Tag Archives: google

Verizon’s latest promotion: Free Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass with unlimited plans

Verizon already offers a Disney bundle and a 12-month subscription to Discovery Plus with its Play More and Get More plans. On Monday, the carrier is adding a new perk: a free 12-month subscription to Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass.  Both programs normally run $5 a month, with Apple’s subscription getting you access to …

Read More »

Android 12: Google’s major new revamp changes your phone from head to toe. Here’s how

Google’s Android 12 operating system, revealed at the Google I/O developer conference Tuesday, represents the biggest design change in the history of the OS, complete with customizable color palettes, updated notifications and faster, battery-saving performance. There are now more than 3 billion active Android devices worldwide, Sameer Samat, vice president of Android, said during the Google I/O keynote. Now available …

Read More »

Google wants to make your Android 12 phone your TV remote. Here’s how it’ll work

One announcement followed another at Google I/O on Monday, including a major redesign to Android 12, Google’s operating system for nearly 72% of the world’s phone users according to Statista. For example, notifications are getting a new look, there are several new privacy features — including a dashboard — and it’s going to be better integrated with Google’s Chrome OS platform.  As part …

Read More »

Google I/O 2021: Every announcement from Google’s developers conference

At Google I/O this week, we got some major announcements, including more details on Android 12, Wear OS and watches and possibly Pixel phones. The company skipped I/O last year so there’s a lot to catch up on. The conference was entirely virtual this year and free for everyone, running from now through May 20. You can watch a replay of …

Read More »

Google and Samsung unite to reboot Android watches, with a dose of Fitbit too

Were you considering buying a smartwatch for your Android phone? Hold off until the fall. Google and Samsung have announced a partnership to redesign Google’s Wear OS for watches, and Samsung’s future Galaxy watches will run on this new software. Also, Fitbit is making a Wear OS app, and will have its own watch too. The news broke at this …

Read More »

9 great reads from CNET this week: Google, Venmo, iMac and more

Over the past year, Google has weathered a whole host of controversies — from antitrust scrutiny to discord in its AI ranks — amid the wide-ranging challenges of the pandemic. So it must have been a relief for the company to spend a couple of hours focused exclusively on the marvels of tech it’s been cooking up. That’s what we …

Read More »

Google combats fake news in its latest Search update. Here’s how it works

Google is making it easier for people to evaluate information and check the sources for results that show up on its massive search platform, the company said during the Google I/O developer’s conference keynote on Tuesday.  When you search for something on Google, a new feature called About this Result will appear under a given website in your results list. …

Read More »

Can Google and Samsung’s Wear OS take on the Apple Watch? It’s complicated

Google had big ambitions with its wearable software, Wear OS. But for the past few years, it’s stagnated and Apple has taken an even bigger lead in the global smartwatch market. A new partnership with Samsung announced on Tuesday at Google I/O could give Wear OS the attention it needs to stay relevant. But it won’t catch up to Apple …

Read More »

Video chats get way more realistic with Google’s new Project Starline

We’ve all become familiar with video chat platforms like Zoom and Google Meet over the past year, and the fatigue and anxiety that can come with hours of video calls, technology glitches and sitting in one place staring at all those boxes. But what if video chatting actually felt more like sitting across from a real person and talking naturally?  …

Read More »

Belkin’s Soundform Connect adds AirPlay 2 to almost any speaker

Forget Bluetooth dongles. The wave of the future is Wi-Fi music, and in the absence of Google’s discontinued Chromecast Audio we look instead to Belkin’s new Apple AirPlay 2 add-on, the $100 Soundform Connect. Like the Chromecast Audio, the Soundform Connect is designed to connect any system with an aux or optical digital input to Wi-Fi. AirPlay 2 is a multiroom …

Read More »