iPhones. iPads. Android. Windows Phone 7. We’ve updated all of our essential apps lists to include a few forgotten favorites, some long awaited arrivals and, as always, even more amazing apps. Check them out! More »
Dropbox is an indispensable part of many a computer users’ arsenal, including several here at Engadget. But, the company hasn’t had a viable option for businesses who would have an obvious use for a tool that allows you to easily sync files between PCs, share them amongst users and always have backups in the cloud. The boys and girls at the Y Combinator startup know that there’s lots of money to be made in the enterprise space and that’s why they’ve unveiled Dropbox for Teams. The general experience is the same, but rather than individually managed chunks of storage, teams share one large repository, starting at 1TB for five users. The base plan costs $795 a year and additional users, which also includes 200GB of storage, can be tacked on for $125 annually. The business offering also includes special tools for administrators to add or delete users and dedicated phone support. Check out the full PR after the break.
Continue reading Dropbox for Teams offers businesses copious amounts of sharable storage
Dropbox for Teams offers businesses copious amounts of sharable storage originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Plex is one of the more popular solutions to the problem of how to get all that (legally downloaded, of course) media sitting on your home PC to your various devices for consumption. But, like many of its competitors, getting the whole shebang set up isn’t always the easiest task. The company’s new myPlex platform aims to solve this conundrum, and adds a few welcome features along the way. Now, setting up a server or a client is as simple as logging in to your Plex account — no matter how many of either part of the media-streaming equation you may have. As an added bonus, your account is also now home to a queue that is shared across all devices. Stopped watching a movie half way through on your commute home? You can pick up right where you left off on your Roku. You can even add web clips from sources like YouTube to the list. Check out the source link for a few more details.
myPlex makes streaming your media simple, gives you one queue to rule them all originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apps make the iPhone shine. And you want your new (or even old) iPhone to shine, right? Here are the best iPhone apps this week! It’s a solid list.
The new version of Google TV includes direct access to Android Market. A select group of 30 apps, directly optimized for Google TV, will appear in the Featured For TV section shown above. Hundreds more — Google TV-compatible, but not expressly optimized — will surface if you dig further.
Google’s smart TV software platform, Google TV, is poised for its first significant overhaul since it launched in Logitech and Sony hardware a year ago. Via over-the-air updates that should begin streaming to hardware devices on October 30, Google TV users will find new TV-optimized Android Apps, an improved YouTube experience, and new features that provide easy, direct discovery of TV and movie content.
All this Googly goodness is wrapped up in a new user interface that aims to simplify a challenging information design — a design that’s left many Google TV customers with a persistent sense of yuck.
When Google TV launched, it was supposed to seamlessly co-mingle “live TV” (read: broadcast, satellite and cable) with streaming video services like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Video On Demand. You could also use your Google TV software to search the web, and even access digital content from your home network or attached storage.
In theory: Fantastic. In practice: Difficult to use.
Whether you were running a Google TV set-top box manufactured by Logitech or Sony, or directly tapping into the Google TV software installed in various Sony TVs, you were faced with a series of menus that defied easy access and discovery of the content you actually wanted to see. And it’s also possible you bought your Google TV in the mistaken belief that it’s a “cord-cutting” platform — that it would allow you to nix your cable or satellite service, and instead watch your favorite TV shows via direct Internet streaming.
After all, the TV networks stream full TV episodes directly from their websites. So Google TV must be the perfect delivery system for that content, right?
No, not so fast. The networks summarily blocked their online content from appearing on Google TV, giving a large subset of early adopters one more reason to kvetch about a hardware purchase they wished they never made.
Well, all dreams of cord-cutting should be put to rest. As Rishi Chandra, director of product management, Google TV, told me, “There was a perception that we were a cord-cutting product, and that’s something that we didn’t do enough to dispel. Our point of view is that there’s new content coming, content that you just haven’t been able to access with your TV. Now we’re bringing that content, and adding the discovery experience on top of it.”
So, no, Google TV can’t be your all-in-one, zero-compromises, Internet-only video delivery system. But what it can do well — namely, deliver YouTube, Netflix and other web-based video to your HDTV — is about to get better. I recently traveled to Google’s headquarters for a hands-on demo of the new software, and what I saw is a substantial improvement over Google existing (however compromised) status quo.
