Popular titles from some of the world’s leading publishers such as Condé Nast UK, Dennis Publishing, Future, Haymarket, Hearst UK, Immediate Media and IPC Media are now available for purchase on your Android phone or tablet.
Get in shape with Men’s Fitness, cook up a storm with olive, work off all that turkey and Christmas pudding with Slimming World, catch up on the latest must-have gadgets with T3 and read a preview of The Hobbit in this month’s edition of Total Film.
Browse the Play Store to find your favourite magazines, discover new titles with a 30-day free trial, buy single issues or purchase a money-saving monthly or annual subscription to leading titles such as Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Wired. New Nexus devices even come pre-loaded with free issues of Men’s Fitness, .net and Vogue to get you started.
All your latest issues will be instantly available on your Android tablet or phone, or online, using our web reader, and organised in your collection in the cloud. You can flip through your magazine carousel to quickly decide what to read next or simply search for a specific title in your magazine collection.
Magazines are available today to enjoy on the sofa or on the go via your Android devices and on play.google.com, so please take a look.
“What's this song?” Starting today, the Sound Search for Google Play widget is available to download from the Play store, so you can start identifying music playing around you, directly from your Android device’s homescreen.
Sometimes, you hear a song you like while you’re out and about but don’t want to download it right at that moment. The Sound Search widget syncs across all of your devices, so that song you recognized with your phone in the coffee shop can be quickly purchased from your tablet at home.
For devices running Android 4.2, you can add the widget directly to your device’s lockscreen, letting you recognize songs without even unlocking your phone, making it even easier for you to catch that song at the club.
The Sound Search for Google Play widget is available on Google Play for devices in the U.S. running Android 4.0 and above. After you’ve installed it, go to the widget picker and drag the Sound Search widget onto your homescreen. You can click on the widget at any time to start recognizing music around you.
Keeping up on the news out there can be overwhelming. That's where Google Currents comes in—an app that allows you to discover, share and read your favorite news outlets, blogs and online magazines (what we together refer to as “editions”) on your smartphone or tablet—even when you’re offline. Currents is filled with great editions like The Los Angeles Times, CBS Sports, Android Central, The Guardian, Shortlist, and Forbes. Today, we’re revamping Currents to make it even easier to scan through all your favorite categories and specific editions with just the swipe of a finger. And, we’re using some of the technology behind Search to bring you breaking stories on those celebrity scandals, that fiscal cliff negotiation or hottest holiday gift.
Scan through categories We’re now grouping editions into categories to help you keep track of your existing subscriptions and discover new ones. Check out editions related to your interests through categories like Entertainment, Sports, Lifestyle and more. All of your content will be grouped in these categories, accessible from a sidebar. And you can organize your editions in each category with favorites on top.
We’ve also made it easy to quickly browse through top articles from all your favorite editions in a category—just swipe horizontally. If you subscribe to more than a dozen News editions like The Atlantic, ABC News and The Telegraph, you can quickly swipe through the entire category and dive into editions with articles of interest.
Scan through editions We’ve also made it easier to scan headlines in a particular edition—just swipe vertically. Want to see what’s new in Popular Science? Just swipe through through the headlines. After you view a story we’ll mark it as read, so it’s easier to see new content each time you use Currents.
Scan through breaking stories To help you stay up-to-date with the latest news, Google Currents now uses some of the technology behind Search to deliver the hottest breaking stories in categories such as World, Entertainment, Sports, Science and more. You’ll find new articles from hot topics that interest you, while discovering existing Currents editions you can subscribe to. Breaking stories are customized to your country and language—so we’ll only show you relevant news.
Currents optimizes editions to look great on whatever type of device you're using. Now articles shine, with larger images and layouts that are intelligently optimized for your device, whether you're on a phone or a tablet. Check out some of our newest featured partners like Cars.com, Voice of America News and New Scientist.
Back in April we expanded Google Currents internationally. Since then millions of readers around the world have downloaded Currents, reading over 700 publisher editions and tens of thousands of self-produced editions. The updated app is now available for download on Google Play and coming soon to iOS. We hope that today’s updates make keeping up with the latest news fast, easy and fun no matter where you are or what device you’re using.
Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen! For Santa’s holiday travel this season, Google Now is just the prescription.
As you head off this holiday season, the latest update to Google Now makes it even more useful for traveling. Before you even leave your house, Google Now will tell you what the weather will be like at your destination (just in time to make sure you remember to pack those mittens). At the airport, your boarding pass is automatically pulled up, helping you breeze through to the gate (launching shortly for United Airlines, with more to come). And once you've arrived at your destination, Google Now can help you uncover some great activities, by showing you events happening around you, suggesting websites for you to explore as you research things to do, or allowing you to learn more about specific pieces while you’re at a museum (using Google Goggles).
All of this builds on top of some of the other cards designed for travel, like the currency conversion, translation, and flight status cards -- hopefully taking a little bit of the stress out of holiday travel so you can focus on family and fun.
We're also making Voice Search even more powerful: you can find out the name of the song that’s playing (“What’s this song?”), quickly find product info (“Scan this barcode”) and post updates to Google+ simply by using just your voice.
These goodies are waiting for you in the updated Google Search app, available on Google Play for devices running Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, or higher.
