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Google Unveils Nexus 7 Tablet, Nexus Q 'Social Streaming Device'
Through some stroke of fortune, your friendly editor Timothy Lord is at Google I/O watching the keynote. We'll be updating the story live (below the fold) with his updates as they stream in. Starting things off, he reported a few features of Android Jelly Bean. First, graphics will be triple-buffered for extra smoothness; the graphics demo was reportedly impressive enough that the audience swooned. Text input has been improved with new dictionaries and a predictive keyboard that will learn better over time. Additionally, voice typing will now work offline. English will be initially supported, with Farsi, Thai, and Hindi support to follow. Hit the link below to see further updates, including details on the Nexus 7 tablet and the Nexus Q streaming device.
Update: 06/27 17:16 GMT by S : Camera: Toss photos by just flicking them away — actually, you can now do this with apps on the home screen, too. Pinch for a quick sideshow view; it's much faster than one by one, and makes a quick strip-view to slide back and forth. Undo for photo delete -- nice.Google Beam: More than a million NFC-enabled devices are out now: In Jellybean, send someone a photo or contact info by tapping phones. Works with big files, too.
Notifications: You can expand and collapse them, they are actionable, and you can get a lot more info directly from notifications than in previous versions. Rather than opening an app from notifications (as from a missed call), you can call right from the notification itself. Similarly, you can read mail (that is, Gmail) right from the notification list. Canned responses to messages are also available directly from notifications. You can see full photos, Foursquare check-ins, etc. Notifications expand as they bubble to the top of the list, but you can also make them expand with a two-finger drag gesture.
Google search: Using Knowledge Graph. The graph allows new "card" answers to Google searches — a bit like "I'm feeling lucky," but with more multimedia right there. Search for 'What movies was Angelina Jolie in,' and you get back a headshot and a filmography.
Voice Search: Quick spoken answers to spoken questions. The demo question was: "Show me pictures of pygmy marmosets." Yep, there are the pictures.
"Google now" (lower case n): "Gets you just the right info at just the right time." It uses things like search, location, and calendar history to figure out what info you might need and when. If you looked for a flight, and it's updated, Google will alert you and show you the new one. It keeps track of your favorite sports teams. (The guy next to me says, "that's scary cool.. and kind of creepy.") Call up public transportation or an upcoming flight and you get details like how long each trip will be and where to transfer. I'm surprised it doesn't tell you which side of the street is shadier to walk on. Google knows now when you're traveling, and tells you, among other things, what time it is back home.
Note for developers: Jelly Bean will start to release to open source in mid-July. Devs can grab the Preview SDK from developer.android.com right now.
Android Engineering director Chis Yerga says Google Play is now up to 600,000 apps and 20 billion downloads Thousands of books and movies, as well as millions of songs. You can store 20,000 tracks for free in your music library. Yerga introduced movie sales, not just rentals. They're also adding TV: buy episodes, or whole seasons — 'perfect for when you're on the bus.' To start, their partners include Disney, NBC, Sony Pics, Paramount, and small ones like Magnolia. There will also be magazines: premium ones (Esquire, Wired) and lots of the pedestrian ones, too.
Brief, but important new features: App encryption (big applause from audience), and smart App updates — only the parts of the APK that update need to be transferred.
What everyone was waiting for: Asus-built Nexus 7, brandished from the stage. It's super thin, light and portable, and has a 1280x800 display. Inside: Tegra 3. Quad-core CPU, 12-core GPU. "That's basically 16 cores, which makes everything, including games, incredibly smooth.' It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, a gyro, an accelerometer, and up to 9 hours of video playback. It weighs 340 grams — like a paperback book. Fits nicely in one hand.
Mag reader gets you form-factor optimized version of magazines, with various swipe-activated interactive features. There were chuckles from audience on showing the cover of 'Shape' magazine. A bikini picture as a demo of interactive "Premium reading experience" on Google play, available for certain magazines. I'm surprised that was the choice. It seems like the kind of thing women developers might not appreciate, or at least that I'd anticipate would have been nixed based on that presumption.
Google has also added a "what's this song" widget, which leads you to (of course) the store, where you can buy the identified song.
