Adobe was very public about dropping mobile Flash last fall. In case that wasn’t clear enough, the developer just drew a line in the sand: Android 4.1 doesn’t, and won’t ever, get certification for Flash. The company is stopping short of saying that Flash won’t run, but it’s evident that Adobe won’t help you if the web browser plugin doesn’t install (or breaks in spectacular fashion) on that Nexus 7. Just to underscore the point, the firm is also halting new installations of Flash from Google Play as of August 15th. Security updates and other vital patches will continue on for existing users. Any fresh downloads after that fateful day, however, will have to come from Adobe’s mausoleum for old versions. The company had already said that HTML5 was the way forward on phones and tablets — now we know just how quickly it’s backing up that claim.
This week Google has introduced a new component to their search and location-aware ecosystem in the mobile realm called Google Now. This system sits at the heart of Android, with your ability to access it sitting right in your lock screen. Google Now is effectively an add-on to the Google Search experience, adding a selection of “cards” that show you where you are, how you’ll be getting to the next place you’re going, and where you might very well want to go.
To access Google Now, you’ve only to access it from your lockscreen or to tap on the Google Search widget or app icon. From here you’ll find that you’ve got a lovely and super simple search bar at the top that’s ready to accept all typed or spoken voice commands as well as search terms. The real magic of course is in the cards that sit below the search bar before you do your search.
Above you’ll see the Nexus 7 connecting to this service via the lockscreen – in the hands-on video below you’ll see the Galaxy Nexus working with Google Now.
These cards include Weather, Public Transit, Places, Traffic, Flights, Sports, Appointments, Translation, Currency, and Time Back Home. The last item on this list is something you’ll have to program, it simply needing to know when you’ll want to see a map back home – and it’ll need you to mark where your home is, but just once. Appointments are connected to your Google Calendar, Translation and Currency appear when you go to a foreign country, and Sports show the scores of your favorite teams.
Flights is a card that’s able to track your flight information, how late you’ll be, and how long it’ll take you to get where you’re going. The same is true of Traffic and Public Transit, these connecting to Google Maps and Navigation to bring you the information you need, while Weather and Places are the most common cards as they’ll almost always be active to bring you information on the place you’re physically at.
Once you’re done with the info these cards can bring you, you can head straight back up to the search bar where results will spill over the cards to bring you deeper into the web.
Stick around as we continue to bring on the heat via our I/O 2012 and Android portals all week!
In 2008, when the Eee PC was revolutionizing the computing world and driving every manufacturer to make cheaper and smaller laptops, Sony washed its hands of the whole thing. The “race to the bottom,” the company said, would profoundly impact the industry, killing profit margins and flooding the market with cheap, terrible machines. Sony was wrong, its stance lasting about a year before joining the competition with its own VAIO W.
Four years on we’re buying better laptops than ever before and, with the netbook class now more or less dead, that downward competition seems to have shifted to the tablet front. A flood of cheap, truly awful slates preceded Amazon’s Kindle Fire, the $200 tablet from a major brand that looks to have been the proper catalyst in plunging prices. The latest challenger to enter the competition is ASUS, partnering with Google to create the first Nexus tablet, a device that not only will amaze with its MSRP, but with its quality. It’s called the Nexus 7, it too is $200, and it’s better than Amazon’s offering in every way but one.
We know you’re itching to get your hands on the Nexus 7, trawling the internet for every scrap of information you can find, but why not get all the details directly from Google? The company has thrown up a Guidebook to the Nexus 7 on the Play Store, containing around 90 pages of technological goodness. It’s not just a guide for the tablet either, featuring some in depth information on Jelly Bean.
If you absolutely crave all the information on Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, then you should probably head over to the Play Store and download the guidebook. Inside you’ll find details on Google Now, the new resizable widgets, as well as the offline voice dictation.
Here’s a quick refresher on the Nexus 7: it’s a 7-inch slate with a 1280×800 IPS display, powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, and comes with a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera. It’s the first Android device in the world to run Jelly Bean, although Galaxy Nexus owners can treat themselves to the leaked image that hit the internet this morning as well. Why not check out our review of the Nexus 7 while you’re at it?
Google’s next iteration of Android wasn’t quite the full-point release jump that many of you were perhaps anticipating. Rather than using Google I/O 2012 as the launching pad for Android 5.0, we’re being formally introduced to v4.1 — a mere 0.1 ahead of where Ice Cream Sandwich placed us around six months ago. Aside from grabbing a name change, the minor numerical bump also provides Jelly Bean the opportunity to usher in a few new features for Nexus owners to enjoy.
If you missed yesterday’s keynote, Google revealed that Android 4.1 would arrive on Nexus devices in “mid-July,” but there’s no clear word on when partner companies will begin pushing it to their products. Moreover, pundits are quick to point out the legions of Android products that still haven’t made the leap to 4.0, leaving us to wonder if those Froyo and Gingerbread laggards will simply take the fast track to 4.1 now that it’s (almost) available. Care to see if the latest and greatest will live up to your expectations once it lands in a few weeks? Head on past the break as we discuss some of the larger changes that Jelly Bean has to offer.
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.
Are you totally, utterly and irrevocably impatient? Then head past the break for some very early benchmarks we grabbed from a pre-production (hand-built) Nexus 7 in London. Our full review will have far more complete and reliable stats, but in the meantime we’ve seen just enough evidence to be sure of one thing: neither the tablet’s low $199 price point nor its slightly reduced (1.2GHz) clock speed throttle its Tegra 3 engine in any obvious way. Read on for more.
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.
Google announced its Nexus 7 tablet yesterday, with the Jelly Bean device seemingly only available through the Play Store in the UK. Engadget has confirmed with ASUS that the 16GB model of the tablet will go on sale in retail stores, specifically PC World, Dixons, Comet, eBuyer, and the Carphone Warehouse. Those stores will reportedly be receiving shipments for the tablet starting from July 20th, although the official sale date for retailers is July 27th.
Only the 16GB version of the tablet will make it to retail shelves, however. The cheaper 8GB model will be sold exclusively through the Play Store by Google. Still, if you want to waltz into a high street store and pick up Google’s official tablet you’ll have the option.
The Nexus 7 features a 7-inch 1280×800 display and is powered by NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 processor along with 1GB of RAM. The tablet also comes with a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, and a 4,325mAh battery that’s rated for up to 9 hours of video playback. The Nexus 7 is also running the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean, built with an emphasis on speed and performance as well as adding new features such as Google Now and an offline voice recognition engine.
We’ve just had word from ASUS that the 16GB variant of the Nexus 7 will arrive on UK shelves on July 27th — slightly later than the 8GB model, which will be sold exclusively through Google Play from mid-July. Brits are looking at £159 for the 8GB tablet and £199 for 16GB. The latter is actually shipping to big stores like PC World, Comet, Tesco and eBuyer around July 20th, so those who pre-order may end up signing for that Special Delivery even earlier.
Update: the 16GB slate will also be sold through Carphone Warehouse, either for the same price as above or free on a tethered contract (but check those sums before signing up, obviously). PR added.
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