Posted by Baris Gultekin, Product Management Director
You’re making your list, you’re checking it twice -- and now you can do it from anywhere.
Just in time for this year’s holiday season, you can edit Google Sheets on your mobile device, just like you can with Google Docs. From the Drive app on your Android device, you can create a new spreadsheet or edit an existing one. You can switch fonts, resize columns, sort data, and more. And just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits in real time as they’re made.
Beyond spreadsheets, you may notice a few other tweaks to the Drive app, including better text formatting when you paste from one Google document to another. And from your Android device, you can edit text within tables in documents and add a shortcut on the homescreen of your device to any specific file in Drive.
Whether it’s holiday recipes, shopping lists, or just your family budget, the Drive app on your mobile device makes it easy to get stuff done wherever you are.
As you hit the mall this holiday season, chances are you’ll be accompanied by a reliable personal shopping companion: your mobile phone. Four out of five mobile phone and tablet owners plan to use their device for holiday shopping - for comparing prices, locating nearby stores, and searching for coupons. Today, with the launch of Google Shopper 3.0 for Android, you can easily browse for gift ideas, research products, and locate great deals on the go. Search for products and get gift ideas on the redesigned home page The app’s redesigned home screen features a bigger search box for easier navigation. When you browse curated gift ideas and latest trends on the home page or search for apparel and accessories, larger photos let you view product designs in more detail.
Find great sales and special offers Shopper now makes it quick and easy to find great deals at local and online stores. From the new Sales page, you can view weekly circulars from nearby stores, along with a handful of featured current promotions which you can redeem online or in person. Shopper also shows you store promotions, such as ‘30% off’ or ‘free shipping’, as you search for products in the app.
Use GoodGuide rating to Identify healthy, safe, and eco-friendly products Whether you shop with a conscience or would like a reason to start, Shopper now features GoodGuide ratings, a rating system that indicates on a scale of one to ten whether a product is healthy, safe and environmentally friendly. When GoodGuide ratings are available for a product, you can view these by scrolling down the product detail screen, as shown below. You can learn more about the GoodGuide rating system here.
You can download Shopper 3.0 for your Android device from Google Play.
Posted by John Shriver-Blake, Product Manager, Google Shopper
People increasingly have more than one device, and they switch between them many times a day. Nexus—Google’s hardware line for Android devices—gets rid of the hassle. Just sign in with your Google Account and everything is there ready to go, whatever device you’re using: photos, emails, contacts, bookmarks, even your entertainment on Google Play. Today, we’re excited to announce three great new Nexus devices … in small, medium and large. And they all run Android 4.2, a new flavor of Jelly Bean—which includes the latest version of Google Now and other great new features.
Nexus 4 with Google Now and Photo Sphere Nexus 4 is our latest smartphone, developed together with LG. It has a quad-core processor which means it's super fast, a crisp 4.7" (320 ppi) display that's perfect for looking at photos and watching YouTube, and with wireless charging you just set the phone down on a charging surface to power it up, no wires needed. While Nexus 4 is incredibly powerful under the hood, it also features the latest version of Jelly Bean, Android 4.2—the simplest and smartest version of Android yet. Starting with the camera, we've reinvented the photo experience with Photo Sphere, which lets you capture images that are literally larger than life. Snap shots up, down and in every direction to create stunning 360-degree immersive experiences that you can share on Google+ with friends and family—or you can add your Photo Sphere to Google Maps for the world to see. Android 4.2 brings other great goodies like Gesture Typing, which lets you glide your finger over the letters you want to type on the keyboard—it makes typing fast, fun and a whole lot simpler. Android 4.2 also adds support for wireless display so you can wirelessly watch movies, YouTube videos and play games right on your Miracast-compatible HDTV. Learn more about all of the new features in Android 4.2, Jelly Bean, here.