Apps on N7 + Jellybean: The Nexus 7 is the first device that ships with Chrome as a standard browser! YouTube app provides high-def video optimized for the N7. Google Maps: you've got the usual features (public transit, etc.), but also, "learn about a place before you get there." It has pannable 3D images inside places (where they have the footage, of course: it's not complete magic). They demonstrated panning inside a bar. BUG: "Make available offline" in a tappable menu means you don't need a data connection. Google Currents, news reader, etc., now has Google Translate built right in, transparently: choose a new language and see your news in Arabic, say, or any supported language, just like that. Games: They showed an amazing game demo (Horn) with lens flare, environment effects, and individually rendered leaves. Another game has zombies and lots and lots of blood (Dead Trigger). Not for kids, but great graphics.
The Nexus 7 price: They will launch "starting at" $199, including a $25 credit in the Google Play store, and several things as teases, including a Transformers movie and the Bourne Dominion book. It will be available in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the UK to start, with more countries coming.
Mysterious: Project Tungsten. It involves Android and Google Play — the first consumer product Google has ever built from ground up: The "Nexus Q." Q is a small (tiny!) Android computer, which "connects to all the media you have stored in the cloud." It's designed to plug into the best speakers and TV in your home, and always be connected to the cloud. It pulls content directly from Google Play, and is controlled by (but not streaming through) your phone / tablet as a remote. It's a small black orb; looks like a little Death Star. It'll use an NFC connection to your phone: "This is how you get your software," he said, as the phone leaned against it for a moment.
It runs on the same chip as the Galaxy Nexus. And 25-watt amp built right in (!?). It has optical digital audio and micro HDMI outs, too. Dual-band Wi-fi, ethernet, NFC, BT, and a port to encourage 'general hackability' (which got big applause). It's an odd-looking little thing — you won't be stacking anything on top of it. OK, I am drooling: there's a multi-colored LED-lit line around the equator (imagine Luke diving in with his tiny X-wing) which lights in patterns based on music.
It's a 'social connected device': multiple people controlling it from their own tablets in the same space results in their songs from different devices getting spread. Anyone can move songs around the queue, or control the listening experience. "Pretty cool, my friends can now play their music in my living room." Neat tech, but not the very newest possibility in the world. Slightly more cumbersome possibility it replaces: carrying one's whole movie library around. Basically, you can take over the TV connected to the Nexus Q, in order to stream stuff. It will cost $299. They're taking pre-orders now, and the device will start shipping in mid-July.
Google+: Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of G+. They played a cute video of hangouts, showing live video streaming to group. There's a vibrant community of astronomers, knitters, musicians, etc. 250 million G+ users now, with 50pct daily logins. Users tend to spend more than 12 minutes a day in the stream, up from 9 a few months ago (is that an impressive number?) Google+ is now accessed more from mobile than from desktop. They keep getting the same request from users: "Native tablet version?" That's the big G+ announcement today: native G+ for tablets. Photos, text, video, etc. are stylized slightly differently from each other for easy scanning. Hangout experience is an emphasis, too. Swipe to accept and invite, just like a phone call. Automatic video switching to whoever's talking. Looks slick and sweet. Everything is launching on the iPad, too, "very soon." All the new features also now immediately available for phones. Final note: they're introducing a sort of organization around events. "The substance of a real world event is [now] lost online" -- invites are brittle. Announcement: Google Plus Events, for stuff before, during, after. It includes deep integration with Google Calendar.
Before: Invitation, scheduling, organization. You can choose ready-made, cinematic themes. Eh, that looks sort of weak, but then, people sure bought a lot of trapper keepers in the '80s, and Hallmark is a successful business. During: Streaming, involvement, etc. "Everyone's photos get lost," with typical current mix of devices, systems, etc. But you can enable "party mode," which shares all the photos people are taking, if they've turned it on. Also, a current-photos slideshow. This is also controlled from Notifications — a green icon shows if one has turned on Party mode. OK, this is pretty neat — it beats my long-time idea that weddings should all have stations for dumping pictures from SD cards. After: put all those photos in chronological order: all the pics from all the guests who had party mode on, in one stream. Also, analyze photos, for most engagement or plus-ones, and ones in which you're tagged; can also sort by photographer.
