Articles about Google

Google’s I/O developer conference is underway and there will be plenty of announcements coming from the search giant.

Hot on the heels of the big makeover for Gmail comes news of another powerful new feature for the webmail service. Smart Compose uses machine learning to help you write responses to emails. It’s a step beyond the Smart Reply feature the company introduced last year.

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It's not long since Google's Android Excellence program bestowed praise on apps and games on what were considered to offer a high quality experience. Now the company has used Google I/O to reveal the winners of the 2018 Google Play Awards.

Google says that the aim of the ceremony is to "recognize the best apps and games on Google Play over the past year", and it's a great way to discover something new to try.

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Google today announced the launch of Android Things 1.0, its Internet of Things platform. There have been numerous beta versions for developers to play with, but now that the operating system has been officially launched we can expect to see it popping up on a wide range of devices.

The company says that it has been working closely with a number of manufacturers to help ensure that products will be available soon. On the horizon are smart speakers from LG and iHome, as well as smart displays from Lenovo, LG, and JBL.

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Technology companies have been telling us virtual reality will change the world for decades now. While VR has become more popular in recent years, it is still a niche market. Virtual reality will probably become mainstream in the future, but until prices come down even further, it will remain a hobby for enthusiasts.

With that said, Google is still banking on virtual reality, especially with its Daydream initiative. Today, the search giant is making a VR positional-tracking tool called "Seurat" open source. The code is being hosted on GitHub.

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It is now two years since Apple decided that an image of a gun had no place as an emoji. The company replaced the handgun icon with an image of a water pistol, leading to a debate about whether it was the right thing to do.

With further serious shootings and gun crimes bringing firearms into the spotlight time and time again, more technology companies decided to follow suit. The latest names to follow Apple's lead are Microsoft, Facebook and Google, all of whom plan to kill the gun emoji and replace it with a water pistol.

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The big news from Google today is the launch of the redesigned Gmail, but it's not the only news. The company has also launched a new app called Tasks which -- no prizes for guessing -- allows for management of to-do lists.

The Google Tasks service is nothing new, and it has been accessible from Gmail inboxes and Google Calendar for quite some time, but this is the first time there has been a dedicated app for it. As well as the app, there's also a revamp of the web-based version of Tasks.

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We've known for a little while that Google was planning a major overhaul of Gmail -- complete with a host of new features -- and now the big day has arrived. The most obvious change is the new look which is more in keeping with the aesthetics of Material Design, but it's the new features that Google is most keen to talk about.

While the company says that the aim of the update is "to help people be more productive at work", the new features are available to everyone starting now. What do you have to look forward to? Nudges, Smart Replies, email snoozing, action buttons and more.

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Chrome OS is a fairly flexible operating system, and its support for Android apps via the Google Play Store opens up a world of software. It has been thought -- and hoped -- for some time that Linux support might be on its way, and this is looking increasingly likely.

A Terminal app has appeared in the Chrome OS dev channel, strongly suggesting that support for Linux applications could well be on the horizon -- something which will give Chromebooks a new appeal.

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For 2018, I decided to take stock in my finances to see exactly where my money is going each month. I found many ways to cut costs, such as making my own lunch instead of buying something from a deli each day. In New York, a sandwich, bag of chips, and a Snapple can easily run you $13! Food aside, there was one thing in particular that was really destroying my budget -- cable.

When I say cable, I am referring to the traditional "triple play" service, where you get television, internet, and phone. For this, I was paying over $200 a month! This was without any premium channels -- no HBO, Starz, or Showtime. The most ridiculous part? I was being charged monthly rental fees for the cable boxes and modem. Well, enough was enough. Thanks to YouTube TV, I "cut the cord" and I couldn't be happier.

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Google has had no shortage of chat and messaging tools over the years, and the company just added another one to its list. Google's Chat is based on the RCS (Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services) protocol which it is hoped will succeed SMS.

The company is hitting pause on Allo -- which only launched towards the end of 2016 -- to focus resources on RCS. Google is transferring "almost all" of the team currently working on Allo to Android Messages which will ultimately feature Chat, its own RCS implementation.

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Spreadsheets may not be the most exciting tools out there, but there's no denying that they're important. If you use Google Sheets as part of your number crunching process, there's some great news: Google is adding macro support.

While it was previously possible to automate tasks through scripts, the newly added support for direct macro recording simplifies things greatly. Sheets can now automatically convert macro actions into an Apps Script, and the macros are designed for use on cloud-based files.

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Just a few days ago we reported about the upcoming redesign of Gmail on the web. Delving further into the redesign we find that there are new features, including self-destructing emails.

With a new "Confidential Mode", Gmail will not only give users the ability to set an expiry date for the emails they send to people, but also put restrictions on messages to prevent them from being printed or forwarded.

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A businessman with an historic criminal conviction has won his case against Google in a "right to be forgotten" lawsuit seeking to remove information about his conviction from search results.

The case, heard today in London, could set a precedent and lead to a series of similar cases from other people with spent convictions. The anonymous businessman -- known only as NT2 -- has a conviction for conspiracy to intercept communications from more than a decade ago and spent six months in prison for the crime.

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Given the order of the alphabet, it came at no surprise that the name of the successor to Android Oreo was going start with the letter P. Until now it has simply been referred to as Android P, but now Google may have given away what the full name will be.

Over on Instagram, Google shared a series of images which were designed to be screengrabbed and used as wallpapers -- something which has become common on Instagram. One of the wallpapers features popsicles, leading to speculation that Android P will in fact be called Android Popsicle.

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If you thought your Android phone was patched with all of the latest security updates, it might be time to think again. A report by Security Research Labs found that some phone manufacturers were not only failing to deliver security updates, but were hiding this fact from users.

The company found that some devices suffered a "patch gap" whereby manufacturers altered the date reported to Android -- and users -- about when security updates were last installed, without actually installing any patches.

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