Google Now—even more useful We designed Google Now to make life simpler by giving you the right information at just the right time in easy to read cards, before you even ask. And the feedback has been awesome. So today we’re adding more cards that we hope you’ll find useful. Flight information, restaurant reservations, hotel confirmations and shipping details—how often have you found yourself wading through your email to get this information at the last moment? So next time you book a table for dinner, you’ll get a reminder with all the details without ever having to lift a finger. You’ll also get cards for nearby attractions, interesting photo spots, movies times at nearby theaters or concerts by your favorite artists. Nexus 7: Thin, light and now even more portable Nexus 7 brings you the best of Google–YouTube, Chrome, Gmail, Maps–and all the great content from Google Play in a slim, portable package that fits perfectly in your hand. To give you more room for all that great content you can now get Nexus 7 with 16GB ($199) or 32GB ($249) of storage. But we also wanted to make this highly portable tablet even more mobile. So we added HSPA+ mobile data. Nexus 7 is now also available with 32GB and HSPA+ mobile ($299), which can operate on more than 200 GSM providers worldwide, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Nexus 10: Powerful and shareable Nexus 10 is the ultimate tablet for watching movies or reading magazines. We wanted to build a premium entertainment device, so we partnered with Samsung to do just that. Nexus 10 is the highest resolution tablet on the planet with a 10.055" display at 2560-by-1600 (300ppi), that's over 4 million pixels right in your hands. It comes with a powerful battery that will get you up to nine hours of video playback and more than 500 hours of standby time. With a set of front-facing stereo speakers, you can watch movies right from your Nexus 10 and they simply sound awesome. But what makes Nexus 10 unique is that it's the first truly shareable tablet. With Android 4.2, you can add multiple users and switch between them instantly right from the lockscreen. We believe that everyone should have quick and easy access to their own stuff -- email, apps, bookmarks, and more. That way, everyone can have their own home screens, their own music, and even their own high scores. Google Play: More entertainment, more countries We’ve recently added a ton of great new entertainment to Google Play, such as movies and TV shows from Twentieth Century Fox. Earlier this year we expanded our service beyond movie rentals and now you can purchase movies and build a library of your favorites in Google Play. Today we’re bringing movie purchasing to more countries - Canada, the U.K., France, Spain and Australia. We’re also excited to announce two new partnerships. We’re now working with Time, Inc. to bring you even more magazines like InStyle, PEOPLE, TIME and others. And we’ve partnered with Warner Music Group who will be adding their full music catalog with new songs coming each day. We’re now working with all of the major record labels globally, and all the major U.S. magazine publishers, as well as many independent labels, artists and publishers. On November 13, we're bringing music on Google Play to Europe. Those of you in the U.K, France, Germany, Italy and Spain will be able to purchase music from the Google Play store and add up to 20,000 songs—for free—from your existing collection to the cloud for streaming to your Android devices or web browser. We’re also launching our new matching feature to streamline the process of uploading your personal music to Google Play. We’ll scan your music collection and any song we match against the Google Play catalog will be automatically added to your online library without needing to upload it, saving you time. This will be available in Europe at launch on November 13 and is coming to the U.S. soon after. This will all be for free—free storage of your music, free matching, free syncing across your devices and free listening. Great value We’ve always focused on building great devices at great value. And we think today’s devices offer the very best that money can buy. Here are more details on when and where you can pick up your next Nexus device:
Nexus 4: 8GB for $299; 16GB for $349; available unlocked and without a contract on 11/13 on the Google Play store in U.S., U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain and Canada. The 16GB version will also be available through T-Mobile for $199, with a 2-year contract (check here for more details).
Nexus 7: 16GB for $199 and 32GB for $249; available in U.S., U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Canada and Japan, and also through our retail partners Gamestop, Office Depot, Office Max, Staples and Walmart.
Nexus 7 with 32GB and mobile data: $299 and unlocked, on sale 11/13 in the Google Play store in the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain and Canada.
Nexus 10: 16GB for $399; 32GB for $499; available on 11/13 in the Google Play Store in the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Canada and Japan. You'll also be able to purchase the 32GB version in over 2,000 Walmart stores in the U.S.
A Nexus device is much more than simply a phone or tablet. It’s your connection to the best of Google—all of your stuff and entertainment, everywhere you go with no hassle. Now you have three new Nexus devices, a new improved version of Jelly Bean and more entertainment than ever before—all available on Google Play. The playground is open.
Posted by Andy Rubin, SVP, Mobile and Digital Content
Previously available only on select Android devices like Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, you can now download the official Google Calendar app for Android from Google Play. Google Calendar makes it easy for you to manage all your calendars in one place, including those from your Google accounts and other calendars synced to your Android device. Beyond supporting the basics such as creating, editing, deleting events and responding to invitations, the new Google Calendar app has extra features that help you manage your time and communication more easily:
Snooze events directly from a notification if you’re not quite ready and want to be reminded later.
Use predefined messages to send quick "I'll be late" updates to your event participants directly from the notifications or the event itself (of course, you can always write your own).
Pinch to zoom in and out of a day.
Set a home time zone to help you manage your time better when traveling.
In addition, we also expanded the sync period so you can review past events from up to one year ago directly on your device. Download Google Calendar on Google Play today for devices running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.3+) or Jellybean. Use the Google Feedback feature in the app to let us know how we can make Calendar work better for you!
Whether you’re looking for directions, checking email or sharing a picture with friends, apps are now an indispensable part of life. And if you’re using Android, it all starts with Google Play, home to 675,000 apps and games. That’s a lot of choice. We’ve now crossed 25 billion downloads from Google Play, and to celebrate we’re offering some great discounts for the next five days.
Every day you’ll be able to choose from a collection of apps from some of the world’s top developers including Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Rovio, runtastic, Full Fat and more. And all for just 25 cents. We’ll also be offering some special collections like 25 movies you must own, 25 banned books, 25 albums that changed the world and our 25 top selling magazines, all at special prices. Visit Google Play a little later today to check them out.
Twenty-five billion is more than twice the distance, in miles, that the Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled since its launch 35 years ago. It’s the amount of time, in minutes, that have passed since some of our earliest ancestors began to set foot in Europe. And now, thanks to all of you, it’s a Google Play milestone. We look forward to the next 25 billion.
Posted by Jamie Rosenberg, Director, Digital Content
Google Play Books enables you to read more than 4 million books on the go, and it's available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Korea and Japan. Today we’re bringing new features to the Books app to help you better explore your books and understand what you’re reading.
