Hasta La Gadget!

Some of the mystery has been taken out of it, but Google has officially taken the wraps off of the Nexus 7, its first reference-grade tablet. The 7-inch slate is the first and currently only device shipping with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and takes advantage of its optimization for smaller tablet screens, magazines and movies — it’s also the first to ship with a finished Chrome for Android. Like what was widely suspected, the tablet is built by ASUS (shades of Eee Pad MeMO ME370T, anyone?) and mostly draws our attention in terms of what we get for the money: that quad-core Tegra 3, 1.2-megapixel front camera, NFC and 1280 x 800, IPS-based LCD are traits we’d normally look for in a pricier tablet. How much pricier, you ask? Google is asking just $199 for a dainty 8GB model and $249 for a 16GB version — that’s a lot of speed for the money, especially with a $25 Google Play credit and a slew of bundled content. There’s no SD card slot, however. We’ll test the Nexus 7 as soon as we can, but you can swing by Google Play (and possibly local stores) to order one in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US with a mid-July shipping window.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s opening keynote at our event hub!

Continue reading Google makes the Nexus 7 tablet official: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a $199 price (video)

Google makes the Nexus 7 tablet official: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a $199 price (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Android Market became Google Play to focus on how it pushes media, and now it’s adding a few new options. On stage at Google I/O 2012 the company just announced it’s adding support for the purchase of movies, as well as TV shows by episode or by season, and even magazines all available today. That’s in addition to the existing apps, movie rentals, music and books. Oh, and look, Google just introduced a new tablet that you can use to access all of that content. We’ll keep an eye out for an exact list of all the new media partners, although mentioned on stage were magazines including Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith long with TV networks Disney / ABC, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Paramount . Check out our Google I/O live blog for even more details as they’re announced, and look after the break for video introductions.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s opening keynote at our event hub!

Continue reading Google Play starts selling movies, TV shows (single episode or full season) and magazines today

Google Play starts selling movies, TV shows (single episode or full season) and magazines today originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google during its I/O keynote hit a symbolic milestone: it now has 600,000 apps in the Google Play Store. As well, the store is clearly hitting a brisk pace in adoption, with 1.5 billion downloads every month and 20 billion since Android began. Free apps are available in 190 countries, with paid apps in 132. The app and download counts stack up fairly well to Apple’s own claims, although not universally: it’s just short of the App Store’s 650,000 apps, but Apple can still point to 30 billion total downloads. Google also hasn’t said how many apps are explicitly tablet-friendly versus 225,000 iPad-oriented apps. Either way, Google can say that it has largely erased the app quantity deficit, and that’s no mean feat.

Google Play hits 600,000 apps, 20 billion total installs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android 4.1 Jelly Bean has introduced a Siri-battling voice feature, a super-speed recognition tool that produces results in a streamlined infographic-style UI. The new GOogle voice search system can recognize naturally spoken queries, pulling up Wikipedia entries, Google Image Search results and other data. Best of all, it looks considerably faster than rival systems.

In contrast to Siri and Samsung’s S-Voice on the Galaxy S III, the Jelly Bean voice search delivered its results almost instantaneously. Those results are presented in a clean new UI, picking out the key results and particularly well suited to navigating in those times you’re walking around and can’t poke at tiny on-screen graphics.

The voice search can even handle somewhat unusual requests. “Show me pictures of pygmy marmosets” it was asked during the demonstration, swiftly bringing up a gallery of shots that could then be tapped into and swiped through.

Jelly Bean Google Voice Search will be accompanied by the new Google now system, a contextual search implementation.

Jelly Bean Google Voice Search challenges Siri is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week we’ve got a whole bunch of updates to the Android system with no less than two big updates to the elements that are already powerful on the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich system. One of the changes included in the NFC world is an update to Android Beam – here in this update we’re a able to easily transfer not just photos and app suggestions, but videos as well!

In notifications, we’ve got the same lovely notification features we’ve had before, including the swiping away of already read items. Inside notifications for Gmail, Google has included a set of canned responses, such as “I’ll be there soon.” For TuneIn Radio – and other radio apps in the future – you’ve got brand new mini controller notifications.

Pulse has perhaps the most awesome boost of all, it being able to be expanded in a way that allows you to see several tappable icons next to one another. This is only the beginning of the large amount of treats included in this lovely update – check out our I/O 2012 portal and out Android portal to get up to date all week!

Jelly Bean issues new NFC and Notification features is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.