IBM constructs a 17-qubit quantum processor, its most powerful to date

Why it matters to you

IBM’s research into quantum computing is making steady progress, and anyone who’s interested can experiment with the tech for themselves via IBM Cloud.

IBM has announced that it has successfully created its most powerful quantum processor to date. The 17-qubit prototype will serve as the foundation for the first early-access commercial systems offered as part of the IBM Q program.

The new processor represents a significant increase in qubit count, but that’s not the only improvement that has been made. IBM states that the prototype leverages advances in terms of materials and architecture, resulting in a system that’s twice as powerful as the one that’s currently available for public usee via IBM Cloud.

IBM is also making some upgrades to that public system, which has run more than 300,000 experiments for students, scientists, and enthusiasts since the IBM Q initiative got underway in March 2017. The previous 5-qubit processor has been replaced with a 16-qubit processor, which should allow for much more complex problems to be studied using the hardware.

“The significant engineering improvements announced today will allow IBM to scale future processors to include 50 or more qubits, and demonstrate computational capabilities beyond today’s classical computing systems,” said Arvind Krishna, the senior vice president and director of IBM Research and Hybrid Cloud.

Quantum computing has progressed in leaps and bound over recent years, and now the race is on to find practical applications for the most promising examples of the technology. Quantum systems are capable of working with data sets that are much too large or complex for classical computers to handle.

After years of theoretical research, companies like IBM are looking to monetize the technology by offering it to businesses as a solution for their data analysis needs — and since IBM is already talking about a commercial implementation, it seems that the project is well on its way toward that goal.

Of course, quantum computing isn’t the only solution to this kind of problem. Earlier this week, HPE unveiled its latest prototype of The Machine, which provides similar capabilities in terms of working with large data sets, without invoking the intricacies of superposition and quantum entanglement.

Huawei takes the fight to Amazon with a brand-new 7-inch budget tablet

Why it matters to you

Looking for a tablet that isn’t flashy and won’t break the bank? Huawei’s latest is a compelling choice.

If you’re in the market for a budget tablet, there are quite a few options out there — though it’s often hard to tell which of them offer reasonable value and which just aren’t worth the trouble. Fortunately, Huawei has just given shoppers another option, and it’s available at Walmart stores right now for just $90.

It’s called the MediaPad T3 7, and it checks all the boxes for the bare minimum for an Android tablet, while offering a few surprising benefits. For one, the whole thing is crafted from anodized aluminum, which is somewhat surprising for a sub-$100 tablet. And although the device only comes with 16GB of onboard storage, you have the ability to expand that up to 128GB with a MicroSD card.

In other respects, the MediaPad T3 7 is about what you’d expect. The device sports a 7-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1024 x 600, and is powered by a MediaTek MT8127 quad-core processor along with 1GB of RAM. Spec-wise, it’s perfectly on par with another popular budget tablet, Amazon’s Fire 7 — which, coincidentally, was also refreshed today.

Huawei’s tablet features front and rear 2-megapixel cameras, which will make do for video chatting, and a 3,100mAh battery. The company doesn’t elaborate as to how many hours users can expect to get out of a single charge, but the outgoing Amazon Fire 7 managed about 7 hours on a 2,980mAh cell, so expect it to fall somewhere in that ballpark.

Comparisons between the MediaPad T3 7 and Fire 7 will inevitably be drawn, and they stack up quite favorably. The Fire 7 starts at $30 less, but only offers 8GB of storage. Bump that up to 16GB, and you’re paying $70.

There is also the issue of operating systems: Amazon’s devices run on a forked version of Android, which means you’ll miss out on Google apps as well as the Play Store. If you are heavily invested in Amazon’s ecosystem, are a Prime member, or use Alexa frequently, this may be a trade-off you’re willing to make.

Conversely, the MediaPad T3 7 runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow which, while not the most current version of Google’s operating system, provides access to far more software.

The MediaPad T3 7 is not yet listed as available for shipping online, but you can pick it up at brick-and-mortar Walmart locations right now.

Google’s revamped Find My Device app makes finding lost Android phones easy

Why it matters to you

Leave your smartphone somewhere? Not to worry — Google’s new Find My Device app can help you locate it quickly and easily.

