Now that Nest is closer to Google than ever before, it's only right that Google's next product be Nest-branded. Clues collected this week point toward Google's rumored smart screen (with Google Assistant onboard) coming from the smart home brand Nest. Nest was never going to be satisfied just making thermostats, cameras, and doorbells - no way!
Today, ASUS revealed the next phone in its ZenFone Max lineup. This new device is called the ZenFone Max Pro M1, and like the Max Plus, it's almost entirely focused on long battery life. In fact, it even seems like its mid-range hardware has been selected specifically to make the Max Pro last as long as possible on a single charge.
This week the folks at Samsung Pay added PayPal top their roster to vastly expand the platform's entry points. PayPal users were allowed to use PayPal as their payment of choice in the Samsung Pay wallet starting immediately if not soon. With this combination, PayPal users around the world will soon be able to pay for products and services at 90% of all physical stores in the world with NFC and MST - like magic.
It appears that Samsung may soon release new storage options for the Galaxy S9 and its big brother here in the US. Thus far, the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ have only been available in the US with 64GB of storage. That's a decent amount, but it means anyone looking for more storage has to purchase a microSD card - an added expense that some would rather not deal with by purchasing a phone with more internal storage at the start.
In just a few days, one of the latest, and by that we mean "very late" 2018 smartphone flagship will finally be announced. Not that we're expecting any surprise considering how the LG G7 ThinQ has been leaked to death. What we'll be waiting for, instead, is to see how LG plans to spin a smartphone that is later than usual, with features you might also find in other smartphones already in the market. But just so that we're all on the same page, here are the things we expect to find in the LG G7 ThinQ.
Who needs a combined Android and Chrome OS when Chrome OS can pretty much run it all. There's native Chrome OS, of course, and official Android support via Google Play Store. There's even preliminary Windows support via WINE for Android on Chrome OS. And, soon, Chromebooks might be able to run Linux programs as well. That possibility already was hinted at last February but might be coming really soon with the appearance of the Terminal app in Chrome OS' dev channel.
AI assistants may be called "personal" but they definitely aren't personable. Never mind their obviously fake personalities, these intelligent chatbots are really intelligent in only the factual sense. Huawei, however wants AI assistants to grow beyond that to become something more relatable, more approachable, more human-like. In other words, it wants to make its AI have some EI, emotional intelligence, as well to help identify human emotions and, if needed, console their users. Considering what Huawei is going through, it might be in need of some of that emotional support itself.
The last several weeks have seen numerous leaks and rumors about the upcoming LG G7 ThinQ, and with the phone's official debut expected on May 2nd more concrete details are surfacing, including LG's confirmation of the name. The latest tidbit is that one of the G7 ThinQ's hardware buttons will have a sole purpose of activating the voice-powered Google Assistant.
Analyzing the Galaxy Note 9 is like seeing the culmination of a year's worth of best phone concepts. It's like seeing what every other smartphone was trying to achieve, and Samsung crowning their efforts. Each year when the Samsung Galaxy Note series arrives, it's like Samsung was just sitting back waiting for everyone else to try to make something as uniquely all-encompassing and fulfilling, specs, price, and all that goodness.
It's time to turn Alexa into a joke machine, using the first round of Alexa Blueprints to do some mischief. If you're a big fan of The Office, you know the episode cold open where Michael Scott figures out he can make his computer speak. Today, you can make all your Amazon Echo or otherwise Alexa-infused devices do what you want. Or at least answer all the questions you ask it, how you wish.
The answer to which smartphone has the best camera is a tricky one, but Huawei has scooped up another award for its P20 Pro. Announced last month, the triple-camera smartphone cranked up Huawei's imaging credentials with a Leica co-branded array of color and monochrome sensors that mingle their data for better results.
Google's communication services are a mess, and that's describing it nicely. It has made multiple attempts, some of which continue to exist independently, to offer the best messaging platform ever. Almost all of those have failed miserably. Why can't Google just make a straight out iMessage clone? Well, it could but it's choosing not to do so. Instead, it is trying to push for a more industry-supported messaging standard that it will simply be calling "Chat". Not "Google Chat", just "Chat".