Google Fiber could bring its speedy internet to Dallas
Good news Dallasites, Google Fiber could be headed your way soon. The Fiber team said yesterday it’s considering bringing its high-speed gigabit internet service to Dallas, though it’ll likely be a while before anything actually happens. Google is in talks with Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings, and it’s currently exploring how it could deploy Fiber throughout the city using guidelines laid down in the Google Fiber checklist. Austin was one of the first cities to get Google’s internet service, and it’s currently being deployed in San Antonio as well (where the rollout exploration process took 17 months).
“Dallas is already one of the best cities to work in tech,” wrote Jill Szuchmacher, Google Fiber’s director of expansion. “Google Fiber will help Dallas attract even more tech talent, and push the city further toward the future.” And since Google has already brought Fiber to other Texas cities, it likely has a decent understanding of its local politics and environment.
Google won’t be alone in Dallas, though. AT&T is also based in the city, and it already has its GigaPower fiber internet service available in some areas. AT&T is also planning to bring more fiber service to southern Dallas eventually.
Google Fiber is currently available in six cities, and it’s in the process of rolling it out in another six. Dallas is now the 12th potential city to get the service.
Source: Google Fiber
Former Android chief is betting on quantum computing and AI
Andy Rubin — one of the people who invented the Android platform — left Google in 2014, but he’s still helping shape the future of technology. At Bloomberg Technology Conference, he revealed that one of the startups his hardware incubator is backing has a pretty lofty goal: finding a way to commercialize quantum computing devices with the manufacturing processes we use today. Rubin said new computing platforms “happen every 10 to 12 years.” He believes it’s time to start building quantum computers and using them to run AI.
Quantum computers, in a nutshell, will be able to perform tasks much, much faster than typical computers by harnessing the power of atoms and molecules. It’s a complex topic, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might be able to help you out. The technology is still in its infancy, but a few organizations, including Google and MIT, managed to create simple versions that could lead something bigger.
As you can imagine then, a quantum computer and an AI make a formidable combination. During the event, Rubin said the resulting machine could be so powerful, we’d need only one to power every connected device, such as smartphones. “If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one. It might not be something you carry around; it just has to be conscious,” he said, according to The Verge.
The idea of an extremely capable and conscious computer is both intriguing and terrifying. Remember Skynet? Rubin said we shouldn’t “be worrying about Skynet coming online,” though. We “should be worrying about what it means to compute at these magnitudes.”
Source: Bloomberg
Google Maps wants you to help check user-submitted info
Google’s Maps team doesn’t have all day to go around checking that the information people submit about locations is accurate, so it’s turning to you to share that responsibility. Some folks have been seeing a new feature that asks for input on whether a user suggestion is correct.
The feature has been said to be coming ever since Android Police found snippets of code in an April app update that hinted at an upcoming user-feedback tool. But it didn’t go live until about a couple of weeks ago, according to Android Police, and it’s not clear if it’s available to everyone yet.
Based on screenshots obtained by Android Police, the user-submitted changes will show up in a place’s card in orange, with the words, “Someone suggested new info.” Tapping that brings up a panel with the original data and the suggested change, and you’re asked to select the correct version. You can also hit “Not sure” if you don’t know what’s right, or “Call place to verify” if you have time and unlimited minutes at your disposal.
Google has already handed the responsibility of verifying local information off to what it calls Regional Leads — volunteers who know an area well — to review tweaks made to its Map Maker tool before they show up on Maps. But that could slow down the process of ensuring the map is up to date with accurate new information.
This new method could make it faster and easier to confirm (or refute) changes made to Maps, and prevent future cases of digital vandalism. Of course, this still depends on whether the general public can be trusted to responsibly vet tweaks. It’s not clear if there will be a tier of trusted editors to manage crowd edits a la Wikipedia. We’ll have to wait for an official Google announcement or wider scale implementation to see if there will be more comprehensive measures in place to prevent mischief.
Source: Android Police
Google brings ‘intelligent search’ to business users
Google’s new Springboard search may be aimed at companies, but it’s just the kind of AI-powered tech that can trickle down to consumers. The search giant describes it as a sort of digital assistant that helps employees search through piles of documents in Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Contacts and other apps. Much like Google Now, it also “assists you throughout your workday by proactively providing useful and actionable information and recommendations,” according to the company.
The company already uses machine learning in Search and other products like Translate — and the VP of search John Giannandrea is, in fact, a leading AI researcher. Just recently, for instance, the company launched Assistant, a version of Google Now that you can actually converse with. This is the first time we’ve seen intelligent search working across so many apps, however. For employees drowning in files, it should help them sort out their stuff — as Google App VP Prabhakar Raghavan puts it, “today the average knowledge worker spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information.”