Places and dictionary School’s now in full swing and students are picking up the classics. Whether you're diving into Moby Dick or trying your hand at some Tolstoy, we want to make your reading experience as enjoyable and rewarding as possible. Starting today, when you come across an unfamiliar geographic location—a faraway city or distant mountain range—you can tap on the location to learn more about it. You’ll see an info card with a Google Map and the option to get more information by searching on Google or Wikipedia.
Similarly when you come across an unfamiliar word (say, abligurition or jentacular), just tap it for a quick definition.
Translation For those adventurous readers making their way through books in non-native languages, you can now easily translate words or phrases to and from a number of languages. Just select the text or word and use the button on the top action bar to indicate which language you’d like translate into.
Highlighting and notes If you happen to page through any of the books on my shelf, you’ll likely find highlighted passages and illegibly scrawled notes in the margins. Starting today, our app lets you highlight text and easily take notes. And because all your books live in the cloud, highlights and notes sync on your tablet, phone and the web.
You will also notice a new sepia reading theme (in addition to the current day and night themes), 2D sliding page turn animation, and lots of stability improvements. Finally, you can now read Japanese books in a vertical, right-to-left layout—and flip pages from right to left.
We hope these features make reading more enjoyable—and productive.
Posted by Xinxing Gu, Product Manager, Google Play
We built Android to be an open source mobile platform freely available to anyone wishing to use it. In 2008, Android was released under the Apache open source license and we continue to develop and innovate the platform under the same open source license -- it is available to everyone at: http://source.android.com. This openness allows device manufacturers to customize Android and enable new user experiences, driving innovation and consumer choice.
As the lead developer and shepherd of the open platform, we realize that we have a responsibility to app developers -- those who invested in the platform by adopting it and building applications specifically for Android. These developers each contribute to making the platform better -- because when developers support a platform with their applications, the platform becomes better and more attractive to consumers. As more developers build great apps for Android, more consumers are likely to buy Android devices because of the availability of great software content (app titles like Fruit Ninja or Google Maps). As more delighted consumers adopt Android phones and tablets, it creates a larger audience for app developers to sell more apps. The result is a strategy that is good for developers (they sell more apps), good for device manufacturers (they sell more devices) and good for consumers (they get more features and innovation).
In biological terms, this is sometimes referred to as an ecosystem. In economic terms, this is known as a virtuous cycle -- a set of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop. Each iteration of the cycle positively reinforces the previous one. These cycles will continue in the direction of their momentum until an external factor intervenes and breaks the cycle.
When we first contemplated Android and formed the Open Handset Alliance, we wanted to create an open virtuous cycle where all members of the ecosystem would benefit. We thought hard about what types of external factors could intervene to weaken the ecosystem as a whole. One important external factor we knew could do this was incompatibilities between implementations of Android. Let me explain:
Imagine a hypothetical situation where the platform on each phone sold was just a little bit different. Different enough where Google Maps would run normally on one phone but run terribly slow on another. Let's say, for sake of example, that Android implemented an API that put the phone to sleep for a fraction of a second to conserve battery life when nothing was moving on the screen. The API prototype for such a function might look like SystemClock.sleep(millis) where the parameter "millis" is the number of milliseconds to put the device to sleep for.
If one phone manufacturer implemented SystemClock.sleep() incorrectly, and interpreted the parameter as Seconds instead of Milliseconds, the phone would be put to sleep a thousand times longer than intended! This manufacturer’s phone would have a terrible time running Google Maps. If apps don’t run well across devices due to incompatibilities, consumers would leave the ecosystem, followed by developers. The end of the virtuous cycle.
We have never believed in a “one size fits all” strategy, so we found a way to enable differentiation for device manufactures while protecting developers and consumers from incompatibilities by offering a free "compatibility test suite" (CTS). CTS is a set of software tools that tests and exercises the platform to make sure that (for example) SystemClock.sleep(millis) actually puts the device to sleep for only milliseconds. Like Android, the test suite is freely available to everyone under the Apache open source license: http://source.android.com/compatibility/cts-intro.html
While Android remains free for anyone to use as they would like, only Android compatible devices benefit from the full Android ecosystem. By joining the Open Handset Alliance, each member contributes to and builds one Android platform -- not a bunch of incompatible versions. We’re grateful to the over 85 Open Handset Alliance members who have helped us build the Android ecosystem and continue to drive innovation at an incredible pace. Thanks to their support the Android ecosystem now has over 500 million Android-compatible devices and counting!
Posted by Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile and Digital Content
“Norwegian restaurants in New York City.” I can type that phrase fast, but I can say it even faster—and when I’m on the go, speed is what I’m looking for. With Voice Search, you can speak into your phone to get search results quickly and easily. Voice Search is already available in 29 languages, and today, we're bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users—bringing the total to 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. In fact, 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of:
Basque
Bulgarian
Catalan
European Portuguese
Finnish
Galician
Hungarian
Icelandic
Norwegian
Romanian
Serbian
Slovak
Swedish
Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced.
This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.
As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.
Since we released the first version of Google Wallet, the app that makes your phone your wallet, we’ve made it available on six phones from Sprint and Virgin Mobile, as well as the new Nexus 7 tablet. We’ve also partnered with more than 25 national retailers, and thanks to MasterCard PayPass, you can pay with your phone at more than 200,000 retail locations across the U.S.
