Google targets Amazon and Apple’s set-top boxes with Android TV platform
Google’s already well acquainted with the living room, having launched its Google TV platform at the I/O conference four years ago. It’s safe to say the set-top box software has fallen out of favor (with all but Sony, anyway), and Google’s been experiencing more success of late with its simpler Chromecast dongle. Well, today the search giant’s revealing its next play in home entertainment with Android TV, a brand new platform that’s part of Android L, and it’s bringing Google’s OS back to the big screen.
Much like on Apple’s set-top box or Amazon’s Fire TV, Google’s platform is a convenient front-end for it to plug video content from its own collection, in this case the Play store. It runs apps from other content providers like Netflix, of course, and allows you to pump live TV through the interface as well. Anything running Android TV will have the same functionality as a Chromecast, so you’ll be able to push content from your other devices to the TV exactly as you do with the dongle. Google Cast itself is being updated with direct screen mirroring, among other things.
Even closer to Amazon’s effort, Google intends Android TV not to be just for passive media consumption, but gaming as well. Different Android devices can be connected to your TV simultaneously to act as controllers. If your watching rather than gaming, then any Android phone, or smartwatch running the Wear platform, can be used as a remote.
Android TV features a simple and familiar card-based UI that naturally focuses on visual information (displaying movie posters, for example). The home screen floats on top of the content you’re currently playing, bringing that feeling of depth that’s key to Google’s new Material Design language. Google’s services and personalized recommendations are prominent, and voice search and navigation is included to make finding consumables, or anything else, as easy as saying it from the sofa. Apps and content can organize themselves across your home screen dynamically, based on your recent usage patterns.
With a special Play store experience just for the big screen, Android TV will be launching later this year alongside the Android L release, and various hardware partners are already on board. Next year’s smart TV ranges from the likes of Sharp and Sony, among others, will have the Android TV platform built-in. And, if you don’t fancy buying a whole new set, Razer, ASUS and others will be making set-top boxes-slash-consoles. Google’s also got a dev kit for those eager to get working with the SDK right away, which in Android L is the same one for tablet and smartphone form factors, too.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Software, HD, Google
Source: Google Android TV
Here’s what Google’s Android Wear can do
Google says that we glance at our smartphones 125 times per day, but wants Android Wear devices to take on much of that burden. During an I/O 2014 demo, it showed how smartwatches like LG’s G Watch — paired with Android 4.3 or higher phones — will display the most important info to you at any given time. That includes info like flights, the weather, your commute, appointments, reminders, Keep notes and messages. Since all Wear devices will have touchscreens, you can swipe up on the watch face, Google Now-style, to see more cards. Swiping sideways will then bring up additional info from a given card. Disposing of a card on the watch makes it disappear on your handset too.
You’ve also got voice commands, activated by — you guessed it — “Okay, Google.” You can use it to set a reminder or take voice notes that are automatically saved to Google Keep. You can also pose questions to the watch and get the answer in card form on both your wearable and phone screen. Swiping down from the top of the screen mutes or unmutes the sound on your watch and lets you peek at settings like the battery life.
You can also control music with touch or voice controls, (which will turn the song’s album art into your watch’s background screen, by the way). It’ll also function as a sportsband by measuring the steps you’ve taken and your heart rate on supported devices. Google will give you daily summaries of those stats, and those stats will also be fully available to developers via API functions.
All of that comes with stock Android Wear, but developers will get access to those functions too. For instance, any phone notification from say, Twitter or Facebook, can also be available on your wrist, along with voice replies and notification pages as we saw in an earlier preview. Another sample third-party app flaunted by Mountain View was Pinterest, which will notify you when you’re near a pal’s location, letting you swipe to see a map and step-by-step directions. All that’s powered by Google Maps, which, of course, is baked into Android Wear.
Google showed off a few other third-party demos by ordering a pizza from the Moto 360 in about 20 seconds and displaying a step-by-step recipe on its watch face from the Allthecooks app. It also used voice-recognition to order a car with the upcoming Lyft wearable app. (It also noted in an aside that all Android Wear devices will be water-resistant.)
Google saved the best news for last: the Android Wear SDK is now available for developers with most of the API features included. If you’re champing at the bit to buy one, there’s another payoff too. LG’s G Watch is now available to order on the Play Store and Samsung’s newly announced watch, the Gear Live, is also up for pre-order. The much anticipated round-faced Moto 360, however, won’t be coming until later this summer.
For more, check our Google’s new Android Wear page and our I/O 2014 event hub right here.