Here are four key improvements you’ll see in the next version of Google TV. (Sony hardware devices will begin receiving over-the-air updates on Sunday, with Sony updates continuing through the middle of next week. Over-the-air updates for Logitech hardware will begin shortly thereafter.)
The first version of Google TV included a home screen that dominated your TV display whenever you summoned its presence. This original home screen, littered with gigantic thumbnails, was obtrusive by any measure.
The new home screen, however, is defined by a simple menu bar at the bottom of your display (see screenshot above). It’s clean, simple, and simply more fashion-forward than its predecessor. Likewise, the new Google TV software features a revised view of your All Apps menu. The old view listed apps in a long, single-file list arrangement. The new view (see screenshot below) mimics an Android Honeycomb tablet interface. Apps are arranged in rows of four, and the arrangement is customizable.
These may not seem like big changes — unless you’re already using Google TV, and have spent the last year coping with a cluttered, “something’s sort of ‘off’ here” U.I . From what I saw in my hands-on demo, various key interface elements have been tweaked and finessed to do away with Google TV’s previously horsey (or at least user-antagonistic) design sensibility.
The original version of Google TV had all the necessary hooks into TV and movie content. It could catalog everything that was available from your cable or satellite provider, and also sort through all the content that was available from Internet-based video-on-demand sources (or at least the ones that weren’t blocking content). But actually finding the right content to watch was still quite difficult.
Sure, you could hit the search button of your Google TV remote, and key in an appropriate search term. But the results you received were anything but Googly in their depth and relevance, and weren’t aggregated across all of Google TV’s content sources.
This has been addressed in the new update. First, search results are now more comprehensive and detailed. Second, there’s a new TV & Movies app that lets you intuitively browse for high-end video content, using a full slate of filters to narrow choices pulled from cable and satellite, as well as YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, HBO GO and other premium online sources.
When you browse content in the new app, you can head straight to various thematic headings (e.g., comedy, drama, sports) to window shop for a video that suits your fancy. You can also sort by video quality, price, and according to when a video is playing (e.g., “On Now”). And these are just the low-hanging fruit of more civilized content-surfacing. Chandra says that if users opt-in, Google TV will also create browsing choices that respond to personal preferences.
And, wait, it gets more clever than that. Says Chandra: “Once you open up this canvas to other tools available on the web, we can ask, ‘What are people tweeting about right now? What are people watching right now?’ There are all these different dimensions that can help us reorganize what we’re watching.”
OK, I’m not sure I want my friends — let alone the great unwashed Internet masses — nudging me toward the last 15 minutes of Bridalplasty. But I’m still heartened to learn that Google thinks a content-surfacing tool for Bridalplasty is an interesting thing to build.
In the grand scheme of all the hardware you may ever connect to your TV, Google TV has always delivered an excellent YouTube experience. Its YouTube functionality is better than what you’ll get from so-called “home theater PCs,” Blu-ray players equipped with YouTube apps, and YouTube apps built directly into the “connected TV” services of the latest HDTVs.
In fact, for its YouTube and Netflix features alone, I think Google TV — even the first version of the platform — is a smart purchase for anyone who can’t already get these content streams from existing living room hardware. After all, Logitech’s Google TV set-top box, the Revue, costs only $99.
And now a much-improved YouTube app makes Google TV even better. That’s good news for YouTube junkies, and there must be a few out there as Google says YouTube boasts 800 million monthly viewers.
Google TV’s new YouTube app is, at its heart, a TV-optimized Android app that’s been fine-tuned for speedy video delivery and a 10-foot user interface. During my demo, I was astounded by how quickly videos loaded. Load times were so quick, in fact, I asked Chandra if popular videos were sitting in ultra-speedy cache on Google servers.
No, Chandra said. The fast load times were solely the result of software optimizations. Google focused on improving how quickly the YouTube app pings its servers, leveraging all the software optimization tricks that Google deployed for YouTube in mobile devices. (Indeed, YouTube on phones and tablets must already copy with low-bandwidth, high-latency connections, so optimization has always been key to an Android YouTube strategy).
When all was said and done, Chandra said, Google wanted Google TV to flip between videos as fast a satellite box flips between channels. We’ll see how this plays out during hands-on testing, but the load times we saw at Google HQ impressed us, to be sure.
Also impressive: Viewing full-screen, professionally produced, HD video on the YouTube app. I was wowed by the clarity and definition of HD content, and for the first time, I really wanted to find more YouTube video to check out.