Today we’re releasing a new, cloud-based version of the Google Wallet app that supports all credit and debit cards from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover. Now, you can use any card when you shop in-store or online with Google Wallet. With the new version, you can also remotely disable your mobile wallet app from your Google Wallet account on the web.
A wallet with all your credit and debit cards To save a card to Google Wallet, just enter the number into the mobile app, online wallet, or Google Play when making purchases. When you shop in-store, you can use Google Wallet in conjunction with your selected credit or debit card for purchases (more info here). Shortly after making a payment, you’ll see a transaction record on the phone with the merchant name and dollar amount. You can now view a history of all your in-store and online purchases from the online wallet.
To support all credit and debit cards, we changed our technical approach to storing payment cards. The Google Wallet app now stores your payment cards on highly secure Google servers, instead of in the secure storage area on your phone. A wallet ID (virtual card number) is stored in the secure storage area of the phone, and this is used to facilitate transactions at the point of sale. Google instantly charges your selected credit or debit card. This new approach speeds up the integration process for banks so they can add their cards to the Wallet app in just a few weeks. Banks that want to help their customers save cards to Google Wallet, including their custom card art, can apply here — there is no cost.
A wallet you can lock — and remotely disableWe take security very seriously and have always had a dedicated Google Wallet PIN to prevent others from making payments with your Google Wallet. And as always, we encourage Google Wallet customers to set up the phone’s screen lock -- as an extra layer of protection.
Today, we’re adding a Google Wallet security feature that makes it possible for you to remotely disable your mobile wallet on a lost phone. It’s easy. If you lose your phone, just visit the ‘Devices’ section in the online wallet and select the phone with the mobile wallet you wish to disable. When you successfully disable your wallet on a device, Google Wallet will not authorize any transactions attempted with that device*. If the Google Wallet online service can establish a connection to your device, it will remotely reset your mobile wallet, clearing it of card and transaction data. There is no way you can do that with your leather wallet.
Posted by Robin Dua, Head of Product Management, Google Wallet
* For now, Google Prepaid Cards and some Citi MasterCard cards will remain active until Google Wallet can remotely connect and reset your mobile wallet.
Last year at Google I/O, we talked about momentum, mobile and more. This year, we’re picking up right where we left off. More than 400 million Android devices have now been activated—up from 100 million last June. And twelve new Android devices are activated every every second—that’s more than 1 million a day. Today, we’re rolling out a new version of Android called Jelly Bean, adding more entertainment to Google Play, and introducing two powerful—yet distinctly different Nexus devices to bring you the best of Google.
Jelly Bean: simple, beautiful and beyond smart Jelly Bean builds on top of Ice Cream Sandwich. It makes everything smoother, faster and more fluid. For example, notifications are now more dynamic: if you’re late for a meeting or missed a call, you can email or call directly from notifications. The keyboard is smarter and more accurate, and can predict your next word. And voice typing is faster, working even when you don’t have a data connection.
We’ve redesigned search from the ground up in Jelly Bean, with a new user interface and faster, more natural Voice Search. You can type your query or simply ask Google a question. Google can speak back to you, delivering a precise answer, powered by the Knowledge Graph, if it knows one, in addition to a list of search results.
Today’s smart devices still rely on you to do pretty much everything—that is, until now. Google Now is a new feature that gets you just the right information at just the right time. It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, or your favorite team's score as they’re playing. There’s no digging required: cards appear at the moment you need them most.
Starting in mid-July, we’ll start rolling out over-the-air updates to Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and Nexus S, and we’ll also release Jelly Bean to open source.
Google Play: more entertainment Google Play is your digital entertainment destination, with more than 600,000 apps and games plus music, movies and books. It’s entirely cloud-based, which means all of your content is always available across all of your devices. Today our store is expanding to include magazines. We’ve been working with leading publishers Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and more to offer magazines like House Beautiful, Men’s Health, Shape and WIRED.
Now, you can also purchase movies in addition to renting them. And we’re adding television shows on Google Play—in fact, we’re adding thousands of episodes of broadcast and cable TV shows, like "Revenge," "Parks & Recreation" and "Breaking Bad," from some of the top studios, like ABC Studios, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures. You can play back movies and TV shows on all your Android devices, through Google Play on the web, and on YouTube, and soon we’ll bring the experience to Google TV devices.
Movie purchases, TV shows and magazines are available today on play.google.com, and will roll out to Google Play on devices over the coming days.
Nexus 7: powerful, portable and designed for Google Play All of this great Google Play content comes to life on Nexus 7, a powerful new tablet with a vibrant, 7” 1280x800 HD display. The Tegra-3 chipset, with a quad-core CPU and 12-core GPU, makes everything, including games, extremely fast. And best of all, it’s only 340 grams, lighter than most tablets out there. Nexus 7 was built to bring you the best of Google in the palm of your hand. Hang out with up to 10 friends on Google+ using the front-facing camera, browse the web blazingly fast with Chrome and, of course, crank through your emails with Gmail.