Google also rebuilt Sites, an app that lets corporate users share internal documents like newsletters or account reports. It now behaves like Docs and other Google apps, in that you can use drag-and-drop editing, real-time collaboration and other teamwork tools. In addition, any Site you create now displays properly to users whether they’re on a smartphone, smart TV or laptop.
Huawei P9 Review – an iPhone by any other OS would still taste of Apple
Since I own and use a Huawei Nexus 6P as my daily driver, I find myself in the unique position of being able to compare these two phones – one crafted with direct input from Google, and one the result of Huawei when left to its own means – side by side. Many of my observations in this piece will be comparisons between the two, despite the piece as a whole being a review of the Huawei P9, specifically.
Build
The aluminum frame feels great in the hand. It’s got a slim profile and weighs next to nothing – a stark contrast to the Nexus 6P, which is bigger and noticeably heftier in-hand. Oddly, the P9 is only 0.3mm thinner than the 6P, but feels much smaller – perhaps because the 6P is 38 grams heavier. The P9 is so light, in fact, that when it slipped out of my pocket when I sat down and embedded itself in the couch cushion, I never noticed until I went to check it.
The downside to that all-aluminum body is that when the phone gets hot, it gets hot. A video call with my sister for a mere 15 minutes made the thing nigh-unholdable (that is not a word), lest I burn the fingerprints from the tips of my fingers.
Time to acknowledge the elephant in the room – the P9 looks just like an iPhone. From the shape, to the dimensions, to the random Torx screws on the bottom of the phone, it reeks of Apple design. I understand that people think Apple is the pinnacle of build quality, but ripping Apple’s aesthetic while using Google’s operating system seems so very wrong on so many levels.
Aside from looking like an iPhone, the rest of the phone is structured like a Nexus 6P – volume buttons and power button on the right side of the frame, fingerprint sensor on the back, Type-C USB on the bottom (although the headphone jack is on the bottom as well, not the top).
Screen
Quantitatively, the Nexus 6P is a superior screen – 0.5″ bigger on the diagonal (5.7″ AMOLED), a higher pixel density, and an oil resistant coating on top of corning Gorilla Glass 4 all work in the 6P’s favor. In practice, though I’ve found the P9’s display (5.2″ IPS LCD) to be equal or better in nearly every way.
The pixel density difference is not immediately obvious to the eye, and the supposed oleophobic coating on the 6P didn’t prevent it from picking up fingerprints at the same prodigious rate as the P9. The latter’s display is every bit as gorgeous as the former’s, despite the 6P’s AMOLED screen. In certain side-by-side instances, the colors on the P9 are even more vibrant. Either way, the P9’s screen is pretty damn good. I took a side-by-side shot of the two screens to show the difference – presented without comment.
Cameras
I’m gonna do this quick; like a bandaid, just tear it off – the P9’s camera blows the 6P out of the water. Badly. In all of my (amateur, highly unscientific and purely subjective) head-to-head comparisons, I preferred the P9 – both in terms of how easy it was to get the desired shot, and how the shot looked on its screen and on my computer. I’ve uploaded a gallery of images taken with the two phones for your perusal.
The P9’s camera software more robust than Google’s, and it seems more responsive. The options list for the P9’s camera is extensive, to say the least: Photo, Monochrome, “Beauty” mode, Video, HDR, Panorama, Nighjt Shot, Light Painting, Time-Lapse, Slow-Mo, Watermark, Audio Note, and Document Readjustment. Wow.
This software also features a pretty nifty feature that turns off the camera if you leave it open for too long without doing anything with it – this would undoubtedly save some accidental battery loss.
The focus of the P9 is far superior to the 6P’s, making taking close-up shots way easier to capture; take a look at the Lego closeup and the closeup of the gaming miniature to see what I’m talking about. Additionally, the shutter speed on the P9 seemed a lot snappier than the 6P, which was sluggish by comparison.
In terms of front facing cameras, the P9’s really picks up insane amounts of detail – to the point where I saw my own selfie and thought “ugh, dat skin tho.” In short, the P9’s selfie cam is straight up better. I video chatted a few times with the P9 as well to get a feel for if the quality was any better on the receiving end, but my partner in crime for those calls didn’t seem to notice a difference.
Battery Life
In terms of battery, the P9 performs about how you’d expect with a 3000mAH battery; I got less than a day of my usage, which is to say about 3 hours of screen on time streaming music, refreshing Twitter like mad and texting like crazy. For comparison, my Nexus 6P manages about 4 hours of screen-on time before I need to charge it. The P9 doesn’t quite have the same lasting power, but it’s also no chump. With some battery saving considerations, there’s no reason the battery couldn’t last most people until bed time.