Now Sergey is up on stage for a Google Glass demo...
Sergey is talking with his friend JT — they're live-streaming from about a mile ahead and thousands of feet up. They're in a blimp. They're communicating through a Hangout using Google Glass. He's about to jump with the glasses on . He's wearing a wing suit and has a GoPro camera. They're looking right at Moscone Center. And there they go! They're flying through the air, broadcasting the view live. They're aiming for the Moscone. Since I'm inside a big building, this could all be special effects, and I wouldn't know. And now they've landed on the room. Audience applause is hurting my ears.
And they have bikers up there, to speed them along the roof, also with Glasses. The bikers zoomed along the roof, doing flips, all streamed live. They rappelled down the side of the building to get onto the appropriate floor, then biked right up to the stage. Ludicrous. "Special delivery for Sergey." Now the skydivers and other guys have all reached the stage.
More on Glass: Lots of sensors, networking, location awareness, multiple radios for data communications. The project started 2.5 years ago. They showed a photo of Thad Starner wearing a clunkier version from back then. Now it's more like one side of a pair of fat-framed sunglasses. Lead designer Isabel Olsson (Senior Industrial Designer) talks about it: the display is above the eye; designed to be close to your senses, but not block them. The latest prototype weighs less on the nose than many sunglasses. They showed a few demos: playing tennis, first person service. Jumping into a ball pit. They stressed the importance of scaleable design: put all components to one side, so there can be wide frame compatibility. It looks symmetrically (could be be reversed and put on the other side?), but the demos all seem to show it on the right side (from the user's perspective) of the head.
Aspirations / purposes for Glass:
- Communications, documentation: Sometimes for grand or spectacular purpose (skydivers), but also mundane moments among geo-distant friends (the weather in NY or wherever), a baby growing up, etc.
- Search result medium
- Real-time dashboard (how fast are you going on your bike?)
- Interactive communication -- you're at the market and see something odd, or want to ask your spouse about the product you're supposed to pick up.
They showed a heartwarming demo: it looks like an Apple commerical, which may or may not warm the hearts of the people who made it. Sergey talked a bit about why they're showing these particular features. A) They're excited about it, B) These are things they can show us -- there are other uses, but they're tough to demonstrate, and C) they're a small team, with only a limited ability to test them out in different contexts. Sergey also announced Google Glass Explorer Edition. It's a rough-around-the-edges version for developers. Preorders are available for US-based I/O attendees to start. Cost is $1,500, and they plan to ship it to you sometime next year.
"First, graphics will be triple-buffered for extra latency."
There, fixed that for you.
That's kind of a lie. IOS has some features that are only availible with some phones. Ie Siri on 4s only. The problem is only going to get worse with IOS 6 .
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
the impression i get is that both are mature with slightly different feature sets and themes. apple lets their developers finish up on the feature set while google likes to tie most features into their backend and let the hardware partners sell the devices.
very little true cool new features in both updates
at this point i'm looking to dump AT&T and go pre-paid. I don't even care if i keep a phone for three years instead of 2. even the hardware innovation seems to have flattened out as well. slightly faster CPU, better GPU, better camera. yawn
Why in the fuck is the Q so expensive? No way that thing will sell against Roku, AppleTV, the consoles (this gen and next) etc.
Good-bye
In theory, there should be no more latency than there is with double buffering... you are still only ever drawing the frame that is one frame ahead of what you see at any given instant, just like double buffering. The third buffer is used to clear the drawing area and simply prepare it for being drawn on so that the logic that incorporates drawing offscreen does not need to deal with that, and could therefore potentially execute faster.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Like supporting multiple user accounts on a single tablet?
I've been begging for transcripts for ages. Not all of us have the time or ability to watch long video streams all day.
Genuinely- thanks Timothy!
It does not include an external storage device as far as I can tell. Yes I, and some others, do travel to places without cloud access. OK: I want to buy hours of video to keep my kids quiet on a road trip. My cell phone service is lacking where I'm going. 16GB is not going to cut it. I need removable media...
