It would appear that Google is good and ready to enter the smart TV market from a Chrome angle this week with a device called Chromecast. This little beast is made to plug into your television’s standard HDMI port, connect to the web, and obey your every Chromebook and/or Android device’s command. Sound easy enough?
Here you’ll be working with a new “cast” button in apps like YouTube – sound familiar? – that’ll play a video that you choose from your phone or tablet (or Chrome web browser window) to your Chromecast-connected TV. This works in a manner thats exceedingly similar to the Nexus Q, a much larger device introduced by Google at Google I/O 2012 – and ditched not long after.
This device will be offered through the Google Play store the same as the Nexus device lineup and will be opening some rather interesting avenues for not just Android devices, but the whole Chrome operating system universe as well. Think about how not just televisions will be utilized, but massive computer displays as well!
We’ll be exploring this device and its abilities in greater detail once we have our hands on a unit. For now you’ll want to know this: this device connects with software, not with hardware, over a Wifi connection in your living room. It’ll work with the YouTube app on iOS, you can access this button with YouTube in a Chrome internet browser – and we’ll see what else as soon as hackers get their hands on it, too!
UPDATE: Netflix, too, of course. Expect big things from this cross-collaboration in the near future!
With the reintroduction of the Nexus 7, complete with the same name as it had in its first iteration, Google revealed that Android 4.3 would also be called Jelly Bean. This system’s detailing began with a boost to Multi-User abilities with Restricted Profiles – this is for parents, for the most part, allowing and dis-allowing bits and pieces of the operating system depending on the user. From there, Google launched directly into Bluetooth Smart – also known as Bluetooth Low Energy, this coming alongside Bluetooth 4.0.
Google’s Android 4.3 will be coming in with OpenGL ES 3.0 for developers – this will open a lot of doors for next-generation games in an environment that brings a lot of support for higher-definition graphics and 3D gaming. Demoing 3D abilities with a showing by the folks at Silicon Studio, then moving on to a futuristic motorcycle game powered by the Unity gaming engine, Google made the case for Android being a prime spot for the next generation in groundbreaking mobile gaming graphics.
Android 4.3 Jelly Bean will be coming with a new set of DRM which will benefit hardware-based encryption for video. Google flashed one of the biggest names in video streaming – Netflix – on stage along with a note on how they’ll be taking advantage. This new DRM will allow Netflix to play 1080p video with any device working with Android 4.3 – and of course, the Nexus 7 (the new Nexus 7) will be able to take full advantage of it.
This update to Android will be appearing today – starting with Google’s Nexus devices like the Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Nexus 4, then rolling out to Google Play edition smartphones “very soon”. Stay tuned as we have a more in-depth look at this system update today, right here on SlashGear’s Android Hub!
As Apple reports a record quarter for iPhone sales and an otherwise less-than-eventful quarter for hardware, Google rings the last bell they hope they’ll have to ring with a Motorola loss. How do the two compare other than in billions of dollars this past set of three months? Let’s have a peek!
Google’s reported consolidated revenues for this past quarter rang in at $14.11 billion USD, this a 19% increase over the same quarter one year previous.
This includes a total of $998 million in revenue from Motorola alone – though as our Motorola earnings in Google earnings rundown shows, GAAP operating loss for Motorola headed upward to $342 million for this quarter, while non-GAAP operating loss went from $49 million to $218 million in the same quarters year-over-year – no small change to scoff at.
It’s important to note at this point that the two companies do not record earnings to be compared to one another specifically, and as such, this article should be taken at face value. Apple and Google create reports like these to send information out to their investors specifically – this battle is for entertainment alone.
Apple plays a very different game here than Google, creating their own hardware and software rather than chalking up wins and losses to a separate entity. While Google works with Motorola and will soon be releasing Moto X, the closest Google will have come yet to taking total control of a Motorola handset, there’s still a point at which the two entities are more separate than Apple is with its hardware/software combinations.
Apple’s quarterly revenue comes in at $35.3 billion, this up from $35 billion (without the .3 at the end) the same quarter one year ago.
Meanwhile Google’s operating expenses, other than the cost of revenues, were up at $4.92 billion for this quarter, while Apple’s were $3.82 billion. Net income for Apple rang in at $6.9 billion for the three month period while Google’s was $3.23 billion (and that’s non-GAAP).