The P9 does not support the 6P’s 3A charging speeds, but the smaller battery and Type-C USB port mean it still charges pretty quickly compared to other devices.
Data, Coverage, Etc.
It’s important to note that the P9 does not support CDMA bands, only GSM – which means Sprint and Verizon customers are out of luck in the US (note that it does support HSPA and LTE, however). My reception with my T-Mobile nano SIM was pretty flawless, with no connection drops and very good quality calls.
WiFi performed as expected – in my case, lots of drops and lag, because the internet in my neck of the woods is awful, and I need to yell at the AT&T guy again. At Starbucks, however, the WiFi was just fine.
Features
The fingerprint reader is arguably faster than the Nexus 6P’s, but I feel like the 6P’s registers my finger correctly more often – note that this may be because of the way I set up my fingerprint on the two devices, which has a margin of human error.
The speaker placement on the P9 isn’t ideal, especially in comparison to the front-facing dual speakers of the Nexus 6P. Holding the phone one-handed in my typical left-handed grip – index finger bracing the left side, middle finger supporting the back, pinky under the bottom of the frame – actually blocks the speaker, muffling the volume. When unimpeded by fat fingers, the volume can compete with the best of them, but the overall sound quality seems a bit hollow to me.
Firmware
Long story, short: if you like iOS’s launcher, or MIUI, this phone is for you. It eschews Google’s signature app drawer in favor of spreading each and every single icon of each and every single app you install on your homescreen. This, to me, results in way too many icons – especially if you start adding widgets.There are a number of cute options within the launcher: transition animations, auto-align icons, shake to align, and homescreen looping are among them.
In terms of performance, I ran into a number of jitters and hesitations when running around in the menus, but to its credit the P9 ran Android 6.0 admirably, and didn’t lag a whole lot; buttery smooth, for the most part. One area the P9 does struggle with, though, is the keyboard – I ran into a bunch of occasions where it would hesitate to input my keystrokes, resulting in many, many backtracks.
Final Thoughts
I had a really great time with this phone. It often felt as good, if not occasionally superior, to my Nexus 6P, especially in terms of how it felt in the hand. The launcher – and, indeed, Huawei’s modified OS in general – was not my bag, for I’m an AndroidGuy (I’m ashamed of that plug), not an Apple Guy.
Basic Spec Comparison
Phone: Huawei P9
Android Version: 6.0
Screen: 5.2″ IPS LCD
Resolution: 1080×1920 (401ppi)
CPU: HiSilicon 2.5ghz Octa-core
RAM: 3GB
Storage: 32GB internal (expandable)
Camera: 12mp duo camera
Battery: 3000mAh, Type C Charging
Price: 599.99 at Amazon
Phone: Huawei Nexus 6P
Android Version: 6.0
Screen: 5.7″ AMOLED
Resolution: 1440×2560 (518ppi)
CPU: 2Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 810
RAM: 3GB
Storage: Up to 128gb (nonexpandable)
Camera: 12.3mp
Battery: 3450mAh, Type C Charging
Price: 419.99-569.99 at Amazon
The After Math: Can’t buy me love
There’s something in the air this week. Seems everybody’s in L-O-V-E, love. Well, except maybe this guy. Researchers successfully tested a new gene therapy using the DNA from three donors. Lenovo debuted the world’s first Tango-enabled smartphone. Tinder kicked all the kids out and Google’s gave its devs something to crow about. Numbers, because how else would we know that one is the loneliest?
Google clarifies how search autocomplete works
In yet another odd development of the 2016 campaign season, Google’s autocomplete feature — not the actual search results, just autocomplete — has come under scrutiny of potential bias. A YouTube video posted by SourceFed (with a followup, posted here) picked up attention after claiming that Google failed to link “Hillary Clinton” with “indictment” in its autocomplete, unlike competitors Bing and Yahoo (that Yahoo is powered by both Bing and Google seems to have gone unmentioned), even if you spot it the i-n-d. So, clearly Google is in the tank for Clinton, right? As it turns out, an alternate and more accurate explanation becomes clear with some knowledge of how Google’s algorithms work.
Contrary to the way SourceFed describes the inner workings of a search engine, Google mentions that its autocomplete does filter for terms, particularly ones that could link someone’s name with things that are potentially hurtful or disparaging. This isn’t especially new information, as Google has previously manually adjusted its results for copyright reasons, and has even been fined for defamatory results.
Searching ‘Donald Trump law’ suggests lawn, but not his numerous lawsuits.