Android Device Manager, Google’s location-tracking and remote tool for Android smartphones and tablets, got a fresh coat of paint ahead of Google’s annual developer conference. It has a new name — Find My Device — and a revamped, streamlined interface with a renewed focus on device management.

The new Find My Device app, just like Android Device Manager before it, lets you easily locate, lock, and erase an Android device associated with your Google account. That same support extends to smartwatches powered by Android Wear.

Find My Device puts your devices front and center. Once you sign in with your Google credentials, you’ll see your phones, smartwatches, and tablets represented by icons at the top, which replace the old app’s drop-down menu. Tapping a device pulls up options to sound an audible alarm, lock it, or factory reset it. You’ll also see its current Wi-Fi status and battery life, as well as its rough geographic location on a Google Maps screen.

If your device doesn’t have a lock screen, Find My Device lets you enter a password you can use to unlock it when you find it. Alternatively, you can add a message or phone number where a good Samaritan can reach you if they find it.

The overhaul is long overdue. Google launched Android Device Manager way back in 2013, shortly after that year’s I/O conference, as an answer to Apple’s Find My iPhone service. Before then, managing an Android phone remotely required downloading and installing a third-party solution.

Somewhat cryptically, the app’s store listing mentions what appears to be a new brand: “Google Play Protect.” It might refer to a new of suite apps for Android devices, or perhaps a new development team within Google focused on security. We’ll likely have to wait for the Google I/O keynote address — and the follow-up Google I/O session on Android security — to find out more.

This drone footage finally reveals how narwhals use their long tusks

Why it matters to you

Drones are helping unlock the secrets of the animal kingdom and get some pretty stunning footage while doing it.

Narwhal tusks have long fascinated Inuits but there has never been scientific evidence for how they are actually used. Well, drone footage has finally confirmed one use of these strange extensions. In a short clip, a narwhal is shown striking, stunning, and eating a small fish — the first time such behavior has been captured on tape.

“We know narwhals come in an out of the fjords in the summer but it’s not totally clear what they do,” Marianne Marcoux, one of the scientists who worked on the study, told Digital Trends. “The drone allows us to get a new vantage point without disturbing the animals.”

Initiated as a pilot study to test the usefulness of the drone, the goal was to count how many narwhals were entering Tremblay Sound, Nunavut. The research team from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), World Wildlife Fund Canada, the Vancouver Aquarium, and Arctic Bear Productions got a surprise.

“We found the narwhal would use the tusk to tap fish and it would stun them a little bit, and the narwhal could then suck in the fish,” Marcoux said.

Stunning fish is now an acknowledged secondary function of the tusk — the first of which is for sexual selection. “It’s a bit like the feathers of the peacock in that it allows the female to judge the male on his qualities,” Marcoux said.

This secondary function is closely related to another hypothesis, which suggests the tusks are used as sensory organs.

The narwhal’s tusk is a hollow canine tooth that spirals out from the animals head, reaching lengths of up to nine feet. A nerve runs through its middle and small holes enables the narwhal to sense its environment, such as electricity generated by fish.

Despite their apparent noise, the drones don’t seem to disturb the narwhals. Marcoux said at least one other study has measured drone noise above and below water in the environments and determined that the devices weren’t loud enough to bother the animals. The researchers plan to return with a drone next year summer to observe moms and their calves.

At long last, Google’s Smart Reply makes the jump from Inbox to Gmail

Why it matters to you

Smart Reply uses machine learning to take the busy work out of firing off email replies, saving you time and frustration.

Google’s Smart Reply feature, which automatically suggests intelligent responses to incoming messages, has been kicking around in the company’s Inbox email app, as well as Allo and Android Wear, for some time now. At last, it is finally making its way to Gmail on Android and iOS.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the arrival of Smart Reply during the keynote speech at its annual I/O conference. The technology scans the content of messages in your inbox, then uses machine learning to call up three automated responses based on your writing habits. As such, the more you use it, the better it gets at knowing what options to present to you. Smart Reply pays attention to the selections you make, as well as the ones you ignore, for a dynamic experience.

It’s not necessarily just for short, quick responses, either. Tapping on an option places your cursor at the end of the sentence, so you can further elaborate if necessary. Think of it as a jumping off point, rather than a canned auto-reply.

