Category: Google

Allison Johnson, writing at The Verge, about the just-announced Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro’s take on mobile photography:

In its eight years of existence, Google Photos has shifted its official mission just once: from “home for all your photos and videos” to “home for all your memories,” says Google Photos VP Shimrit Ben-Yair.

That tagline switch starts to make a lot more sense when you look at the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Inside the new phones, Google Photos will see some of its biggest changes to date, all designed to refine your memories. There’s a lot to be proven about how well the new features work, and there are the usual messy questions to ask about the role of generative AI in photography. But you can start to see very clearly how Google is shifting from saving “your photos” to cataloging your messy, complicated memories.

Google isn’t the only company applying a lot of computing power to photos and videos taken with its phones, but they are doing a lot more than Apple or Samsung are at this point.

David Pierce, writing at The Verge:

There was a sign in the Google Reader team’s workspace at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. “Days Since Cancellation,” it read, with a number below: zero. It was always zero.

This was in 2006 or so, back when Google Reader was still growing. Back when it still existed at all. Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything. It wasn’t Google’s most popular app, not by a long shot, but it was one of its most beloved.

Within the company, though, Reader’s future always felt precarious. “It felt so incongruent,” says Dolapo Falola, a former engineer on the Reader team. “Literally, it felt like the entire time I was on the project, various people were trying to kill it.”

Google has brought something terrible into the world.

MKBHD’s hands-on video of Google’s new foldable is a good watch. This device looks very nicely put together:

Dan Seifert:

The looks of the Pixel Tablet are relatively generic. It has an 11-inch, 16:10, 2560 x 1600 pixel LCD display, even bezels all around, and a matte back. It comes in three colors: white, dark green, and light pink, with the dark green model featuring a black bezel. Though it looks like plastic from a distance, the Pixel Tablet has an aluminum frame with a nanotexture coating, not unlike what Google did with the Pixel 5 smartphone.

Bundled in the box with the Pixel Tablet is a magnetic speaker dock. This serves multiple purposes and is meant to prevent the dreaded “dead tablet in a drawer” syndrome: it’s a place to store the Pixel Tablet when it’s not in use; it charges the battery; and it has a louder, fuller speaker better suited for communal listening than the speakers that are built into the tablet. If you’re playing music or watching a video on the tablet when you put it on the dock, it will seamlessly transfer the audio to the dock’s speaker. Pull the tablet off the dock while something is playing, and it will instantly switch to the tablet’s speakers.

I want Apple to make an iPad version of this so, so badly.

Steven Aquino, writing at Forbes, about a feature that shipped with the new Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro:

A marquee feature of the Pixel 7 series is what Google calls Guided Frame. The feature, an interplay of hardware and software, works with Android’s TalkBack screen reader to help guide a Blind or low vision person to get into the best positioning for a good selfie. Guided Frame also smartly leverages haptic feedback to assist in confirmation that you did the right thing. For many disabled people, the double dose of sensory input — clinically known as bimodal support, referring to two forms of sensory experience — is not only technologically adroit. Haptics is one way to make use of a device’s panoply of sensors, but the practical application these little buzzes have for people who can’t rely on pure visual feedback is not superfluous. It’s actually extremely useful.

Once the “sweet spot” is found, the system automatically hits the shutter button.

Accessibility should allow anyone to access all of the features of these devices, and this is a good example of something that should have been for a long time now.

David Pierce, writing at The Verge, has a great interview with Pixel hardware boss Rick Osterloh about the new watch, Google’s purchase of Fitbit and why anyone should trust Google to keep supporting this thing in the long run.

Yes, please.