It's that time of the year again at which point the really funny folks come out to play. Google is always game for a joke or two on April 1st, and has begun the tomfoolery with a little adjustment to its famed Maps app. Essentially, it brings a Pokémon Challenge element to the revered navigation tool, and since it's now April Fools' day in many parts of the world already, the Big G has already delivered its prank to tech fans.
2014 is shaping up quite nicely as The Year of the Smartwatch, and with Samsung already having announced the Gear 2 and Gear Fit at last month's Mobile World Congress, we're expecting at least two of the mobile industry's other big names to follow suit in the coming months. As well as the Apple 'iWatch,' which has been referenced in numerous leaks and concepts running back a few years now, Google also rumored to be developing a smartwatch of its own. Today, for the first time, we've an insight into its purported specifications.
Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp for $19 billion has taught us a lot of things, and while the focus has been mainly upon the breathtaking sums of money involved in this particular transaction, WhatsApp's swift 5-year rise, and the dogged, determined nature of one Brian Acton, the acquisition has made apparent the fact that Facebook is up there with the big boys when it comes to spending. Indeed, hitherto, it has been Google stumping up the cash to acquire large firms such as Motorola, and intriguingly, Fortune is reporting that the search giant once placed $10 billion on the table in an offer to buy WhatsApp out.
Samsung is one of the most prolific carriers of Google's Android. Save a couple of half-hearted Windows Phone efforts over the past couple of years, the Korean company has consistently churned out swathes of smartphones running the ubiquitous software, and considering how many hundreds of millions of handsets out there are on Android, the $50 million Google paid to acquire Android nearly a decade ago looks a shrewd bit of business. But it has now emerged that in actual fact, Andy Rubin, one of the founding members of the Android team, actually pitched the product to the Galaxy maker out in Seoul, a proposition that Samsung unequivocally - and perhaps, regrettably - baulked at.
Although company executives and CEOs spend most of their public speaking time discussing affairs concerning their own business and products, it's always interesting to hear what the big names have to say about rivals. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked whether the ongoing Mac vs. Windows PC battle was in any way similar to the the rivalry between iOS and Android. This analogy is frequently used by commentators and tech fans alike, after all, but Cook completely disagrees that the two famous rivalries are comparable, and here's why.
Only two days ago, Google officially released one of their most not-so-secret products in recent months, a red Nexus 5. Unlike most releases from Google, this one didn't come as much of a surprise. The red Nexus 5 had been leaked so much that it almost felt like Google were purely putting us out of our misery by officially announcing it. But announce it they did, and order it I did. I've personally held off from purchasing the Nexus 5 up until this point because it just wasn't popping enough for me. The introduction of this color certainly fixes that.
Google has pushed out an in-app notice to users of its iOS Gmail app stressing that a bug may have caused them to accidentally delete emails received between the 12th and 21nd of January. Furthermore, the bug - which is also said to have affected the mobile browser and the offline version of the popular email client - may also have led users to inadvertently mark the wrong emails as spam.
There's a moment when every good product makes the jump from the geek world to the mainstream world. A time in history where it goes from being something that only those who live and breath technology know about to truly living in the consciousness of the average man walking down the street. Today, Google Glass makes that jump after being parodied on America's longest-running animated show, The Simpsons.
Google+, the company's often ignored social network is creeping its way into Google's other products left and right, and according to an announcement out of Mountain View, we're soon to see it feature more prominently in our Gmail inboxes.
One of the great things about the release of the Walter Isaacson biography detailing the life and times of Steve Jobs, was that we learned much more of events and instances that we'd only previously gathered the crux of. We hear names, we see keynotes, we enjoy products; but the ins and outs of what exactly goes on tend to remain obscured from the public eye - at least until another extensive book hits the market. Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, is a self-explanatory tale of two modern-day tech titans, and The Atlantic has posted an interesting piece dissecting a particular chapter about the release of the iPhone and notably, Google's reaction.