While Google rings in the earnings bell for items like Advertising, Apple lets numbers be known on each individual piece of hardware they sell – iPhones, iPads, Mac, iPod, and Accessories. Will we see similar numbers in the future as Google continues with Motorola, especially with products like the Moto X? And what kind of one-on-one numbers will we see between the Moto X and the next iPhone, coming this Fall? We shall see!
The Ubuntu Edge is the amazing future space phone of your dreams, which is why UK-based Canonical feels it needs $32 million to make the thing. The Ubuntu creator made some good progress in the initial hours of its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and is now sitting at just over $4 million pledged, but to stoke the fire it took back its initial promise to up the entry-level pre-order price of the Edge from $600 to $830.
The plan at first was to up the price of the Ubuntu-powered superphone, which is somewhere between a grand tech experiment and a reference device, and it aims to be powerful enough to achieve true computing convergence and replace both smartphone and desktop. But the speed of pledges dipping seems to have encouraged Canonical to change its strategy, so it opened up a number of devices at the $625 dollar level, and also added $675 and $725 tiers. Each has 1250 devices total, with the $625 units selling out at a pretty fast rate already.
Once those are all gone, of course, it reverts back to the $830 level (unless Canonical once again decides to open up more less expensive options). The worry here is that after the initial bump, the Edge will hit a wall and won’t manage the rate of pledges it needs to reach its incredibly ambitious goal in the 29 days remaining in its funding campaign.
Canonical’s goal isn’t completely beyond reach – campaigns on crowdfunding sites including Kickstarter have raised ludicrous amounts of money in less time, like the Pebble, but that only raised $10 million in just over a month, and it was actually seeking about a tenth of that. The Edge sounds like it’ll be the best thing you can get in a mobile device when it finally does become a real, actual thing, but that’s not slated to happen until at least May 2014 per Canonical’s shipping schedule.
Crazy high concept device with huge price tag and relatively unknown mobile OS isn’t exactly a recipe for pre-order success, but the Edge is a mobile geek’s dream. The question is, will enough of those dreamers believe hard enough to raise $32 million in just under a month? Canonical’s clearly willing to give some ground to make that happen, but just how much it will take isn’t quite clear yet.
This week NVIDIA is once again blurring the lines between desktop and mobile graphics with a note on the introduction of Kepler technology into their next-generation mobile processor. NVIDIA suggests that, “from a graphics perspective, this is as big a milestone for mobile as the first GPU, GeForce 256, was for the PC when it was introduced 14 years ago.” This is the first set of details we’re getting on Project Logan, the next processor architecture in the Tegra chipset family.
You’ll remember the comic book character collection of code-names for the processors that’ve become the Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 – and what we must assume will be the Tegra 5 as well. Here with what’s still called Project Logan, NVIDIA makes clear their intent to bring graphics processing abilities until now reserved for desktop machines to the mobile realm; for tablets, smartphones, and everything in between.
In addition to deploying Kepler’s efficient processing powers to the Logan mobile SoC, NVIDIA intents on bringing the excellence in a form that the company will be able to license to others. This licensing was outlined earlier this year amid the latest Kepler integrations into GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760.
NVIDIA suggests that the technology deployed with mobile Kepler is able to use one-third the power of “GPUs in leading tablets, such as the retinal iPad”, while it performs identical renderings. They also note that this efficiency is achieved with mobile Kepler without compromising graphics capabilities, working with OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL 4.4, and everything else in the OpenGL universe.
Though we’re expecting this architecture to hit Google’s Android – as NVIDIA has been hitting for the past several years – they do mention that the technology also supports DirectX, the latest graphics API from Microsoft. Think Windows RT and Windows 8 – NVIDIA’s been there before.
Working with these current and next-generation APIs allow NVIDIA to bring on graphics unlike any seen in the mobile universe, developers taking hold of these environments with a variety of high-end rendering and simulation techniques. NVIDIA runs down three of the most powerful:
Tessellation – which creates geometry dynamically and efficiently on the GPU from high-level descriptions, sizing triangles optimally based on the user’s viewpoint. By comparison, fine detail in a traditional pre-generated approach is inefficient, requiring excess geometry to deal with all possible viewpoints.
Compute-based deferred rendering – which calculates the effect of all lights in the scene in a single deferred rendering pass. This OpenGL 4 capability greatly improves deferred rendering efficiency and scalability compared to current OpenGL ES based implementations, which require an extra pass for each light source in the scene. The scalability of the compute-based approach paves the way to even more advanced lighting models, such as using virtual points of lights to approximate global illumination effects.
