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.
The Advanced Technologies and Projects (ATAP) team over at Google has today unveiled Project Tango, an innovative new piece of smartphone technology that offers genuine 3D motion tracking to mobile devices. The ambitious development, which project lead Johnny Chung Lee describes as being part of a goal "to give mobile devices a human scale understanding of space and motion," looks very exciting indeed, and with seemingly no boundaries as to where this technology could go and how it may eventually be used, a prototype kit has already been prepped for intrigued developers. Further details, including a demonstration video, can be seen after the fold.
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.
Flappy Bird was recently pulled from the App Store and Google Play Store at the height of its popularity by developer Dong Nguyen, and although his reasons for removing the app appear to have been well-intended, folks have sought to cash in on the title's fame in a variety of ways.
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.
It’s news that seems to have come completely out of the blue. Google is selling Motorola’s mobile division to Lenovo for just $2.91 billion less than three years after picking it up.
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.
Sometimes modern technology amazes us. The things we can do today are the kinds of things that we could only dream about ten years ago, which makes us wonder what we'll be doing in ten years from now. If Google has its way, we could be putting contact lenses in our eyes that monitor our blood sugar, and if that doesn't get your techy heart racing, there's something not quite right!
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.
Google Glass XE12 update has been made public today. With a whole bunch of exciting and useful features, it's not to be missed by any owner of the Big G's first major piece of wearable tech, and you can catch all of the details after the break!