Nexus 7 comes preloaded with some great entertainment, including the movie "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," the book “The Bourne Dominion,” magazines like Condé Nast Traveler and Popular Science, and songs from bands like Coldplay and the Rolling Stones. We’ve also included a $25 credit to purchase your favorite movies, books and more from Google Play, for a limited time. Nexus 7 is available for preorder today from Google Play in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, and starts at $199 in the U.S. It will start shipping mid-July.
Nexus Q: It’s a sphere! It's great to be able to take your entertainment with you wherever you go, but sometimes you want to ditch the headphones and enjoy music with friends and family. So we’re introducing Nexus Q, which combines the power of Android and Google Play to easily stream music and video in your home—all controlled by an Android phone or tablet. Designed and engineered by Google, Nexus Q is a small sphere that plugs into the best speakers and TV in your house. It’s the first-ever social streaming device—like a cloud-connected jukebox where everyone brings their own music to the party. Available first in the U.S., you can preorder Nexus Q today from Google Play for $299, and it will ship mid-July.
If you own one of the 400 million Android devices out there, you already know that it’s much more than simply a phone or tablet. It’s your connection to the best of Google—all of your stuff and entertainment, everywhere you go. Now you have a new version of Android, more entertainment and a growing portfolio of Nexus devices to choose from—all available in Google Play. The playground is open.
Posted by Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile and Digital Content
The statues on the front lawn of the Android building got a new friend this afternoon...
Also, you may have noticed we did a little redecorating. We’ve been asking you what content you wanted to see more of on the Google Mobile blog, and the answer was quite clear: more Android! This blog, in addition to the +Android page on Google+, will be your place to find all the latest news from the Android team.
See you tomorrow at I/O!
Posted by: Hugo Barra, Director of Product Management, Android
Wherever you are, Google Maps for Android helps you get around and discover new places. Today with the 6.7 release we will help you find offers from nearby businesses in the U.S. -- everything from restaurants, to salons, to city tours. Also, we’ve added indoor walking directions in the U.S. and Japan, plus 360-degree interior photos of businesses, to help you intrepidly make your way indoors and out.
Discover great offers near you Today, in the U.S. only, we’re launching a way to discover nearby Google Offers in Google Maps for Android. To see great deals near you, tap on “Maps” to open the dropdown menu and then tap on “Offers.” If you see something you like you can click on it to learn more. Some Google Offers can be purchased and saved for later while others are immediately available for free. With free Google Offers, press “Use now” to redeem instantly or “Save for later” for future use. You can also opt-in to receive notifications in the app when there are offers near you.
Explore the great indoors with walking directions and Business Photos. Since we launched indoor maps in the U.S. and Japan in Google Maps for Android last November, business owners have been adding their floor plans to our maps with Google Maps Floor Plans. Today, we are launching indoor walking directions for participating venues in these countries. This will help you get directions not only to a building’s front door, but also through those doors to the places where you want to go inside.
Get Indoor walking directions in indoor maps (photo: Macy’s San Francisco)
With Google Business Photos you can explore panoramic photos of the inside of a business from the palm of your hand. Now you can get a feel for a restaurant or store inside as well as outside using Street View technologies. To access these 360-degree panoramic views, look for the “See Inside” section on the Place page of select businesses.
See the interior of participating businesses with Business Photos (photo: Toyjoy)
Download Google Maps 6.7 for Android from Google Play, and use it as your trusted guide to help you find and discover places to eat, shop and play! You can also learn more about other great features on the Google Maps YouTube channel.
Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager for Google Maps for Android
We started shipping Nexus phones more than two years ago to give you a pure Google experience and access to the latest Android updates. Today, we’ve started selling Galaxy Nexus (HSPA+) from a new Devices section in the Google Play web store, so you can quickly and easily purchase an unlocked version of the phone. We want to give you a place to purchase Nexus devices that work really well with your digital entertainment.
Galaxy Nexus by Samsung runs the latest Android software, Ice Cream Sandwich, with Google mobile services, Google Play and new features like Android Beam and Google+ mobile hangouts. It also offers a 4.65” HD Super AMOLED display that’s perfect for watching movies, playing games or reading books on the go.
First available in the U.S., Galaxy Nexus costs $399 and arrives at your door unlocked, without a carrier commitment or contract. You can use it on the GSM network of your choice, including T-Mobile and AT&T. It also comes pre-installed with the Google Wallet app which lets you easily make purchases and redeem offers with a tap of your phone. Best of all, we'll give you a $10 credit to get you started with your new mobile wallet.
We’ve come a long way since the first Android devices started hitting shelves three and a half years ago and since the launch of the first Nexus device. More than 300 million Android devices have been activated globally. We’ve worked with developers and content partners to launch Google Play, offering more than 500,000 apps, millions of songs and books, and thousands of movies. And we’ve implemented new customer support services to improve the purchasing experience on Google Play. We’ve taken all of this into consideration in designing Devices on Google Play. We hope to bring it to more countries soon.
Posted by Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile and Digital Content
In December we launched Google Currents, an app for Android and iOS devices that lets you explore online magazines and other content with the swipe of a finger. We’re thrilled by how many readers and publishers are using the app in the U.S.—nearly 400 publisher editions and over 14,000 self-produced editions are now available.
