You could name Android N in Google poll: Napoleon, Nachos and Nougat options

The next iteration of Android 7.0 N has been released in the form of a developer build, much earlier than usual. As such a name hasn’t yet been unveiled and it looks like Google wants you to decide.

Using the Google Opinion Rewards app the company has begun trawling its users for opinions on names that could work. The system works by offering choices which allow for one option to be picked. So plenty of naming possibilities have been revealed by Google.

Shockingly the front-running name on the interwebs, Nutella, doesn’t even appear as an option. Instead there are even savoury snack choices in the list. This makes sense as Google has always maintained Android names simply need to be “tasty treats”.

The options on the list for Android N 7.0 include Napoleon, Nut brittle, Nachos, Nori, Noodles, Nougat and Neapolitan ice cream.

You can download the app now to hopefully be given a chance to cast your vote. Although Google does use these polls to target specific users and markets so there is a chance you won’t even see this poll. But it should be worth a try.

We still like the Nutella name, but maybe it’s a bit too obvious for Google’s tastes now?

READ: Android N preview: Everything you need to know about Android N

ICYMI: Smart pill dispenser, Kodak’s new app and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: Kodak is launching a new app at SXSW for friends and family to share their key moments with one another, and according to the company, it’s free of ads and data collection or tracking. It’s promoting the new social platform by touring with an interactive display that takes a moment you love from your camera roll, having you describe it out loud so a team of people behind a curtain can curate the things you said about that photo and set it to music — all while you watch it spin in a kaleidescope-like room full of mirrors.

Meanwhile IBM showed what sort of work its cognitive computing system Watson can give to professional bike riders by creating a VR experience that mimics a race across America.

And the medical tech area at SXSW showcased the Hero smart pill dispenser plus a wine filtering stick designed to allow people who get headaches from red wine to drink it pain-free.

Finally, our last SXSW show from the road is wrapping up in the best of Austin ways: With a pedicab tour of the city and tacos. We had tuna tacos with Thor the wonder biker, which we can’t recommend enough. And as always, please share any interesting science or tech videos, anytime! Just tweet us with the #ICYMI hashtag to @mskerryd.

‘Gone Home’ follow-up ‘Tacoma’ pushed back to 2017

Fullbright, the studio behind the critically acclaimed Gone Home, has delayed its new game Tacoma. The sci-fi mystery was penciled in for the second half of this year, but it’s now been pushed back to 2017.

The reason for the delay is quality control. Tacoma has been in development for two years now, and was pretty far along (and enjoyable) when we tried it out last summer. It played out similarly to the narrative-driven Gone Home, but added additional gameplay in the form of gravity-based puzzles, and more than a little of System Shock’s eerie tension thrown in for good measure.

Fullbright says it sent a playable Tacoma build out to some trusted developers shortly after the summer demo, who confirmed its feelings that it needed to “rework a number of the core assumptions” it had made about the game. It then made a lot of changes, specifically to the story and gravity mechanics of the game. After sending out a new build to the same group, it feels these amendments have improved the experience significantly.

Unfortunately, this six-month rework has pushed the entire project back. Fullbright’s giving itself “an additional six-plus months” to complete Tacoma. It’ll now land on PC and Xbox One — it’s a console exclusive for Microsoft’s platform — in Spring 2017.

Via: The Verge

Source: Fullbright

Android N for phones is promising, but not for the faint of heart

Last Wednesday, Google threw us all for a loop by pushing out an Android N Developer Preview well ahead of its I/O developer conference. We already dug into what this preview build means for tablets like the Pixel C, but that’s only part of the story. The only thing left to do was to throw N onto a sacrificial Nexus 5X and spent a few days getting a feel things on the small screen. Long story short, while most of you should steer clear, the preview offers a tantalizing — and feature-packed– peek at Google’s refined vision of mobile computing.

Getting started

There are some thrills to be had by rolling up your sleeves and pecking commands into a Terminal window, but really: You should just enroll your compatible devices in the Android Beta program. Not only does the process take mere moments to get started (I swear, I got the update notification in less than a minute), you’ll also get access to over-the-air updates as they’re released. Google has never, ever made it this easy to install its unfinished software; hopefully, this is a trend that sticks.

Before we go any further, it’s worth reiterating one crucial fact: You should not use this build as your daily driver. For every surprisingly nuanced feature you’ll find, there’s at least one potentially deal-breaking bug lurking in the shadows. Dialog boxes were squished to the point of illegibility, preventing some apps from working properly. Other apps just crash out of nowhere. Chrome simply refused to work after acknowledging it was connected to my Google account. I couldn’t listen to a single voicemail.