Razer’s making a gaming ‘micro-console’ with Android TV, available this fall
The company behind crazy devices like the Razer Edge and Project Christine is getting into game console creation as well. Razer’s employing Google’s Android TV initiative to create a game-focused “micro-console” and it’s arriving this fall. So, what does it do? Razer’s only offering a teensy bit of details, but what we know thus far sounds impressive. The micro-console can “stream movies, music and other apps for large-screen entertainment,” says Razer, “with an emphasis on gaming.” Sounds a lot like Amazon’s Fire TV, no? The difference here is that Razer’s also promising “hardcore” gaming, though we’re not hearing exactly how it will pull that off just yet (we asked!).
The same goes for what’s inside the Razer micro-console in terms of horsepower and connectivity — we’ve got no idea just yet. Internal storage? No idea. Price? Same situation. Actually, what Razer’s saying is, “In keeping with the spirit of Google I/O, we will not be discussing specific product details at this time.” Pretty funny you guys!
Anyway, in terms of gaming-specific applications, we also don’t know how you’ll control games on the device. Bluetooth game controllers? A custom controller? While we expect it’ll support Bluetooth, Razer’s not saying just yet. As for interface navigation, that’ll be handled by the Android TV app you heard about earlier today. There’s also some form of voice control, which we expect depends on your phone’s mic (though it’s always possible one’s built into a custom gamepad — we’ve got a lot of questions!).
Razer’s not offering hands-on opps today, and the image you see above is actually a render. As a result, it’ll be a few before we can offer more details on Razer’s first console experiment. For now…well, it sounds neat, right? Razer makes nice hardware and knows how to cater to gamers. Consider us cautiously excited.
Android TV will be in Sony, Sharp and Philips TVs next year
Google isn’t giving up on TVs yet. While its new Android TV flavor of Android L will hit the streets in set-top boxes aimed at game consoles and media streamers, it announced that next year smart TVs from Sony (all of its 4K and smart TVs), Sharp and TP Vision / Philips will ship with the OS. It’s also working with some familiar TV providers overseas like LG U+ in Korea (not LG Electronics TVs, which are moving to webOS) and SFR in France, as well as the chipmakers that build the components for smart TVs and boxes as seen in the slide above. The difference from the original Google TV approach is that the company isn’t treating Android TV as an entirely separate platform from mobile, and everything needed to handle video from HDMI,TV tuners or IPTV receivers is now natively included in Android L. We’ll probably have to wait until CES 2015 to find out if it’s having any success convincing more TV manufacturers to join in (again), but these are a start.
Android TV: Google Cast, voice search and tailored content. Visit http://t.co/H3lQNHUvcn for a preview and look for devices this fall.
– Android (@Android) June 25, 2014
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Sony
Source: Android TV
Google bringing Android apps to Chromebooks
Google I/O wasn’t all about Android and wearables. The Mountain View company unveiled more information about Chrome OS, that other Google operating system, as well. The big news? Google is finally bringing Android apps to the Chromebook. Sundar Pichai, Google’s Senior VP of Android, Chrome and apps, showed off the Vine Android app on a Chromebook Pixel on stage. It seems as if you can mirror the screen from the phone, with a phone-sized screen showing up on the Chromebook display. The apps can access local hardware so you can record a Vine from your Chromebook’s camera if you wish. Additionally, when connected, a notification will pop up on your Chromebook letting you know if your phone battery is low plus incoming calls and text messages too. At last, it seems Google is working to bring Chrome and Android together in a unified experience.
Filed under: Google
Chromecast can finally mirror your Android device’s screen
Which is better, huddling around a 5-inch screen or a 50-inch TV? Google is making that answer a lot easier with a few upgrades to its HDMI dongle. Chromecast can mirror your device’s screen to the flat-panel in your living room. The stage demo included using Google Earth and even Android’s video camera app. Even more than that, the HDMI dongle is getting a little more personalized too. What’s more, you know those pretty-looking images that populate your TV screen when you’re using the device? They’re about to get a little more tailored to you. You can customize the images of that ambient feed (seen when idle) with your own personal Google+ photo albums.
Not happy with your own pics or just don’t use G+ for photo storage? You can enable geographically filtered pictures from Google’s vast image catalog, too. These albums are curated by Google, so they’re ensured (in theory) to be safe and high quality. The feature is dubbed Backdrop, and it’s rolling out to all users this summer. If you’re still not happy with those choices, the search giant says it’s working to open this up to third-party developers, too — the likes of Flickr and 500px images are about to go prime time.
