BMX bikes! Skydiving! High fives! For everyone who was floored by the movie stunt-style debut of Google Glasses yesterday at day one of I/O, well, pump the brakes. They won’t even be consumer-ready until 2014, Sergey Brin told Bloomberg Television. More »
Google Glass will not have a cellular data connection, at least initially, meaning wearers of the augmented reality system will need to rely on WiFi or tethering to get online. The headset demonstrated at Google IO yesterday includes only WiFi and Bluetooth technologies, not 3G or 4G despite early rumors, with senior industrial designer on the Google Glass project Isabelle Olsson confirming to ABC News that users out of hotspot range will need to tether to their smartphone for WWAN access.
Talk of an integrated cellular link first began prior to Google making Project Glass public, when rumors of the wearable display initially broke. Then, it was suggested that Google would equip the headset with either 3G or 4G connectivity, making the unit as a whole self-contained.
Whether that was ever true or not is unclear – Google could have attempted to include WWAN but decided to drop it over battery or size concerns, perhaps – but the current iteration lacks it, according to Olsson. The designer declined to give battery life estimates, though fellow project member Sergey Brin was overheard suggesting a roughly six hour runtime in a post-keynote meeting.
Google was forced to use USB connection tethering with Glass for its live-streamed skydiving stunt, having found the WiFi could not handle the extreme conditions. Otherwise the components are much akin to a regular smartphone, all contained in the oversized arm of the glasses.
No 3G/4G for Google Glass is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Google’s IO 2012 keynote has been and gone, and while the developer event as a whole isn’t over, you can certainly tell where the focus is by what made it onto the opening agenda. I’d already laid out my expectations for IO over at the Google Developers Blog, but there have been some surprises along the way too.
Jelly Bean was the obvious inclusion, and Google balanced its enthusiasm about the new Android version from a technological perspective – with encrypted apps and the perfectly named “Project Butter” for smoothing out the UI – with features that will make more of a difference for end-users. The new notifications system should make a major difference to Android usability, meaning you spend less time jumping between apps, while the Google Voice Search should present an interesting challenge to Siri.
I’ll need to spend some proper time with “Google now” before I can decide whether it brings any real worth to the table. Proper understanding of context is sorely missing from the mobile device market- our handsets can do no shortage of tasks, but they still wait for us to instruct them – though there are potentially significant privacy concerns which I think Google will likely be picked up on sooner rather than later.
The Nexus 7 is a double-hitter of a device, the tablet response not only to concerns that Android developers were opting out of slate-scale app creation, but to Amazon’s strongly-selling Kindle Fire. $200 is a very competitive price, without cutting on specifications, and Jelly Bean comes with all the bells and whistles you need for a tablet OS.
Of course, OS support wasn’t what let Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich down, it was the significant absence of any meaningful tablet application support from third-party developers. The Nexus 7′s low price should help get test units into coders’ hands, at least, though it will take more than a fanfare this week to decide whether Android can catch up on larger screen content with Apple’s iPad.
As for the Nexus Q, I’ll take some more convincing on that. $299 is a lot for a device that also needs an Android phone or tablet in order to work, and Google’s awkward presentation didn’t do a particularly good job of explaining why you’d rather have a Nexus Q than, say, an Apple TV, a Sonos system, or even just a cheap DLNA streamer.
The big surprise today was Google Glasses. Sergey Brin’s “surprise” interruption of the IO presentation, sporting Project Glass himself and then summoning a daredevil army of similarly-augmented skydivers, stunt bikers, abseilers and others onto the stage was a masterstroke of entertainment, and you could feel the enthusiasm and excitement in the auditorium. That the segment ended with a pre-order promise – albeit one at a not-inconsiderable $1,500 – was a suitably outlandish high-point, though we’ll have to wait until early 2013 to actually see Google make good on those investments.
Google Glasses are a long way off. More pressing is how the Nexus 7 holds up to the Kindle Fire (and, though it may not be quite a direct competitor, the iPad) and how quickly manufacturers can get Jelly Bean out to existing devices. Google may be putting a new system of early Android update access into place to speed that process for future iterations, but it looks to have come too late for Jelly Bean updates. We’ll have more from Google IO 2012 over the rest of the week.
Make sure to check out SlashGear’s Android hub for our full Google IO 2012 coverage!