Advanced anti-aliasing and post-processing – which deliver better image quality, particularly in areas of very sharp color contrast, by making multi-sampling more programmable and allowing applications to implement their own anti-aliasing filters. These also enable more efficient film-quality post-processing effects, such as motion blur and depth of field.
NVIDIA makes clear that a lovely collection of processing-heavy tasks will be able to be carried out with this next-generation solution including computer vision, augmented reality, computational imaging, and speech recognition. Showed off this week at Siggraph was a return of the digital head now known as “Ira”, aka Faceworks.
Stick around as we continue to jump deeper into the next big superhero-themed processor, one that’ll break barriers beyond what we’re only just seeing now with the NVIDIA Tegra 4 – living inside NVIDIA SHIELD and getting pumped up for benchmarks sooner than later!
We hope you weren’t just getting used to having 2GB of RAM in a smartphone, because Samsung is already moving on. The company is now mass-producing 3GB LPDDR3 packages whose 0.8mm (0.03in) thickness can accommodate most device sizes. The capacious, 20nm-class memory should also be quick when there’s a pair of symmetric channels to keep data flowing. The first smartphones with 3GB of RAM should ship in the second half of the year; Samsung isn’t revealing which phones will have the honor, but it’s not hard to make some educated guesses.
The Moto X has been leaked extensively, and with the DROID handsets being revealed, we saw some of those leaked features make an appearance, likely confirming what we can expect with the Moto X. Following up with that, however, has been a rather extensive leak of screenshots over at Android Police showing some of the features the Moto X will be offering users, among them being a Motorola Connect Chrome extension and Lost Phone Tracking.
First up is Motorola Assist, which you can see the screenshots for in the image above. This will reportedly be the alternative to the Smart Actions with the DROID handsets, and will serve functions like automatically putting the Moto X into hands-free mode when the user is driving, and silencing the handset during a meeting.
There’s also Motorola Migrate, which makes it easy to migrate data from a previous handset over the Moto X. Touchless Control and Launch Phrase, meanwhile, further confirm that the device will have voice control capabilities. One of the screenshots show the training page for the launch phrase, and advises users to “Move to a quiet room. Like, seriously silent.”
The Lost Phone Tracking feature is what it sounds like – an integrated way to track the handset if it is lost, with one of the screenshots under “Motorola Device ID” detailing the Google account being used for, among other things, “Lost Phone Web Portal,” as well as the Motorola Connect feature. The Motorola Connect Chrome Extension will allow users to sync text messages and calls with Chrome.
Rounding it all out is Active Display and Active Notifications, with the former working to conserve battery life by fading notifications in and out and selectively lighting the pixels needed to show the display. These won’t appear, according to the screenshot, if the phone is in your pocket, if it is placed facedown, or if the user is currently on a call. Active Notifications, meanwhile, give users extensive control over the notification settings.
With the Optimus G Pro already available on AT&T and a Verizon variant rubber-stamped by Uncle Sam, Sprint is bringing up the caboose. A smartphone bearing the model number LG LS980 has just passed through the FCC, and it’s a dead ringer for a G Pro destined for Big Yellow. Not only does its model number jive with the other carrier-specific incarnations of LG’s device, but it packs support for Now Network-friendly CDMA and LTE over band 25, alongside the usual GSM radio. There’s no telling when the Now Network will start offering the phone, but federal approval means it’s clear to arrive when LG pleases.
Want to know which North American carriers might offer the LG G2 after August 7th? The FCC is offering a big hint: it just approved a region-appropriate version of the Android flagship. Going under its D801 codename, the G2 variant cleared by the agency supports all the LTE and HSPA frequencies used by AT&T, T-Mobile and large Canadian networks. As such, it’s likely that the smartphone will get a multi-carrier launch next month. The real question is whether or not any CDMA providers (which aren’t included in the filing) will come along for the ride.
When the Galaxy S4 Mini reached the FCC last month, we thought that might be the last we’d see of it in the US; the Galaxy S III Mini never officially reached the country, after all. The GS4 Mini is back for another round, however, and it’s now toting AT&T-native support for both LTE (on the 700MHz and AWS bands) and HSPA (850MHz and 1,900MHz). Few other surprises are in store, although we’ve noticed that there’s no AWS-based HSPA for T-Mobile fans. The filing also doesn’t say anything about an AT&T launch for the GS4 Mini, but it comes a month after the FCC approved a compatible Galaxy Mega 6.3 — we wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more to the story.
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