After the U.S. launch, the top features readers requested were to make the app available internationally and to allow content to sync quickly. We’ve heard you, and today we’re making Google Currents 1.1 available around the world. Hundreds of U.S. editions are now readable in your preferred language with a new publisher-selected translation feature, and local publishers can begin adding their content to the catalog through Google Currents Producer. Plus, a new dynamic sync feature improves your reading experience with fresh content wherever you are.
Whatever you’re interested in—whether it’s science (Popular Science, Scientific American, Space.com), sports (Bleacher Report, CBS Sports, Surfer), business (Harvard Business Review, Inc.), celebrities (Celebuzz, HollywoodLife, Now magazine, TMZ), health & wellness (Men’s Health, Yoga Journal), design (Colossal, Dwell) or news (The Atlantic, PRI, Slate)—it’s easy to find a great edition to read in Google Currents.
Read in more places With this update, we’ve made Google Currents available globally, wherever apps are available on Google Play and the Apple App Store. International publishers, using Google Currents Producer, can now begin adding local content for an international audience, choosing where to make it available globally and whether to enable auto-translation. For example The Guardian in the UK, LaStampa in Italy, Financial Times Deutschland in Germany, ABC News in Australia, Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland and Hindustan Times in India have already started publishing editions with local content. Readers can also add their favorite local blogs which are instantly converted into Currents editions.
Read in your favorite language To help you enjoy content in your preferred language, we’ve integrated Google Translate into Google Currents. Just press the globe icon while reading an edition, and you can automatically translate that edition to one of 38 supported languages. So it’s easier than ever to keep up with Italian and German sports (Corriere dello Sport, kicker.de), or read Scientific American, in your preferred language.
Read fresh content, automatically With our new dynamic sync feature, you’ll always have fresh content to read. As you open each edition, new content is dynamically delivered, using a minimum of your phone or tablet's battery, bandwidth and storage. Those of you who travel on planes and trains can choose which editions you would like fully packaged for offline reading, including images.
Google Currents is now available for download on Google Play and in the Apple App Store, wherever apps are available. Whether you’re a reader or a publisher, we hope that Google Currents helps you easily experience the best content on the web, now in even more languages.
Every day, millions of people turn to Google Maps for Android for free, voice-guided GPS navigation to guide them to their destination. So far, Navigation on Google Maps for Android has provided 50 billion kilometers of turn-by-turn directions, the equivalent of 130,000 trips to the moon, 334 trips to the sun, 10 trips to Neptune or 0.005 light years! When getting to your destination matters most, Google Maps for Android will get you there:
A new look for Navigation on Android 4.0+ phones In today’s release of Google Maps 6.5 for Android we’ve redesigned the Navigation home screen in Android 4.0+ to make it easier to enter a new destination or select from recent and favorite locations by swiping left or right.
Left: New Navigation home screen Right: Navigation in Google Maps for Android
Crisper, faster maps for high pixel density devices If your device has a high pixel density screen, such as those on Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S II, Droid Razr and others, you’ll now get higher resolution map tiles that take better advantage of the pixels-per-inch on your screen. The result is a crisper, less cluttered map that is easier to read:
Left: Previous style Right:New style in Google Maps 6.5 for Android
Compare our new map on the right to the previous map on the left. The road network is easier to see, less obstructed by labels, and has more color contrast. At more zoomed-in levels, you’ll notice a more controlled amount of maps labels to avoid cluttering the map and blocking out street names. The new style also helps maps react faster to panning, zooming, and twisting.
You'll start seeing the new style as you navigate around new areas on the map; however, you can see these changes immediately by clearing your cache from the Maps settings.
Pick your preferred public transit mode and route option Google Maps 6.5 for Android now lets you choose to prioritize a particular transit mode (such as the bus or subway) and route option (like taking the recommended route, one with fewer transfers or one with less walking). Whether you just need to get somewhere as fast as possible, or you want to avoid the risk of a missed connection or you prefer not to tire your legs, you can get the transit directions that best suit you. Transit directions and schedules are available for 475 cities around the world.
Since we launched Google Voice back in 2009, we’ve supported visual voicemail so you could open the Google Voice app, see all your voicemails with text transcripts, and play them on-demand. But sometimes when I get a missed call, I don’t want to jump between my call log and the Google Voice app to see who has called me and what message they left.
So, today, we’re updating our mobile app so you can view and listen to your voicemails on demand directly from the call log on your Android phone. Your voicemails will appear alongside your outgoing, incoming, and missed calls in your phone’s call log and you can just simply touch them to play them. You can slow down the playback of the message which is great for when someone is telling you their callback number, or you even speed playback up, so you can quickly listen to longer messages.
To turn this feature on, download the latest app from Google Play and check “Voicemail display” under settings. This new feature requires Android 4.0+.
Entertainment is supposed to be fun. But in reality, getting everything to work can be the exact opposite—moving files between your computers, endless syncing across your devices, and wires…lots of wires. Today we’re eliminating all that hassle with Google Play, a digital entertainment destination where you can find, enjoy and share your favorite music, movies, books and apps on the web and on your Android phone or tablet. Google Play is entirely cloud-based so all your music, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available to you, and you never have to worry about losing them or moving them again.
