy for exploring new destinations remotely. You can remotely browse that street full of interesting restaurants while on holiday, checking out which places are heaving, and even looking at some of the pictures of dishes.

Live View also now has better labeling for streets on complex intersections, says Google, and it will automatically orient you in relation to known locations (like your home or work).

Thats not all for Maps, though, and as Googles Liz Reid said onstage, the company is on track to launch more than 100 AI-driven improvements for the app this year.

Other upgrades include a wider launch for the detailed street map view, which will be available in 50 new cities by the end of the year, including Berlin, So Paulo, Seattle, and Singapore; new busyness indicators for whole areas as opposed to specific shops and businesses; and selective highlighting of nearby businesses based on the time of day that youre looking at Google Maps. So if you open up the app first thing in the morning, itll show you more places to grab a coffee than a candle-lit dinner for two.

A more ambitious upgrade for Maps is using AI to identify and forecast hard-braking events when youre in your car. Think of it like traffic warnings that navigation apps issue based on data collated from multiple users. But instead of just traffic jams, Google Maps will try to identify harder-to-define situations that cause you to slam on the brakes, such as confusing lane changes or freeway exits. The company says its tech has the ability to eliminate over 100 million hard-braking events in routes driven with Google Maps each year by giving users a heads up when it knows such an event is on the horizon.

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Google Maps Live View feature now offers more useful information about restaurants and businesses - The Verge

Yesterday brought the momentous news that Google and Samsung will merge together their Wear OS and Tizen-based smartwatch platforms into a single operating system. The new software is currently being referred to as Wear, but that name could change as we get closer to the first devices that will ship with it.

The unified platform is intended to give Android smartwatches a huge boost and much simpler strategy. It will also allow developers to create apps and widgets for a single OS instead of splitting their efforts between Wear OS and Tizen. A lot of this is spelled out in more detail in the below video, but lets also focus on the big highlights.

Speed and responsiveness were one of the major talking points when Google and Samsung made this announcement during the I/O 2021 keynote. The companies are claiming that apps open up to 30 percent faster than they currently do on Wear OS. Google also promises smooth user interface animations and motion, which hasnt always been a strength of Wear OS.

Samsungs smartwatches were already routinely outlasting Wear OS products, so this doesnt come as a surprise. The company is lending Google some hardware expertise to ensure better stamina. Samsung implemented our best technology to provide optimized performances, and advanced sensor batching and low power display technology to ensure an efficient and long-lasting battery, Samsungs Janghyun Yoon wrote after Tuesdays news. Googles Bjorn Kilburn said customers can expect handy optimizations like the ability to run the heart rate sensor continuously during the day, track your sleep overnight and still have battery for the next day.

Samsung has confirmed that its next smartwatch and all others in the pipeline will run the unified Wear platform. But the company made sure to note that it will bring over some of its popular hardware elements, like the rotating bezel mechanism.

In a report from Wired, we learned that there are plans for a Google Maps app on Wear that features a new user interface that will also work even if your phone is not with you. That hints at cellular data support on the new unified platform.

Spotify already allows owners of Samsung smartwatches to download songs for offline listening, and now that same convenience will be extended to Wear. Thats one thing Spotify for the Apple Watch still doesnt do.

Google also confirmed that YouTube Music will be available on Wear. Like Spotify, itll include full support for offline listening.

Having completed its acquisition of Fitbit at the start of this year, Google will now integrate some of the brands health and activity tracking features into Wear. Future premium Fitbit wearables will also run the unified platform.

Google tried to emphasize on Tuesday that this platform isnt just intended for itself and Samsung. All device makers will be able to add a customized user experience on top of the platform, Kilburn said. Thats going to prove important if Google wants to keep companies like Garmin on board with the new platform. And we cant forget about the many traditional watchmakers Fossil, Citizen, TAG Heuer, and others that have gotten behind Wear OS in recent years in the absence of a flagship smartwatch from Google.

Wears apps will use the latest Android development techniques like Jetpack and Kotlin to help reach the best possible performance. Google is also promising to make life easier for app makers with new APIs that cover Tiles, health services, watchfaces, complications, and more. And an activity indicator will show when certain functions are running in the background.

There arent any firm promises yet, but Google at least didnt outright say existing products wont be updated to the new OS. The company told 9to5Google, we will have more updates to share on timelines once the new version launches later this year.

Samsung will not be updating its Galaxy Watch line to Wear, but says it has no intention of leaving its current customers in the dust once it starts releasing Wear hardware. For customers who already own the Tizen OS based Galaxy smartwatches, we are continuing to provide at least three years of software support after the product launch, the company said Tuesday. However, it seems plausible there will be more than a few features and new Wear tricks that will never make their way to older Galaxy smartwatches.

Some people out there really care about having a good watchface selection on a pricey smartwatch. Google and Samsung are promising a wide mix of styles, and Samsung told Wired its design tool and many of the companys own signature watchfaces will be available on Wear.

Google and Samsung shared a decent chunk of information on day one, but were still left without answers to a few important questions. We should learn more details over the summer as we head into fall hardware season.

Continued here:

11 things we know about the new smartwatch OS from Google and Samsung - The Verge