Unboxing Nexus 7 and Nexus Q:
Google IO 2012: Jelly Bean, Nexus 7, Google Glasses and Nexus Q is written by Vincent Nguyen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Google aims to get its Google Glasses augmented reality headset shipping to consumers within a year of the $1,5000 Explorer Edition arriving with developers, the company has confirmed. That consumer version will be “significantly” cheaper than the Explorer Edition prototype hardware, Google co-founder and Glass project lead Sergey Brin told TechCrunch, though this won’t be a race to the bottom.
Instead, the team responsible for Glass has said, the priority will be balancing quality and affordability. No indication of what sort of final price will be settled upon has been given, but wearable eyepiece specialists have already – and separately – estimated that augmented reality headsets of Google Glasses’ ilk will most likely come in at around the $200-500 mark.
In the meantime, Google will be counting on developers to get up to speed with Glass. The cloud-based API they will have use of will be “pretty far along” by the time the Explorer Edition goes on sale, and Google’s own engineers are already testing Gmail, Google+ and other Android apps on the wearable.
As for battery life, Brin was overheard suggesting he had seen six hours of use from a charge, though it’s unclear what settings were enabled at that time. It’s already been confirmed that Glass will be able to locally cache content rather than upload it immediately, or indeed stream low-quality footage while caching higher-quality versions for later use.
Consumer Google Glasses due less than 12 months after developer version is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
What you see here is arguably be the coolest thing on display at Google I/O 2012 — an 8-foot, 300-pound Nexus Q replica (complete with LED ring visualizer) mounted on a robot arm. This interactive installation called Kinetisphere was designed and fabricated by San Francisco-based Bot & Dolly and is controlled by three stations each consisting of — wait for it — a Nexus Q device and a Nexus 7 tablet. How meta is that? One station controls the height of the sphere, another its angle, and a third lets you pick the pattern displayed on the LED ring. Of course, it’s all carefully synchronized to music for maximum effect.
We spent a few minutes talking with Jeff Linnell of Bot & Dolly about what went into the making of Kinetisphere. As it turns out, there’s a lot more to the installation than a Kuka industrial robot, fiberglass, plywood and steel railing. In addition to using the Nexus Q and Nexus 7, the company combined its expertise in motion control and automation with Google’s Android ADK 2012, Autodesk‘s Maya and even Linux. Take a look at our gallery below then hit the break for our video interview and a lovely behind-the-scenes clip.
Gallery: Kinetisphere at Google I/O 2012
Visualized: Kinetisphere takes Nexus Q into another dimension at Google I/O 2012 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google’s Nexus 7 didn’t come as a great surprise when it launched at IO 2012 yesterday, but the $199 price tag still raised some eyebrows in astonishment. At under half the price of a new iPad, it’s competitive – though very different – to Apple’s slate, but it also undercuts a fair number of other Android tablets too. You can’t even accuse Google of milking international buyers to make up the difference, as prices outside of the US are, surprisingly, very reasonable too. The Nexus 7 will sell from £159 in the UK, for instance, versus expectations of around £250. So, how has Google (and hardware partner ASUS) managed to make the Nexus 7 so cheap?
It doesn’t hurt to have relatively mundane hardware. Tegra 3 is no longer a brand new chipset, with the early-adopter tax likely rubbed off, and in fact Google is using the even cheaper KAI version announced earlier this year. That means the 1GB of memory can be the cheaper DDR3L sort commonly used in PCs; meanwhile the 8GB or 16GB of internal storage is unlikely to add greatly to the bill-of-materials. The display is, at 1280 x 800 resolution, better than the 1024 x 600 panel we’ve seen on other cheap slates like RIM’s heavily-discounted BlackBerry PlayBook, but then nor is it an expensive Super AMOLED as on, say, some of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab models.
The rest of the tech is tablet-by-numbers, with only NFC a mild stand-out (and an inexpensive one at that). The camera – front only, as the Nexus 7 does without the rear shooter – is a mere 1.2-megapixels, fine for Google+ Hangouts but not something you’d want to capture precious memories with. Finally, the case is simple molded plastic and rubber, not metal as on the iPad.
“Google’s intentions with Nexus 7 are very different from every other Android OEM”
Meanwhile, unlike every other Android OEM, Google’s intentions with the Nexus 7 are very different from the usual “make some money” approach. The race to the bottom of the Android tablet market has been tempered, a little, by each manufacturer’s hope to secure at least some margins on each unit they sell. After all, they make their money on hardware.
