Tag Archives: google

Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 announced for $3,500, available to preorder now, ships later this year

Comfort, better visuals, easier to use with your hands. That’s the takeaway from HoloLens 2, Microsoft’s follow-up to the Space Age goggles it announced four years ago. The technology behind the $3,500 (about £2,700 or AU$4,900) HoloLens 2 device, which Microsoft calls “mixed reality,” overlays computer images on the real world. Imagine arrows directing you down …

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Google caters to coders with .dev internet addresses

If you have anything to do with building software, Google wants you to sign up to use its new .dev domain. The internet address for developers is now available to all comers, the tech colossus said Thursday. For the past week, Google let people and companies sign up for .dev addresses at premium rates. But now the prices will drop, for example to …

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Apple uses Siri Shortcuts to catch up to Alexa, Google Assistant

While Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant got busy over the past few years creating oodles of new skills and capabilities, Apple’s Siri seemed to be asleep. Alexa came out with food delivery via voice commands back in early 2016. Siri, meanwhile, didn’t offer the same feature until last year. Considering that contrast, it’s no secret Siri has fallen far behind …

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HoloLens 2 hands

I am at Microsoft’s headquarters to get a demo of the HoloLens 2. I’m led down a basement hallway. Large sliding metal doors separate rooms. As I reach my destination, I find a re-creation of an automotive workshop. It smells like rubber tires. In front of me, there’s an ATV on a pedestal. Tools and parts are spread around the …

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Galaxy S10 shows that triple

This year has been one of the more eventful years for the phone industry. There’s all the hoopla about 5G phones, such as Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 5G. Support for 5G will be limited in 2019, but it should be more widely available in 2020. Foldable phones, such as the new Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X, made headlines, but that too …

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Turn iPhone, Pixel or Galaxy phone displays into 3D with this screen protector

In a corner conference room, Han Jin, the CEO of Lucid, places an old iPhone 7 Plus on the table. He swipes through pages of apps, showing me what looks on all counts to be a normal iPhone with a screen protector on it. Then, he opens the Lucid app and plays a clip from Avatar in 3D. I look at …

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Five phone cameras? Three? Galaxy S10, PureView, Xperia take different tacks

Cast your mind back to the heady days of 2012 when Nokia scored an award for launching the best new device at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The winner was the Nokia 808 PureView, a Symbian-powered phone that boasted a camera with 41 megapixels. Seven years later, there’s a new PureView in town, but this time it’s less about the …

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Google puts Assistant into its Android texting app, and it’s pretty cool

Google Assistant lives in your home and might have its own button on your phone. Now it’s in your Android Messages texting app, too. I got a hands-on demo of how exactly it works, here at MWC 2019 in Barcelona.  Each year at the world’s biggest phone show, Google transforms a concrete passageway between two convention center halls into a …

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Brave uses 35% less power than Chrome for Android, startup says

The Android version of the Brave browser uses 35 percent less power than Google’s Chrome on ad-heavy websites, Brave said Wednesday, highlighting a major difference in a world where we often have to keep a close eye on our phone battery. On tests loading 20 news sites on a Samsung Galaxy S9 phone, Brave’s lower power consumption would let you …

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Microsoft CEO defends $480 million HoloLens contract with the US Army

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is defending himself after a group of employees published an open letter calling on the company to ditch a multimillion dollar contract HoloLens contract with the US Army. Nadella told CNN Business in an interview Monday that the contract was not merely about supplying the military with HoloLens headsets, which overlay computer images on the real world. Instead, …

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