If you do take the plunge, be sure to install N on a spare device; the preview works on the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player, the Pixel C and the, uh, General Mobile 4G. If we’re lucky, the inclusion of that low-end Android One device means Google will bring the preview to more gadgets soon.

New look, new notifications

Besides the new stock wallpaper (a fetching violet landscape), the first thing you’ll probably notice is Google’s revamped approach to notifications. How could you not? Pulling down that shade reveals denser, more tightly packed information — Marshmallow’s spacious cards are gone. Everything looks crowded because multiple notifications from the same app are bundled into a single stack. The shift in design makes individual notifications harder to parse at a glance; it’s one of the rare visual missteps on display. More importantly, notifications now allow you to take action without popping into the app proper. Over the weekend, I saw this mostly with YouTube and Hangouts notifications — I was given the option to watch new videos later or respond directly to messages, respectively.

Night Mode, which turns parts of the interface dark, is back after we got a feel for it last year, and accessing it is as arcane as ever. You have to hold down the gear icon in your Quick Settings panel until it starts spinning — let it go after a while and you’ll be granted access to your device’s System UI Tuner. Turns out, Night Mode is a hell of a lot smarter this year, with options to change the interface’s tint (think of it as a built-in version of F.lux or Twilight) and automatically turn on depending on your location and time of day. It doesn’t universally turn the mostly-white interface gray, just parts of it. In fact, the change is most prominent in your device’s Settings — hopefully, this feature gets more spotlight and darkens more of the UI before Android N’s launch. As a fan of reading in bed (and screwing up my sleep schedule as a result), I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Oh, and despite some recent reports, the standard Android app launcher is still here. That’s not to say it won’t disappear before N properly launches — this is a crazy-early build, after all — but for now it’s business as usual.

The joys of multi-tasking

Android N’s multi-window mode is a big deal. It’s one of those features that makes more sense on bigger screens, but the whole thing feels surprisingly elegant even on smaller devices like the 5X. Tapping the Recent Apps button brings up a familiar stack of cards, but grabbing one and dragging it to the top of the resizes the app window to half its normal height, leaving the app switcher active in the bottom pane. Tap another app et voilà, you’re split-screen multitasking on an Android phone. Even third-party apps — Twitter, Spotify, Weather Underground — that haven’t been reconfigured to work in split-screen usually work as intended. (Although the system does throw up a warning just in case things are a little wonky). There’s a catch, though! While you can drag the divider to peek at more information in either app window, you can’t resize those windows all willy-nilly. The best you can do is make one of the apps use two-thirds of the screen. Curiously, this limited resizing works when the phone is vertical — resizing in either orientation works fine on tablets.

More surprising than Google bringing this feature to phones is how well it actually works. I tested a handful of apps that I use everyday on the 5X. While some of them (here’s looking at you, Apple Music) just refused to work, the rest did a fine job adapting to their new, smaller windows. And by “fine,” I mean they ran nice and smooth, even when I was fiddling with both windows simultaneously. Part of that is a testament to how fast Android N feels in general. It’s buttery. Despite non-final software and the Nexus 5X’s mid-range brains, general navigation just felt fantastic and UI animations were noticeably quicker. If anything, it makes the current state of Android on non-Nexus phones seem even more grim — Google just keeps making Android faster while companies such as Samsung just keep covering it up.

There’s more at play here than just futzing with two apps at the same time. Google has baked some new functionality into its humble Recent Apps key — double-tapping it takes you to your last used app, and tapping it while looking at your stack of running apps cycles through them. One nice touch: A little countdown appears on each app card when you switch through them like this, and you’re dropped into an app when time runs out. I’ll admit, I prefer the text-based trail of breadcrumbs iOS uses to take me back to previously opened apps, but Google’s approach is fast and functional in its own right.

Under the hood

If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t spend much time in your phone’s settings, well, I sort of envy you. For the rest of us, Google not only tweaked how settings options are laid out — it also decided to show off pertinent information without making you click into another section. For one, you’ll find notifications of sorts at the top of the page — in my case, they usually told me that Do Not Disturb was turned on. (What can I say? I hate talking to people on the weekend.) Just below those blaring banners are suggestions for tasks you might want to tackle, like changing your wallpaper. All the usual headings (wireless & networks, device, etc…) are just beneath that, but the sections within them offer up quick stats such as how many apps are installed, how much storage is being used and more. Sure, it’s a small change, but it’s one that makes understanding your phone just a little less daunting.