With Google Play you can:
Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks
Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games
Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks
Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles
Starting today, Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will become part of Google Play. On your Android phone or tablet, we’ll be upgrading the Android Market app to the Google Play Store app over the coming days. Your videos, books and music apps (in countries where they are available) will also be upgraded to Google Play Movies, Google Play Books and Google Play Music apps. The music, movies, books and apps you’ve purchased will continue to be available to you through Google Play—simply log in with your Google account like always.
To celebrate, we’ll be offering a different album, book, video rental and Android app at a special price each day for the next week in our “7 Days to Play” sale. In the U.S., today’s titles include the collection of top 40 hits Now That's What I Call Music 41, the popular game Where's My Water, the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the movie Puncture for just 25 cents each. In addition, you'll find great collections of hip-hop, rock and country albums for $3.99 all week, detective novels from $2.99, some of our editorial team's favorite movies from 99 cents, and our favorite apps from 49 cents.
In the U.S., music, movies, books and Android apps are available in Google Play. In Canada and the U.K., we’ll offer movies, books and Android apps; in Australia, books and apps; and in Japan, movies and apps. Everywhere else, Google Play will be the new home for Android apps. Our long-term goal is to roll out as many different types of content as possible to people around the world, and we’ll keep adding new content to keep it fresh.
To learn more, head over to play.google.com/about or keep up with the latest on our Google+ page. If you’re headed to Austin later this week for South by Southwest, come to the Google Village to see Google Play in action. We can’t wait for you to try Google Play and experience a simpler way to manage your entertainment.
Posted by Jamie Rosenberg, Director of Digital Content
Each and every day, we are humbled by the trajectory of Android and our partners.
With a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250%, 850,000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million. These numbers are a testament to the break-neck speed of innovation that defines the Android ecosystem.
Last year at Mobile World Congress (MWC), we announced that there were more than 150,000 apps in Android Market. That number tripled to more than 450,000 apps today, with over one billion app downloads happening every month. Think about the astonishing number of songs Shazam’ed, places Qype’ed and foursquare mayorships! To celebrate the hard work and success of our developer community, we’ve built special “app pods” into our Android stand at MWC. Many of these featured apps demonstrate the latest Android innovations, such as Android Beam, which lets you share content like web pages, videos, directions, and apps—just by touching two Android phones back to back.
The Android Stand on the eve of Mobile World Congress 2012
If you walk around the Android stand, it’s also evident that our hardware partners are thriving. There are 100+ devices on display at the conveyor belt bar, which is just a small portion of the 800+ Android devices that have launched to date. And what better sign of innovation than the Bling Bot—powered by the >Android ADK—which can bedazzle your Galaxy Nexus backplate with perfect precision.
We’re just getting started at Mobile World Congress, so keep checking android.com/mwc and the +Android page on Google+ for updates.
Posted by Andy Rubin, SVP, Mobile and Digital Content
As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s Sydney office this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles, and editing documents—just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!
We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the Google Docs app for Android. We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in.
We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold something important. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:
If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit Google Docs on Google+.
In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we're introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.
Speed With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.
Simplicity Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web. One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier. And as with Chrome on desktop, we built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’).
Sign in You can now bring your personalized Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:
View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer (also signed into Chrome)—picking up exactly where you left off.
Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, you'll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.
Sync bookmarks: Conveniently access your favorite sites no matter where you are or which device you’re using.
Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Finally, we look forward to working closely with the developer community to create a better web on a platform that defines mobile.
The last year has been a phenomenal one for the Android ecosystem. Device activations grew 250% year-on-year, and the total number of app downloads from Android Market topped 11 billion. As the platform continues to grow, we’re focused on bringing you the best new features and innovations - including in security.
Adding a new layer to Android security Today we’re revealing a service we’ve developed, codenamed Bouncer, which provides automated scanning of Android Market for potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience of Android Market or requiring developers to go through an application approval process.
The service performs a set of analyses on new applications, applications already in Android Market, and developer accounts. Here’s how it works: once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware and trojans. It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags. We actually run every application on Google’s cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior. We also analyze new developer accounts to help prevent malicious and repeat-offending developers from coming back.
Android malware downloads are decreasing The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market. This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise. While it’s not possible to prevent bad people from building malware, the most important measurement is whether those bad applications are being installed from Android Market - and we know the rate is declining significantly.
Android makes malware less potent In addition to using new services to help prevent malware, we designed Android from the beginning to make mobile malware less disruptive. In the PC model, malware has more potential to misuse your information. We learned from this approach, designing Android for Internet-connected devices. Some of Android’s core security features are:
Sandboxing: The Android platform uses a technique called “sandboxing” to put virtual walls between applications and other software on the device. So, if you download a malicious application, it can't access data on other parts of your phone and its potential harm is drastically limited.
Permissions: Android provides a permission system to help you understand the capabilities of the apps you install, and manage your own preferences. That way, if you see a game unnecessarily requests permission to send SMS, for example, you don’t need to install it.
Malware removal: Android is designed to prevent malware from modifying the platform or hiding from you, so it can be easily removed if your device is affected. Android Market also has the capability of remotely removing malware from your phone or tablet, if required.
No security approach is foolproof, and added scrutiny can often lead to important improvements. Our systems are getting better at detecting and eliminating malware every day, and we continue to invite the community to work with us to keep Android safe.