Well, the new app makes this easier thanks to a channel-building feature that creates custom videos playlists on the fly. Just enter a term into the YouTube app’s search field, and it will spit out a thematic selection of videos that you can peruse at top speed, “pivoting,” as Google likes to describe it, from one video to the next. The screenshot above illustrates a search for “Katy Perry.”
Bottom line: If you’ve ever used YouTube’s “Lean Back” mode on your computer desktop, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what YouTube now brings to Google TV.
Except the Google TV delivery seems faster.
In the most significant Google TV update of all, Android Apps now have a home on your big-screen TV.
Obviously, not all the apps in Android Market would even work for TV-screen deployment. For example, those that reply on touch gestures or GPS just wouldn’t make sense for Google TV (at least not as the platform is currently deployed). But Chandra estimates some 1,500 existing apps are already Google TV-compatible, and these will appear in the “filtered” version of Android Market that appears in the new software interface.
The real app gems, however, will be found in Google TV’s “Featured For TV” section. These apps — 30 should be available at launch — have been expressly developed for big-screen deployment, and Google TV’s unique talents.
Sure, one app I saw demoed is nothing more than a wrapper for an HD yule-log video (see Classy Fireplace in the screenshot above). But others are game apps (yes, Google TV is now a tenable platform for casual games), and the best apps will likely be the ones that deliver premium video content.
It’s quite ingenious: Google TV’s new Android initiative allows video-savvy media companies to do an end-run around licensing and distribution deals with the cable and satellite networks. Whether your media company is an indie upstart or a blue-chip heavyweight, this holds promise.
Take, for example, the Wall Street Journal. “They’re a premium brand,” says Chandra, “and they have great content, but they don’t want to build a 24-7 news cycle. They don’t want to negotiate deals to get content on the air, and they don’t want to pay to get access to users. So what do they do? They build an app.”
The possibilities: Dizzying. The proof: It remains in the pudding.
But as Mario Queiroz, Google’s vice president of product management, told me, Google considers Google TV to be a marathon project, not a sprint.
“We ask, ‘How can we make the product better?’ instead of belaboring what’s being said,” Queiroz said. “We’ve tried to take what we could use constructively, and build a better product with version 2. As a Google mantra, we always launch early and iterate.”
And iterate they will. Google will soon announce new chipset partners for brand new Google TV hardware in 2012 (Samsung and Vizio are already on board). So, no, the story of Google TV does not begin and end with a single software version, or just a small collection of set-top boxes and TVs from Sony and Logitech.
Google TV is real and its ambition levels remain high. Stay tuned for hands-on reviews of the new version software and upcoming Google TV hardware.
It has been a long year for Google TV. The first (and only, so far) round of hardware started shipping in October 2010 and at the time, promised the Android Marketplace with its wealth of third party apps early in the next year. That clearly didn’t happen, and it quickly became most notable for what it was being blocked from doing, like streaming video from TV providers like Hulu and various network TV websites. After various false starts and delays, Sony Google TV and Logitech Revue hardware will finally receive updates to Android 3.1 Honeycomb (congratulations Google, now where’s Ice Cream Sandwich?) starting this weekend with Sony up first and Logitech “shortly thereafter.” The biggest additions are the aforementioned apps, a new interface, and a refocused system for content discovery that starts with the new TV & Movies app pictured above. Check out the gallery for more pictures of the new Google TV, while more details and videos follow after the break.
Continue reading Google TV, take two, arrives next week with Honeycomb, Android Market
Google TV, take two, arrives next week with Honeycomb, Android Market originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Dark Sky, an ‘accurate short-term weather predictor’
Dark Sky is a weather app that only tells you what will happen in the next hour, at most. What’s the point of that, you ask? Because by limiting itself to what will happen next, Dark Sky can be spookily accurate.
The app, by Adam Grossman and Jack Turner, analyses weather radar data and tells you exactly what is about to happen in the weather, exactly where you are. Thus you can see that you have five minutes before a downpour, giving you enough time to get to the corner store. And that the shower will last ten minutes, so you should buy a magazine while you’re at the store and wait it out.
This works because it’s way easier to tell which way a storm or weather system will move in the next half hour than it is to predict even tomorrow’s weather. And Dark Sky even looks good while it does it. The same algorithm that predicts the weather also interpolates the herky-jerky radar images into a smoothly animated picture of the weather. It’s kind of like an iTunes visualizer, only useful.