If you’re still not sure it works that way, one could try a similar test with Clinton’s presumptive competitor in the presidential race. While Donald Trump has had stories written about him that include the word “rape” or “lawsuits,” searching his name plus ra- or la- shows neither word as a suggestion. A blog post by marketer and SEO expert Rhea Drysdale goes into more detail about how this works and why, for those interested. Finally, simply typing in Hillary shows a top autocomplete suggestion with “Clinton email” for reasons that should be obvious by now. That single result can’t conclusively prove Google isn’t hiding something, but if it is, then it’s doing a terrible job of warning people off of the ongoing investigation.
Source: Inside Search Blog
Google lends support to the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a wide-ranging and controversial trade agreement between 12 countries that President Obama has strongly supported throughout its creation. Today, he received a major ally in the form of Google — the company endorsed the plan in a blog post. “We hope that the TPP can be a positive force and an important counterweight to restrictive Internet policies around the world,” writes Google SVP and general counsel Kent Walker. “Like many other tech companies, we look forward to seeing the agreement approved and implemented in a way that promotes a free and open Internet across the Pacific region.”
The TPP is far from easy to sum up — but as it relates to tech companies like Google, it contains a number of provisions relating to intellectual property and copyright as well as freedom of internet access and the passage of data around the world. Google supports the TPP in part because of its “strong copyright protections,” limited ability for governments to demand access to encryption keys, and its support of an open internet architecture that would theoretically make it harder for governments to block access to certain websites.
That all sounds good, but plenty of technology companies and organizations have stated that the TPP as written is more problematic than positive. The EFF claims that the TPP will benefit big businesses over consumers and takes issue with the lack of transparency around the agreement’s creation and provisions. The organization also has concerns for what the agreement will do to potential whistleblowers and believes it’ll greatly expand copyright terms and and restrictive DRM schemes. And last year, more than 250 companies signed a letter saying the TPP was “dangerously vague.”
Despite this, President Obama has backed the agreement, and it also has the support of Google’s contemporaries Microsoft and Apple. Whether the agreement is finalized in its current form remains to be seen however — chances are good Obama won’t be able to finish getting it pushed through before leaving office, and presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both have issues with it.
Regardless, Obama continues to push for its passage, both in formal and informal channels — like on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon just last night.
Via: Recode
Source: Google
$500 Lenovo Phab2 Pro is the first Google Tango phone
The second generation of Lenovo’s Phab phones are here already, headlined by the first-ever Project Tango-equipped smartphone with sensors and cameras that can map its surroundings. The Phab2 Pro (check out our hands-on impressions right here) is special because it fulfills the promise of demos that Google’s Advanced Technologies and Products (ATAP) division has been showing us for a few years. The phone’s dual cameras create an “eye” that sees its surroundings in 3D with depth perception, while additional sensors monitor location and nearby objects 250,000 times per second.
Google and Lenovo have shown off experiences that use the Tango technology to provide augmented reality-guided tours in museums and odd experiences like Woorld, but there are more-practical applications. For example, Lowe’s has an app that it says will allow homeowners to remodel by virtually envisioning how appliances or furniture will look in their space. Lenovo VP Jeff Meredith envisions the technology becoming “pervasive, just like GPS.”
Despite shrinking from 7 inches to a 6.4-inch size usable by human hands and coming with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, each Phab2 packs a large 4,050mAh battery, along with Dolby Atmos audio features, including the ability to record in 5.1 surround sound. But the similarities end there. The Pro elevates things to the stratosphere with premium specs and sensing abilities that trump any phone we’ve seen before — all with a price of $500, unlocked.
The Pro also adds on a specially designed eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor, 64GB of built-in storage (expandable via microSD), 4GB of RAM and a 2,560 x 1,440 pixel “assertive” display. All of these phones are scheduled to arrive globally in September, while the Tango-enabled Phab2 Pro will be sold at Lowe’s and Best Buy stores and online by the end of the year.
Get all the news from today’s Lenovo and Motorola event right here!
Source: Lenovo
Android can launch apps based on where you are
Google really wants the apps you use to take the context of where you are into account. Thus Nearby, a feature that uses Bluetooth and your device’s GPS to deliver you apps based on where you are. The post on Google’s official Android blog gives a few examples of how this might work: printing photos directly from your phone when you’re in a CVS Pharmacy or using the Mobile Passport app to duck the customs line at certain airports.
The feature is baked into an update to Google Play Services that’s rolling out now and works on devices running KitKat and up; all you really need to do here to use Nearby is have Bluetooth and GPS activated. Much like physical web beacons, you’ll receive a notification when you’re in proximity to one of the Nearby apps and if you’d rather not check it out, you don’t have to.
Source: Official Android Blog
AIVAnet 