Google Store now focuses on selling Google-made products

The internet was abuzz with news earlier that Android Wear might have been abandoned by Google after the section dedicated to these products disappeared from the Google Store. But it seems the reason isn’t as drastic as that one. With the growing number of Google hardware, it seems the company wants to focus on promoting and selling Google-made products. Hoi Lam, a Googler who works with the Android Wear team, confirmed this news on Twitter. Lam adds they have been working over the past year on “custom store fronts with online retailers” for Android Wear. You can see his series of tweets below the cut. 

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Microsoft brings Edge browser to iOS and Android

If you’ve been waiting for Microsoft to bring its Windows 10 browser to mobile, the wait is almost over. We say almost as Microsoft is initially rolling out the preview Edge browser app to iOS and Android users in the US and only available in English, for now. You’ll need to be part of Microsoft’s Windows Insider Program, which you can sign up for here. The preview app is already available to iOS users and will be coming to Android soon.

If you use Edge on your desktop, then this will bring all your Favorites, Reading List, Reading View, and New Tab Page from the PC to your phone. And then like Apple’s Handoff feature, you can open a page on your phone and send that right off to your laptop or desktop.

Source: Windows Blogs

Google Clips brings AI into cameras

"How do you let yourself capture these fleeting moments, while being part of the moment?" Google asks this of us as it unveils a new camera unlike anything we’ve seen so far. Called Google Clips, it’s a self-contained camera that can take photos and videos without you prompting it to do so (but a sole button on it will let you manually record what you want). It runs pre-trained machine learning algorithms and generates clips and photos it thinks are the best ones. It then lets you export these as either photos, videos, or GIFs. Google is focusing on a specific set of users at the moment: parents and pet parents, to be specific. With the artificial intelligence component, they need to teach specific things to the machine learning model so it can start recording things like your child crawling around the living room for the first time. Google with the help of Intel’s Movidius Myriad 2 vision processing unit brings on-board AI processing to Clips.

At first glance, Clips raises some privacy concerns. But Google is quick to address this. Firstly, the clips it records are soundless. The media is all contained in the tiny teal and white cube and can only be exported to the connected smartphone. Clips comes with a 12-megapixel sensor with a 130-degree field-of-view lens capable of taking photos at 15fps. It has a 16GB internal memory and works with a handful of devices at the moment, including Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S7 and S8, and iPhone 6 and up. It’s not a cheap device, though, as it retails for US$249 (approx. CA$310).

Source: TechCrunch + The Verge

Canadian Google Pixel owners have until January 2021 to take advantage of ‘original quality’ Google Photos uploads

All good and free things must come to an end. And that also goes for the ability of Pixel users to upload “original quality” photos and videos to their Google Photos app. For the US users, the access will end by 2020. Meanwhile, we get an extra two weeks or so as the free option will be taken off the table on January 15, 2021. It hasn’t been explicitly said if all uploads done before the end date will remain available to users but at this point we assume that it will. To continue to upload new images and videos in their original state past the deadline, it seems you’ll have to start paying as you would for extra storage on, let’s say, Google Drive. If you switch back to the “high quality” setting though, you’ll continue to have free storage for your Pixel.

Source: Android Authority