Android Marshmallow saw the introduction of Doze, a power management system that shuts down background services when the phone hasn’t been touched or moved in a while. This year, Doze seems to have gotten even smarter — Google says Android N tries to conserve the battery when the screen is off, but the phone is still in motion. It’s too early to definitively say how much better Doze is, but here’s a telling anecdote: After unplugging the phone on Friday, it survived long enough to navigate me to a meeting on Monday morning before giving up the ghost.

Everything else

I’ve used all of the above pretty frequently since Google dropped Android N, but there’s much more to see in this build — especially when it comes to dev-friendly features. Consider the following (non-exhaustive) list of features Android N brings to the table:

• You can display your emergency info (name, blood type, allergies and more) on the lock screen.
• A new feature called Data Saver stops all background data syncing unless you’re on WiFi.
• Android TV will get a picture-in-picture mode, just because.
• Google’s Project Svelte helps Android N run on lower-end devices, thanks to improved memory management.
• Heads-up, PR people: Android N makes it dead-simple to block calls and text messages from specific phone numbers.
• You can set certain apps to always connect through a specified VPN (nice for you corporate types).
• A “display size” option in the accessibility settings lets you tweak the size of fonts and on-screen interface elements.

Yahoo Games is shutting down in May

Yahoo Games, part of many people’s early online gaming experience, has been on its deathbed since 2014 when the company started killing old titles. Now, Yahoo has decided on when it plans to lay the old casual gaming portal to rest, a month after it first announced that it’s shuttering the website along with other products. On May 13th, 2016, Yahoo Games is going the way of the dodo. Those who want to experience it one last time for nostalgia’s sake can still play, but note that it stopped accepting in-game purchases on March 14th.

Those who still play religiously will have to talk to the games’ publishers about transferring anything they bought. Yahoo even asked those publishers to conjure up a transition plan for players before the shutdown date. Besides Games, the company is killing even more products as part of its quest to focus on its core offerings. The other services going down with the gaming portal are Livetext, some of Yahoo’s regional media properties (like Yahoo Astrology in the UK), as well as its BOSS APIs for developers.

Via: US Gamer

Source: Tumblr, Yahoo Games

Apple Music Becomes First Streaming Service to Include Underground DJ Remixes and Mashups

Apple has announced a new partnership with Dubset Media Holdings to stream thousands of remixed songs and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, that were previously unavailable due to copyright issues. Apple Music will be the first streaming music service to provide access to these previously unlicensed tracks, according to Billboard.

Dubset will use a technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or DJ mix file, identify existing recordings within the file, pay the necessary rights holders, and distribute the mix through Apple Music and other streaming services. The process can take about 15 minutes for a 60-minute recording.

But licensing remixes and DJ mixes, both based on original recordings, is incredibly complex. A single mix could have upward of 600 different rights holders. According to CEO Stephen White, a typical mix has 25 to 30 songs that require payments to 25 to 30 record labels and anywhere from two to ten publishers for each track. […]

MixBank matches the recordings used in the remix or DJ mix against a database of three-audio snippets from Gracenote, where White was CEO prior to joining Dubset. He says fingerprinting is a “brute force” tool that can provide MixBand with up to 100 possible matches for each three-second match.

The rise in popularity of the EDM genre has resulted in an increasing number of user-generated remixes, mash-ups, and DJ mixes of popular songs, and this partnership will help bring those underground tracks to Apple Music and potentially “all 400 distributors worldwide” in the future, said White.

Dubset will retain a percentage of revenue for providing in-house licensing and pay the DJ or remixer a share of that amount. The service “allows everyone to make money on this content for the first time,” according to White. The digital distributor has agreements with over 14,000 labels and publishers.

In related news, Beats 1 recently announced that popular EDM artist deadmau5 will host his own show this Friday at 3:00 p.m. Pacific.

Tags: Apple Music, Dubset
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Stay up to date with all the action from ICC World T20 with Google

The ICC World Twenty20 is in full swing, which means that productivity is going to take a serious hit in countries where the gentleman’s game is actively followed. Google is now rolling out new features to ensure that all the latest scores, news, and highlights from the tournament are readily accessible.

As always, you can just search on Google using queries like “cricket score” or “T20 score” to get real-time scores on any live matches, as well as the match schedule for the tournament. You can access detailed stats as well as all the player-related information with ease.