According to Google, 12 percent of responses sent from Inbox are Smart Replies. While Allo and Android Wear also support the feature, all three products are still essentially niche products that don’t serve the wide majority of Google’s customers. With Smart Reply arriving on Gmail, that will all change. After two years of training and tweaking, Google has finally deemed it ready to unleash on the masses.

Smart Reply should roll out to Gmail users over the coming weeks. Initially, only English will be supported, though Spanish will be added shortly after. Initially, the feature will debut only in the mobile app, but don’t consider a web release out of the question — according to a Google spokesperson via VentureBeat, the company is “heavily considering” it as a future feature.

Pre-order a 3-pack of Amazon’s newest Alexa-enabled Fire tablets and save 20%

Our friends at Thrifter are back again, this time with a discount on Amazon’s latest Fire tablets!

Amazon’s Fire tablet has been an extremely popular device since its release, and a large part of that is due to its aggressive price point. The company just announced a refreshed version of it with a higher contrast display, the addition of Alexa and more, yet kept it at the same price point. That’s right, the new version still starts at just $49.99, but you can actually get it for less if you buy more of them.

You may be considering picking up a few of these for your family, and if you grab three of them at the same time you can save 20% on the purchase with promo code FIRE3PACK. This drops the price of three Fire tablets down to just $128.38, saving you $29.99.

The Fire tablet has a 7-inch IPS display and comes with a base of 8GB of storage in it. You can opt to upgrade that to 16GB of internal space for $20 more, or you could spend that extra $20 on a microSD card since the tablet can handle up to 256GB of expandable storage. You can grab one in black, yellow, blue, or red depending on your preference.

See at Amazon

For more great deals be sure to check out our friends at Thrifter now!

The most important announcements from Google I/O 2017!

What are the biggest announcements from Google I/O 2017?

For Android people, Google I/O is both frenetic excitement — all the announcements! — and a huge party. But main takeaways are the products and services that will affect the way developers and consumers interact with Google products every day.

Here are all the major announcements from Google I/O 2017!

Note: This page will be continuously updated throughout Google I/O, so check back often for updates!

Android O beta is live

Check it out! An official announcement is expected later in the keynote.

Android passes 2 billion active devices

The enormous growth of Android continues, with the OS passing the 2 billion active device milestone. “It’s a privilege to serve users at this scale,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the opening minutes of the keynote.

In other milestones, Google revealed that Drive has 800 million users, and Photos has 500 million, with some 1.2 billion photos being uploaded per day

Google Lens announced

Google Lens is a set of vision based computing capabilities that can identify things in the real world using Google’s AI and knowledge graph. Lens is effectively Google Goggles on steroids, and it’ll be shipping first in Google Assistant and Photos, before arriving in other products.

Sundar Pichai gave a few examples of Lens’s capabilities, including identifying specific flowers, finding camera at Wifi username and password by scanning a sticker, and identifying a restaurant in the real world.

Google.ai and TPU Cloud

Google.ai is the company’s new AI platform for developers, allowing them to build machine learning applications in the cloud. Google.ai uses neural nets to design neural nets as part of a reinforcement learning approach, and Google is already using it in healthcare and pathology.

Google Assistant

Google revealed that 100 million devices now have access to Google Assistant. And Assistant is about to get a whole lot smarter thanks to the capabilities of Google Lens, Assistant will be able to have a conversation with your about what’s on your screen. In addition to all that, Google announced that you’ll finally be able to directly type to Assistant.

What’s more, Google Assistant will finally be coming to iPhone, as widely rumored in recent weeks.

The new Google Assistant SDK allows manufacturers to build Google Assistant into whatever device they want — from cars, TVs, drinks mixers to toys to home appliances, opening up the platform to significant new markets.

And new languages are coming too — French, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese this summer, and Italian, Spanish and Korean by the end of the year.

Actions on Google

Actions on Google will be getting payment support, allowing food orders directly through voice in Google Assistant. The on-stage demo showed ordering from Panera, with alterations to order, pulling address and payment from existing data in the Google account.

Google Home

This summer, Google Home will be launching in Canada, Australia, France, Germany and Japan. Proactive assistance will be coming to Google Home — for example, Google Home might light up, prompting you to ask Google what’s up, to notify you you’ll need to leave earlier to reach your next appointment.