Google, though, is seeing Nexus 7 as a means to an end, not the end-product itself. As Android chief Andy Rubin said at Google IO yesterday, the missing piece in tablets running the platform to-date has been the software ecosystem: there were simply not enough compelling apps to make slates look competitive against the iPad.
Nexus 7 Android 4.1 Jelly Bean hands-on:
The Nexus 7, then, is a device to spur interest, adoption and hard work from Android developers. In that way it’s a slightly different proposition from the Nexus phones we’ve seen so far: they were intended as guiding points to the mobile handset industry, resetting specification goalposts that had begun to atrophy amid OEM apathy. The tablet, then, can be cheap because it doesn’t need to be anything more, and Google can opt for relatively mainstream hardware.
That in doing so it also mounts a challenge to Android upstart Amazon – which has been using a similar gateway-hardware strategy with the Kindle Fire, selling a cheap tablet and relying on ebook and media sales to deliver a longer-term revenue stream – is a pleasant bonus, especially since the retailer worked so hard to strip out Google’s own store options in the Fire and replace them with its own.
Google is doing everything it can to get users to start spending money in the Play Store. Free app downloads are well and good, but Apple continues to crow about the amount iOS users spend on paid apps and in-app purchases, and Google would like a share of that market too. Receiving $25 of free Play credit promised for all Nexus 7 buyers is, unsurprisingly, contingent on having “a valid form of payment” in your Google Wallet account. Google is also taking a page out of Amazon’s book with the Kindle, shipping the Nexus 7 automatically paired to users’ accounts – presumably with the same payment information as used to buy the tablet itself – so that it can be used to buy apps out of the box.
It remains to be seen whether Nexus 7 owners can be trained to spend money on software by a little free credit, but if interest in the tablet by the developers at Google IO is anything to go by, a $199 price point might be enough to persuade them to branch out into tablet app development. There’s more on the Nexus 7 in our review.
How is the Nexus 7 so cheap? is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
The official Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update has leaked, with the file being discovered waiting on Google’s servers ahead of the official release next month. The Jelly Bean installer is seemingly the same file that is being pushed out to the free Galaxy Nexus handsets Google handed out to developers after the Google IO keynote yesterday.
Jelly Bean includes a new notifications system as well as Project Butter, Google’s efforts on reducing lag in the interface. There’s also a new Google Voice Search system to take on Apple’s Siri, together with app encryption.
Meanwhile, Google Maps gets offline navigation, and there’s offline voice dictation for US English. There’s more on Jelly Bean in our IO wrap-up here.
You can download the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update here [zip file] though be warned, it’s unclear if all the bugs have been ironed out of this version. If you want the most stable release for your Galaxy Nexus it’s probably safer to hold off until Google pushes it out OTA officially in mid-July.
[via Xmoo]
Jelly Bean for Galaxy Nexus leaks is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Google made keynote history at IO yesterday, skydiving Google Glasses into the venue with the help of a team of stunt bikers and rappellers, and now the company is sharing some behind-the-scenes details. Unsurprisingly, an extreme-sports demo like that requires some practice, and Google has released a video of some of the test jumps Project Glass accompanied, which you can see after the cut.
Despite suggestions otherwise, Google insists that all of the in-flight footage was recorded using Glass. “The higher fidelity footage was recorded locally on the device whereas the hangouts were live streamed at a much lower resolution because of the challenges of networking a skydiver inflight” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said. ”Because we were unable to get regular wifi (which is built into Glass) to work under those conditions, we had to use extra networking gear which was tethered via usb to the device.”
According to Brin, the company will be revealing more details about the stunt after the second Google IO keynote later on today, weather permitting. Google has already begun taking preorders for the Glasses, priced at $1,500 for developers attending IO, and with deliveries expected early next year.
If you’ve not watched the full, surprise keynote appearance of Google Glasses – complete with a jump from a blimp down onto the roof of the Moscone Center – then you can find the must-see video here.