You can also use Google Now to can track your team’s progress throughout the tournament, with Google serving reminders for upcoming matches, real-time scores, and all the latest news.

In addition to the aforementioned services, Google is rolling out new features that allow you to stay connected to the game. When you search for a cricketer, you’ll see additional information, such as match photos, social media posts, or any videos directly in the search results.

Also, if you search for a cricket-related query during a live match, you’ll be able to see real-time commentary from other cricketers. The panels will go live in time for today’s New Zealand vs. India match, and will be available for a total of twelve games in the tournament.

Which team are you guys rooting for?

Source: Google

Amazon’s Fire HD 6 tablet is yours for just £69 today

Amazon has discounted the price of the online retailer’s Fire HD 6 tablet to just £69.99 in the UK. For today only, you’ll fork out less for the Android-powered 6-inch mobile platform that offers a snappy processor for all your movies, books, games and more.

The usual listing price of the HD 6 tablet is £99, making this quite the deal. Powering the experience is a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 6-inch HD display, front-facing camera for video calling, 8/16GB of internal storage, a choice of colors, and up to eight hours of battery life.

See at Amazon

Samsung: Gear VR is just the beginning, future virtual reality headsets planned

Samsung has told Pocket-lint that it will continue its investment in and commitment to virtual reality as it believes that it become “the future of how we engage in media”. And that will include new headsets.

During launch day for the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge smartphones, we met with Conor Pierce, the company’s vice president of IT and mobile in the UK, at the Galaxy Studio pop-up experience and demo centre in the heart of London’s Westfield shopping centre.

Around us, members of the public were enjoying looking at the two new phones, but also experiencing Gear VR demonstrations in a number of different zones. The centrepiece was a 4D ride that used motion and the headsets to simulate a rollercoaster to great effect. It served as the perfect backdrop for a conversation about the future of the Gear VR headset.

READ: Samsung Gear VR Consumer Edition review: The stepping-stone to Oculus proper

Pocket-lint

Samsung VP Conor Pierce spoke to us at the Galaxy Studio in London’s Westfield shopping centre

We asked Pierce if Samsung was pleased about the reaction to it so far and planned to follow up the consumer model.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Having Mark Zuckerberg stand up [at Mobile World Congress] and say that the future platform is VR and that one of the best experiences is via a Samsung Gear VR was great.

“And we have the enviable position of having a competitive advantage. We have a window so let’s make the most of it.

“I’m sure one day the competition will catch up, but I know we’ll be in a really strong position because we have support from Facebook and Oculus. And we know that a driver will be when people can create their own content, which is where the Gear 360 camera comes in.

“When that comes in Q2 you’ll see a huge uptake for Gear VR.”

READ: Samsung Entrim 4D VR uses nerve signals to make you feel you’re really flying

Pocket-lint

Pierce himself believes that, if played right, virtual reality will be a massive technology sector this year and beyond.

“When you really experience VR, you can’t help but want it. Like mobile phones and smartphones, when you get used to it, it becomes an everyday part of your life,” he said.

“I genuinely believe that Gear VR will become the future of how we engage with media. Whether that’s entertainment, whether it’s games, whether it’s education, or whether it’s business.

“It’s completely immersive and you’re showing a completely different view of the world. That’s going to be fun.”

READ: Best Samsung Gear VR Oculus apps 2016

We’re getting closer to real invisibility cloaks

We’ve been inching closer to real-life invisibility cloaks for a bit now, but going full on Harry Potter in the Hogwarts library is probably still a ways off. The latest advancement in metamaterial-based vanishing tech from Iowa State University guards whatever it’s placed on from cameras, according to a paper published in Nature. The naked eye? Not so much. And even those cameras can’t hide it from a human viewing a video feed, only other machines or perhaps radar.

The researchers achieved this by embedding split ring resonators filled with galinstan into silicone sheets. Stretching those sheets is a form of tuning of sorts, and allowed the scientists to suppress certain radar waves up to about 75 percent. This type of tech could be used in a stealth fighter jet for example, as everything RF notes.

On the other side of the metamaterials coin, the University of California at Berkeley has developed a type of invisibility tech that reflects light to keep objects hidden. This method uses gold nanoantennas to “reroute reflected light waves” so that the thing it covers was invisible when the material was turned on by switching the gold’s polarization — watch it in action just below.

For now it’s just working on a microscopic scale, measuring “barely” 80 nanometers thick and only large enough to cover a few biological cells, according to the school. But hey, it’s a start, right?

Via: PSFK

Source: Nature, Berkeley Lab