Mountain View’s HDMI dongle add-ons aren’t stopping there, either. Google announced today that other users can cast to your TV without being on the same WiFi network now, too. This is pretty neat if you don’t want to give out your password or go through the arduous process of getting a long, mixed-character sequence right. All your pals will need to do is enter the PIN on the screen; Google determines that they’re in the same room by location. Seems pretty simple.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Mobile, Google
Google Drive for Business now offers unlimited storage for $10 per month, per user
You didn’t think we’d go through the whole keynote without a little Google Drive love do you? To celebrate an impressive 190-million Drive users (that’s active within the last 30 days), Google has just added a more compelling “Drive for work” proposition — unlimited storage for just $10 per month, per user. It’s not just the price that’s better, there’s a few key updates that got some stage time too. One is that users can now encrypt data within Drive. As for creating documents of your own, that’s getting more seamless too. In the past, when you worked on a word document, it would be converted to a doc file, now it’s all handled natively within Google Drive (of which Docs is now part, of course), and a native Word file is only created as and when you need to send it on to users over email etc. Sundar Pichai made a big noise on stage at I/O about the number of corporates and Universities that were going “all Google,” could this be enough for you to go all green in the office too?
Android for Work lets your personal and business data coexist on one device
If you’ve bemoaned the inability to use your personal Android phone for company business, Google has some heartening news. It just unveiled Android for Work, a code platform that lets your business and personal info coexist on a single device. The technology (derived from Samsung’s Knox) keeps the data types separate without requiring any changes to existing apps. Every major Android manufacturer should have Android for Work certification in the fall, with promises of both guaranteed updates and full security. The office-friendly feature is baked into the Android ‘L’ release from the start, but don’t despair if you’re toting an older device — Google is promising an app that works on Android gadgets running Ice Cream Sandwich or later.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Samsung, Google
Google Fit is Android’s answer to exercise and health tracking
Google Fit is Google’s new health initiative. It’s a service that’ll track all your health metrics — sleep, steps, etc. — and it’s built into the next version of Android. But what does that mean? Well, it means that Google’s Android platform is getting the same kind of life metric tracking that Apple’s iOS users are getting in iOS 8 with HealthKit. More importantly, it means that the health devices you’re already using will play nice with the myriad Android devices out there. It also means that all your health data ends up in one place, in one app, rather than spread across a variety of software applications.
Adidas, Nike, Withings, Intel, RunKeeper and a variety of other fitness companies are involved with Android Fit. Nike’s FuelBand wearables were specifically given a shoutout on-stage at Google’s I/O event this afternoon, where the initiative was announced.
What we didn’t see from Google today is a dedicated app that collects all your data, like Apple’s Health app. Rather, the Fit initiative sounds like a platform for health device manufacturers trying to make their devices interface with Android. Google product manager Ellie Powers described it as using a single set of APIs for all health products, meaning all devices could technically work with all health/fitness software. While it isn’t the whole cloth approach that Apple’s taking in creating its own app, it’s the kind of open-source approach that we expect from Google.
LG’s G Watch has a smartphone processor inside and goes on preorder today
Google thinks it’s finally time for smartwatches. Its Android Wear collaboration with LG goes on preorder today in 12 countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Germany, South Korea and Japan. The G Watch might only be a wearable, but inside beats the heart of a smartphone… processor. Behind the 1.65-inch (280 x 280) IPS display, there’s a substantial Snapdragon 400 chip — the same Qualcomm processor found inside the Galaxy S4 Mini. Below, we’ve got the whole spec rundown, although we’d really love to hear that all-important price tag.
LG is hyped about the voice recognition and Google Now integration. Speech-to-text will substitute for tapping texts out your smartphone screen, while sensors encompass a nine-axis gyro, accelerometer and compass — a few of those are probably going to come in handy for fitness apps. Storage weighs in at 4GB, with 512MB of memory for support, although we’re not quite sure what we’ll use those four gigs for, given that the Android Wear device doesn’t seem to record or store anything. There’s a 400mAh battery (making it bigger than Samsung’s Android Wear device) and it’s all IP67 dust and water resistant, hewn from stainless steel and paired with matching silicone bands — black for the Black Titan model and white for the White Gold one. If you’ve got a fancy leather band that’s aching for a taste of the future, however, any 22mm strap will work, and LG says it’s launching its own collection of bands in the near future.
Filed under: Wearables, Mobile, Google, LG
Source: LG
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