Google Glasses stunt demo dive video released is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
This week the folks at Google have revealed a device manufactured by ASUS and made for the media-consuming public: the Nexus 7. This tablet is the first of its kind in several ways. First in its value proposition: an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor inside a tablet with a price that up until now has been reserved only for devices with much, much less to offer. Second, the Nexus 7 represents Google’s first attempt at a tablet for their Nexus series. Third, it’s the first tablet to be working with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
This tablet certainly isn’t the thinnest 7-inch tablet in the world at 0.41″, but it’s extremely light, and the relatively soft plastic back is super comfortable to handle. This device is sized at 7.8″ x 4.72″ x 0.41″ so you can fit it in your back pocket if you wish, and the display, at a whopping 7-inches with 1280 x 800 pixel LED-backlit IPS (216 ppi), is more than fabulous enough for your HD-loving eyeballs. For comparison’s sake: the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is 196ppi and the iPad 3 is 264ppi, so you’ve got a device that’s right up there in the big leagues.
It’s brighter than you could possibly need it to be in any average day’s activities indoors, comes in a couple different color combinations: black and black (though our Google I/O edition with a black/white combination may be a sign of things to come), and feels really nice to work with. The back-facing camera is certainly OK, but isn’t a vast improvement over anything we’ve seen before, with quality just high enough that we’ll not be taking many photos with it at all – a good thing, too, since this device does not come with a camera app installed because of its push for Google+ hangouts – and eventual Project Glass interaction.
You’ve got a bit of a hidden bonus in the fact that this is one of the only tablets on the market today that uses a standard microUSB for charging. You’ll want to use the included power converter from the package, of course, but running through that little standard port is good for everybody. The speakers are generous on their own, with a single slit running down the back for blasting, but as you’ll come to realize through this review, this device was made more for sharing to other devices – like the brand new Google Nexus Q, introduced at Google I/O 2012 right alongside the Nexus 7. Have a peek at the Q in action here:
Inside of this device you’ll find Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, an updated version of the Google mobile operating system that takes what Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich did for both the smartphone and the tablet and pumps it up with a few applications and features that make it all just a bit more tasty. This device is focused heavily on the Google Play store, as it will be immediately apparent once you’ve had a peek at this hands-on video:
This device is also ready to rock with the TegraZone for games. NVIDIA’s gaming portal TegraZone is a place we’ve visited quite a few times in the past few months here on SlashGear – have a peek at games such as Max Payne Mobile and Renaissance Blood to see what beasts await your game-loving fingers.
Then other than the Jelly Bean upgrades you’ve seen above, there’s not one whole heck of a lot here that wont be available to the rest of the Android universe immediately if not soon. If you loved Ice Cream Sandwich on your tablet – or even if you loved Honeycomb on your tablet, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how this device’s software takes advantage of everything great from those previous versions of the OS and adds a bunch more in all the right places.
Have a peek at a few benchmarks from this device as well to see how the software and the hardware add up with one another:
Though we’ve seen this device connect with the Nexus Q, and quite impressively so, we’ll need a bit more convincing before it’s time we call this a device better at sharing than the HTC One series or the Galaxy S III. Sharing is indeed at the center of this device’s launch, on the other hand, moving forth with mostly its hands on music and videos at parties and in the home. We saw this device demonstrated once and then demonstrated again with its ability to connect via Wi-fi to the Nexus Q. With the Nexus Q in tow, this tablet appears quite apt to control your whole home media experience quite easily – and it’s fun, too!
We generally want to be clear with you on how well the battery performs in a device after we’ve had that device for an extended period of time. As we’ve not yet had this tablet as long as we normally would for such a test, we’ll be filling this section in later – check back soon!
What you’ve got here is a fun machine. Google worked with ASUS and NVIDIA here to bring on a media beast like no other, offered at a price that, sold exclusively through the Google Play store online (for now), is almost undeniable. Even those who want a tablet just to fiddle with should and probably will be considering this device first in the near future – unless they want an iPad.
With the iPad and the Amazon Kindle Fire being this device’s biggest competitors, you’ll want to know: which one is worth buying? There’s no perfect answer, but if I had a choice between the three and would get the chosen product for free, I’d of course pick the iPad – it costs more than 2 times this device’s base price for a reason. If I had to choose between the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire, I’d not think twice about picking the Google product. Every single feature on this tablet, unless you’re an Amazon junkie, is better than the Fire.
Consider this tablet the next time you’re getting prepped for a new tablet experience, and one that’s inexpensive enough to toss down a couple of bills without hesitation. Hackers – this is your key to the future, there’s no other choice.
Also remember that, as it is with all of our reviews: this isn’t the end. If you’ve got questions you still need answered, want us to do additional tests, please feel free to ask or request – we’ll do our best! Meanwhile don’t forget to hit up our Android portal for more Google mobile OS action through the future!
Google Nexus 7 Review is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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