When you try and get your phone replaced under warranty when something goes wrong, the company will screw you over anyway. Even if they don't try and tell you something like "well, ambient humidity triggered the moisture sensor so we're going to pretend you chucked your phone in a lake and not help you", they'll give you someone else's refurbished warranty return and it'll break after three weeks and you'll be in Warranty Hell where you send back the replacement to get a new refurb, at your expense, over and over again.
Void that warranty. Void it with gusto. Void it in the first week of owning your phone and don't look back.
>> "Void that warranty. Void it with gusto. Void it in the first week of owning your phone and don't look back."
Amen.
Define completely artificial.
The microphone and noise cancelation (or lack there of) on phones previous to the 4s make using Siri on them a really shitty experience, its really not something you want to do as you'll just be frustrated as hell as it gets everything wrong/
The iPad 2 has NO noise cancelation, it would fucking suck for siri unless you're in a completely isolated room.
Just because you fail to understand technical reasons for doing things doesn't mean they don't exist.
Perhaps you should leave the software and hardware engineering to the engineers?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So you've discovered that when you buy a device from a manufacturer/carrier that is known for not updating their firmware, your firmware is not updated. Whose fault is this?
I guess you have not tried a high end Android device. The GUI doesn't lag, it is fast and responsive. Occasionally on medium or low end devices there will be a little bit of stutter in the animation due to other tasks needing CPU time and triple buffering will help with that.
I have tried high end Android devices, I got a transformer tablet last year for example, which I ended up swapping for an iPad as it was not quite there yet. Anything using Gingerbread and below is laggy by default because there is not hardware acceleration for the UI. If you've never used an iPhone or a WebOS device you might not be aware of it, but Android, even on the highest end devices can be laggy as hell, in particular whenever the garbage collector kicks in.
:)
When they introduced hardware acceleration in Honeycomb for tablets and then ICS for the rest of devices things improved a bit but it was not what you could call "buttery smooth", it was better by miles but still not that great compared to the experience you get in iOS for example, which is quite frankly, flawless. And this isn't me being an Apple apologist, if you go through my previous posts you'll see I'm a massive Android fanboy.
If you watch the keynote you'll see a demonstration on a Galaxy Nexus. which will show the difference better than I can explain
Yea, I was waiting for the Nexus 7, but on seeing it I'll wait a while longer to get something worthwhile.
$50 more for the version with about $4 worth of extra flash, and no slot to allow the user to add an SD card. And the motive behind this seems to be to force users to use the "cloud". Store all of your music and video on the cloud, then see how long it takes the RIAA and/or the MPAA to find out what you have and start bringing lawsuits. But even if I would re-buy all of my music from Google Play, my ISP has started enforcing monthly usage caps. So I dare not listen to all of my music and watch all of the video that I want or I'll go over the caps and get hit with insanely high overage charges (the little old lady next door already got hit because she likes Netflix). And the finite storage with no expansion slot makes it unreasonable to store all of my music locally (same fault with Nexus Q, which can't store anything). The crippling is for Google's vision of wanting to have all of your information, but pretty much ignores the wants and needs of the customer.
I was pretty disappointed to learn a few days ago about the lack of a back facing camera also. Sure, I've heard the rationalizations, "everyone" already has a digital camera so you don't need it. But that ignores all of the cool things that you can do with a back facing camera on a smart tablet that you can't do with a dumb camera. Everything from Geo-tagging photos to pointing the camera at the night sky and having an astronomy app ID what you are seeing. Reading and looking up QR codes and scanning bar codes. Serving as a wifi enabled remote control camera. And plenty more, and things that just can't be done as well with the crappy front facing webcam.
If they want to claim they had to cut corners to get to the $199 price, I might believe that. But the $249 model has $4 more worth of parts. They could have easily added a basic rear facing camera (even without flash or optical zoom) and an SD slot, and this would have given the customer a decent Android experience. As it is, all I'm hoping for from the Nexus 7 tablet is that it will drive other prices down and set better expectations for screen resolution and CPU power. I had been waiting to buy this, but now that the details are out I wouldn't touch it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.