Handsfree calling will be coming to Google Home, with free calls to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. And thanks to multi-user support, asking Home to “call mom” will call the right person depending on who’s asking.

On the entertainment front, new partners including HBO Now were announced, and users on Spotify’s free service will be able to use Google’s smart speaker in addition to the premium subscribers.

Bluetooth support will be coming to Google Home too, effectively turning it into Bluetooth speaker for iOS and other devices.

And Chromecast will be updated to show visual responses on your TV when you ask for help from Google Home — for example “show me my calendar” might bring up the result on your TV. Through Google Assistant, all the actions supported on other platforms will eventually be available on your TV.

Google Photos

Google Photos is getting new features to make sharing easier. Suggested Sharing can help you find the best pictures of your friends, and share them, using machine learning to recognize people in photos, and offers to share with that person, based on your own sharing patterns.

The new Shared Libraries feature can help to automate sharing of pictures of specific people, things or places. Shared Libraries can notify recipients of new photos, and automatically save photos to personal library — no more worrying about whose phone has which photos. Suggested Sharing and Libraries will be rolling out on iOS, Android and the web in the coming weeks.

Google Photo Books lets you print photos from your library, automatically selecting the best pics from a selection of your choice, based on search. Photo Books are available in the US now: Softcover books will cost for $9.99, with hardcover coming in at $19.99.

Google Lens support will be coming to Google photos too, using the power of Google’s knowledge graph to help you learn more about what’s in your photos.

YouTube

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube told keynote attendees that viewers watched 1 billion hours of content on the video platform in 2016.

360-degree video is coming to YouTube’s TV app, including live 360 video. Using the TV remote, you can pan around the video.

More to come!

There’s lots more to come at Google I/O, so stay tuned!

There are over 2 billion active Android devices today

The world’s largest operating system is used on over 2 billion devices.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off I/O 2017 by highlighting the growth of Android — the world’s largest operating system now powers over 2 billion devices.

Pichai shared usage statistics for other Google products: Photos launched two years ago, clocking over 500 million users and processing 1.2 billion photos per day. People are watching over 1 billion hours’ worth of video on YouTube daily, and Maps is similarly serving directions for 1 billion kilometers on a daily basis.

Drive has also posted an impressive growth, with the cloud storage service crossing over 800 million users. Pichai said that it is “a privilege to serve users at this scale,” and that Google is increasingly leveraging machine learning and AI in its products.

Stay tuned to Android Central for all the updates from Google I/O 2017.

Google Lens brings powerful image recognition to the palm of your hand

On stage at Google IO 2017 today, Google announced Google Lens, the culmination of major improvements the company has made in machine learning. Leveraging Google’s computer vision tech, Google Lens can use your phone’s camera to identify objects around and give you more information about them.

Google Lens can understand what you’re looking at, and Google had some pretty interesting examples on stage to show that off. For example, you can show Lens a flower, and it will serve up more information on what the flower is. A slightly more impressive demo showed Lens recognizing the default Wi-Fi SSID information stored on a routers sticker and using that information to automatically log you into the network.

On top of that, Lens can use your location, orientation and street view to bring up more information about restaurants and other businesses around you. Think of it like Samsung’s Bixby, but better.

All of this is part of what Google CEO Sundar Pichai describes as the company’s shift from a mobile-first world to AI-first. That push has moved Google towards “an inflection point with vision,” Pichai said.

Google Lens will arrive first as part of Google Assistant in Photos.

For more from Google I/O, keep following along with our liveblog.

Google Assistant now available for iPhone

As rumored ahead of Google I/O, Google has announced that Google Assistant is now available for iPhone. A lot of what you’ve come to expect from Assistant is carried over to the iPhone app, but with much lighter system integration, of course.

Google Assistant on iPhone can serve up package details from Gmail, control your smart home devices, conducts searches, and everything else Assistant does. You will, of course, have to open the Assistant app to take advantage of any of these perks.

Given Assitant’s spread from a Pixel-only perk to more Android phones over the last several months, it’s good to see it make the jump to another platform entirely. Of course, whether iPhone users choose to go with Assistant over Siri is another question entirely.

We don’t have an App Store link handy just yet, but Assistant should be available to download shortly. For more from Google I/O, be sure to keep following along with our liveblog.