Google is ramping up its efforts to return to the world’s biggest smartphone market. The search giant launched Wednesday a China-specific version of its storage management platform, Files Go. The app can be downloaded from third-party app stores hosted by Chinese tech mammoths, Baidu, Huawei, Tencent and Xiaomi. Called “Google Wen Jian Ji Ke” (roughly …
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I remember using a selfie stick to try out Google’s educational vision of AR, and it was impressive. My son tried it in his school one day, and felt the same way. Google’s AR Expeditions initiatives were originally designed to be used in classrooms, and still are, but before now schools had to be part of a pilot program to try …
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Project Fi is expanding its phone lineup just a tad. The Google phone network announced Wednesday that it’s adding the LG V35 ThinQ, the G7 ThinQ and the Motorola Moto G6 to its services. Announced earlier Wednesday by AT&T, the V35 is a half-step update to February’s V30 ThinQ and features a 6-inch OLED display, the Snapdragon 845 chipset and 6GB of RAM. Similar to …
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With Mozilla’s flip of a virtual switch, life got easier for the people who make websites and the people who use them, which is to say, everybody. On Monday, Mozilla accepted an update for its Firefox browser that enables technology called web components. You probably won’t directly care about them unless you’re a programmer. But you’ll almost assuredly care about …
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At CES 2018 LG announced it was adding Google Assistant and Alexa voice control to its OLED and Super UHD TVs with ThinQ (its branded AI); now Amazon joins Google with LG’s roll out of Alexa support. Its LG SmartThinQ Skill for Amazon Alexa allows you to ask your Echo to play your favorite show, launch LG WebOS apps and …
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Standalone VR headsets like Oculus Go have shown up to middling reviews, and smart glasses are still a mess. If AR and VR headsets don’t get smoother and cheaper, they may never catch on. Qualcomm’s trying to help with a new chip, the Snapdragon XR1, intended to get more affordable AR and VR wearables off the ground and possibly AI-assisted …
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A 2019 iPhone has been rumored to have three cameras. Now an analyst report speculates that one of the cameras will have a telephoto lens, while the other two will work together to perform depth mapping for AR (the same way 3D cameras do) rather than a dedicated 3D-sensing module. That’s according to Lu Jialin, a Deutsche Securities analyst, as …
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Using PayPal to purchase things with Google Pay is nothing new. That specific partnership was announced over a year ago, but the two companies recently decided to extend their partnership. Starting later this year, you will be able to use PayPal in Google Play, YouTube and Gmail. Here’s how to set it up and what to be aware of. How …
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Google Lens is ready for its close-up — so to speak. The “future of search” uses your phone’s camera to identify objects and then gives you information about those objects — basically a sort of real-time reverse image-lookup, or, if you prefer, an augmented reality (AR) Google. However you choose to describe it, Google Lens can perform some cool tricks. …
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We’ll call him “Mark.” About three years ago, Mark got an email from Amazon saying, “We noticed that a number of your orders have been returned.” It was the start of a rocky relationship with the world’s biggest e-commerce company. Several months later, Mark got banned from Amazon for making too many returns. But after a lot of trial and …
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