Adam and Jack are currently seeking finding on Kickstarter ($15 will pre-order you a copy), as the app backend requires lots of server power to crunch the radar data from the whole country. This also means that an international rollout might take a while. However, if you live in England I can offer you a very accurate prediction: If it is not raining right now, it will start in five minutes. You’re welcome.
Dark Sky project page [Kickstarter. Thanks, Adam!]
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Well, well, what do we have here? These Logitech Revue boxes just hit the sales floor of a major electronics retailer, prominently sporting “New & Improved: Google TV with Android 3.1 and Android Market” stickers. Logitech also released its quarterly earnings overnight, claiming $7.9 million in sales from the Revue and accessories since dumping its CEO and slashing prices to $99. These haven’t been cracked open yet to see if any Honeycomb leaks out, so it’s possible they’re just waiting for the long-delayed OTA update like all the others. Still, if you’re trying to get a jump on the second major Google TV push without any hackery needed, it could be worth scouting store shelves in your area.
Update: As a few commenters have pointed out, a support rep on Logitech’s forums indicates these boxes have been updated with a sticker only. You’ll still have to wait Google to deliver the goods along with everyone else.
Update 2: Logitech reached out to us with the following statement:
We’d like to clarify that these products do not include the next version of Google TV software. The boxes were prematurely updated with the stickers in anticipation of the next release of the Google TV software, which, once available, will be a free and automatic update pushed to all Logitech Revue boxes that are installed and connected to the Internet.
[Thanks, DevonTheDude]
Logitech Revue on sale promising ‘new & improved’ Google TV with Android 3.1, Market (Update: Logitech responds) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Just a few meters from the entrance to Nokia World at London’s sprawling ExCel Exhibition Centre, we found a Toyota iQ compact with Nokia branding on the door. And in the dash was Toyota’s new Touch Life smartphone integration system, complete with Nokia Drive compatibility and display mirroring via MirrorLink. In addition to mirroring your Symbian Belle (or MeeGo) display on the 7-inch touchscreen, Touch Life also provides a driver-friendly interface, including enormous icons to control music playback, or to place calls to contacts by tapping their name and photo, or by using the jumbo telephone keypad. It also integrates with the Nokia Drive app, with a very simple (and also oversized) navigation interface. The concept is simple: access basic smartphone functions as you drive while limiting distractions. While you’re parked, you’ll have unrestricted access to your phone’s interface, but non-critical features are disabled as you drive.
The demo unit we saw is still a few months away from hitting production, so there were a few hiccups. After connecting the Nokia 701 to the system, the smartphone’s display appeared on the in-dash screen within a few seconds. We had full access to all of the phone’s features until shifting into drive, when a much simpler screen popped up, with Call, Drive and Music modules. Everything worked rather seamlessly until we neared the end of the demo, when an “Enjoy the sound while driving” message appeared on screen, where the navigation window had been just a moment before. There isn’t a firm release date in place, and the demo unit only appears to work with Symbian Belle at the moment — though MeeGo support (and likely Windows Phone as well) will be available after launch. Jump past the break to see how it works from behind the wheel.
Continue reading Nokia Drive with MirrorLink on Toyota Touch Life hands-on (video)
Nokia Drive with MirrorLink on Toyota Touch Life hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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For a consumption-only device, the iPad sure is good at making things
The iPad is just a device for consumption, right? And — according to a screed by sci-fi author Cory Doctorow — it signals the end of computer programming, at least for the tinkerers like you and me.
This is, of course, complete nonsense, as is made clear by Codify, a new iPad app for writing software. Not only does it let you code games, music software or pretty much anything you like, it uses multitouch to make the experience better than many desktop coding apps. The video shows it best:
Codify uses the Lua programming language. You tap out the code and then press play to run it. Want to specify a color? Instead of looking it up the internet, you just tap the code itself and a color-picker pops up, filling out the numbers automatically. The same is true for game sprites and other elements.
My programming skills go back to the days of the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and have remained at that BASIC level ever since. But now I’m tempted to play around again with this $8 app. It’s kind of like the Garage Band of coding.
And maybe now Doctorow can come in from the cold and trade up from Android to a proper tablet.
Codify for iPad [Two Lives Left]
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
