The launch of Google Now last year pointed a new way forward for search, as Google could begin predicting the information its users sought before they even thought to type a query. Traffic, weather, sports scores and more began materializing on phones running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and above, with the company promising that many …

Google released a big update for its Google+ apps for iOS and Android today, bringing a wealth of new features around photos, location sharing, and the product’s overall readability. The photo features come from Google’s acquisition of Snapseed, the company said. According to a blog post, they include basic edits like rotating and cropping photos; Instagram-like filters for the iPhone …

Gmail for Android updated today to let users respond to e-mails directly from push notifications. That’s not all: the update also allows archiving and searching Gmail from the notifications window. The company suggests tweaking your settings to limit the amount of push notifications you get for e-mails: “You can combine this with existing notification features like the ability to customize …

Twitter acquired the music discovery service We Are Hunted last year and is using its technology to build a standalone music app, CNET has learned. The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to …

People looking at the Samsung Galaxy S4 may soon learn that it’s looking back at them, tracking their eye movements to perform key tasks. That’s the word in a new report that says eye-tracking software will be built into the new smartphone, which Samsung plans to announce in New York on March 14. The New York Times, citing a person …

A job listing briefly posted on LinkedIn appears to confirm last month’s report of an “X-Phone,” now in development at Motorola, that represents Google’s biggest effort to date to inject life into the struggling device maker. The listing, first noticed by Android Headlines, advertises for a senior product manager for the X-Phone. The listing describes the project as a “next-generation …

Removing YouTube from the pre-installed apps on iOS hasn’t stopped users from finding it. Three months after its release, the standalone app is already on almost half of U.S. iPhones, according to market share data released today by mobile data company Onavo. As of Dec. 31, 44.5 percent of iPhone users had downloaded the standalone YouTube app, according to the report. …

More stockings were stuffed with Android and iOS devices this Christmas than ever before, according to new data released today. And new device owners spent much of December 25 downloading apps for their new toys. The analytics firm Flurry said device activations soared from their daily December average of 4 million to 17.4 million on Christmas Day, a 332 percent …

Like many consumers of online video, Timbo Drayson wanted badly to bring his favorite viral clips from his smartphone to the big screen. But doing so hasn’t always been easy, particularly for Google TV owners like himself. “I love it when the video is playing,” Drayson said. “But actually trying to navigate with these remotes is a nightmare.” Fortunately, as …

The recent release of new 7- and 10-inch Nexus devices earned some of the strongest reviews yet for Android tablets. And yet along with praise for the high-resolution displays and snappy processors came a familiar complaint: there aren’t enough apps. As my colleague Roger Cheng put it: “Unfortunately, it’s software, and not hardware, that continues to be the key problem …