An ambitious project to make contact lenses that could track glucose levels for people with diabetes has been shelved, with Alphabet's Verily admitting the technology just wasn't up to scratch yet. The health-centric lenses were one of the company's first public projects to break cover back in 2014, and a headline example of how it would work with the pharmaceutical industry.
We're now privy to a so-called Google Pixel 3 Lite thanks to a series of photos shared this week by a leakster in Russia. If this device is, indeed, what it's reported to be, it's more than a little bit welcome in my pocket. This is because not ONLY does it have a rectangular display, and a back-facing camera that almost certainly has Pixel 3 powers, it also has a standard headphone jack on top.
Black Friday may be a week away, but Google is already running a tempting deal on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL that could save up to 50-percent on the Android smartphones. The new promotion comes in advance of Google's other big Pixel 3 deal for Black Friday, which will see up to $200 cut off the price of the smartphone.
Verizon revealed a program called My Numbers today. This program allows the user to add up to four numbers to a single device, allowing up to five in total. If the user chooses to add additional lines to their device, they'll get unlimited domestic calling and texting and will have to pay a fee per extra line. As noted by Keena Grigsby, director of product marketing for Verizon, My Numbers is a great solution for "customers with side hustles."
In an update this week, Samsung notified some Galaxy smartphone users that they'd no longer have access to unlimited free themes. Instead, with their update to Android 9 Pie, users will be limited to fourteen days of any one free theme. This is not an optional rule change, and it'll affect all developers.
Is Google itself downplaying the relevance of its Wear OS smartwatch platform? That seems to be the case when nary a mention of smartwatches was made in its latest Google Assistant dump of new features. And now it has almost silently made an update to Wear OS, simply called "Version H" that you'd think would actually be of interest to its users. Because while it might not be a grand update, it addresses one of the biggest flaws of smartwatches to date: battery life.
Today the Motorola Moto G7 leaked in press renders aplenty, both front and back. And boy, does it look familiar. It's almost as if a collection of smartphone makers are using the same design team to create their front facades. This device looks like the OnePlus 6T, which in turn looks like the Oppo F9, which in turn is basically an alternate-reality Essential Phone PH-1 - at least up front. It's like they've taken the cut-out display technology to a place where every phone looks shockingly similar - but it's not like that's a bad thing.
The official Google Store for hardware began their Black Friday sales early this year, starting on November 16th, 3018. That's a week and a day before the official Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States, Thursday, November 22nd, 2018. Google's list of products with sales runs from tomorrow right on through the week after Black Friday on into Cyber Monday, too - and there's a wide variety of products on which to gaze.
This week the latest in Qualcomm Snapdragon processor tech appeared in a benchmark that shows mobile processing performance. This benchmark is not the end-all be-all of tests of this sort of thing, but it's a pretty OK test of general performance. What we're seeing here is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon chip out-performing Apple's latest processor by a significant margin.
It seems that Google's Pixel Slate is very nearly here. Today, the Google Store was updated with expected shipping times for all varieties of the Pixel Slate. Though each model has a shipping time that's at least a few weeks out, they should all begin shipping to customers before the end of the year.
Alphabet is the holding company for search giant Google, and under the Alphabet umbrella, a company called Schaft has been developing bipedal robots for years now. Way back in 2013, Schaft won a DARPA Robotics Challenge Trial with its bipedal robots. Things went off the trials a bit for the company when its director, Andy Rubin, left and went on to found Essential.
Sure, there's a bunch of other stuff in the update, but that ability to put another episode after the episode that's playing - that's all I wanted. This app now has a dark mode - essentially the entirety of the app, by default. That'll be a whole lot nicer for the ol' battery life than the all-white layout that was the app since the beginning.