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Nexus: The best of Google, now in three sizes
October 29, 2012
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 of 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 U.S.
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 the 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 the 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 more than 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
Update 2:30pm:
This post has been updated
with the availability of Nexus 10 at Walmart.
Making the cloud more accessible with Chrome and Android
February 28, 2013
If you’re a blind or low-vision user, you know that working in the cloud poses unique challenges. Our accessibility team had an opportunity to address some of those challenges at the 28th annual
CSUN International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference
this week. While there, we led a workshop on how we’ve been improving the accessibility of Google technologies. For all those who weren’t at the conference, we want to share just a few of those improvements and updates:
Chrome and Google Apps
Chrome OS now supports a high-quality text-to-speech voice (starting with U.S. English). We’ve also made spoken feedback, along with screen magnification and high-contrast mode available out-of-the-box to make Chromebook and Chromebox setup easier for users with accessibility needs.
Gmail now has a consistent navigation interface, backed by HTML5 ARIA, which enables blind and low-vision users to effectively navigate using a set of keyboard commands.
It’s now much easier to access content in your Google Drive using a keyboard—for example, you can navigate a list of files with just the arrow keys. In Docs, you can access features using the keyboard, with a new way to search menu and toolbar options. New keyboard shortcuts and verbalization improvements also make it easier to use Docs, Sheets and Slides with a screenreader.
The
latest stable version of Chrome
, released last week, includes support for the Web Speech API, which developers can use to integrate speech recognition capabilities into their apps. At CSUN, our friends from
Bookshare
demonstrated how they use this new functionality to deliver
ReadNow
—a fully integrated ebook reader for users with print disabilities.
Finally, we released a new
Help Center Guide
specifically for blind and low-vision users to ease the transition to using Google Apps.
Android
We added Braille support to Android 4.1; since then, Braille support has been expanded on Google Drive for Android, making it easier to read and edit your documents. You can also use Talkback with Docs and Sheets to edit on the go.
With Gesture Mode in Android 4.1, you can reliably navigate the UI using touch and swipe gestures in combination with speech output.
Screen magnification is now built into
Android 4.2
—just enable “Magnification gestures,” then triple tap to enter full screen magnification.
The latest release of
TalkBack
(available on Play soon) includes several highly-requested features like structured browsing of web content and the ability to easily suspend/resume TalkBack via an easy-to-use radial menu.
These updates to Chrome, Google Apps, and Android will help create a better overall experience for our blind and low-vision users, but there’s still room for improvement. Looking ahead, we’re focused on the use of accessibility APIs that will make it easier for third-party developers to create accessible web applications, as well as pushing the state of the art forward with technologies like speech recognition and text-to-speech. We’re looking forward to working with the rest of the industry to make computers and the web more accessible for everyone.
Posted by T.V. Raman, Engineering Lead, Google Accessibility
Google Keep—Save what’s on your mind
March 20, 2013
Every day we all see, hear or think of things we need to remember. Usually we grab a pad of sticky-notes, scribble a reminder and put it on the desk, the fridge or the relevant page of a magazine. Unfortunately, if you’re like me you probably often discover that the desk, fridge or magazine wasn’t such a clever place to leave the note after all...it’s rarely where you need it when you need it.
To solve this problem we’ve created Google Keep. With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand.
If it’s more convenient to speak than to type that’s fine—Keep transcribes voice memos for you automatically. There’s super-fast search to find what you’re looking for and when you’re finished with a note you can archive or delete it.
Changing priorities isn’t a problem: just open Keep on your Android phone or tablet (there’s a widget so you can have Keep front and center all the time) and drag your notes around to reflect what matters. You can choose the color for each note too.
Pro tip: for adding thoughts quickly without unlocking your device there's a lock screen widget (on devices running Android 4.2+).
Google Keep
is available on Google Play for devices running Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich and above. You can access, edit and create new notes on the web at
http://drive.google.com/keep
and in the coming weeks you'll be able to do the same directly from Google Drive.
Posted by Katherine Kuan, Software Engineer
Translate where you need it: in any app, offline, and wherever you see Chinese
May 11, 2016
Of the 500 million+ people who use Google Translate, more than 9 in 10 live outside the U.S. We've talked with thousands of you in India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Thailand to learn what works and what doesn’t—and today we’re rolling out some big improvements.
First, say hello to
Tap to Translate
on Android. We know millions of you painstakingly copy-paste text between Google Translate and other apps. Now, you can just copy the text of a chat, comment, song lyric, etc. in whichever app you’re using, and a translation will pop up right there—no need to switch apps:
Watch the video
to learn more. Tap to Translate works for
all 103 of Google Translate’s languages
on any Android phone running Jellybean (4.2) and above.
Next,
Offline Mode
now works on iOS, and joins Android in using small offline packages. We know that many of you found the previous packages too big to download on unreliable data connections or to keep on your phone’s limited storage. That’s why we shrunk them by 90 percent, to a much more manageable 25 MB each.
Offline Mode is easy to set up: Just tap the arrow next to the language name to download the package for that language, and then you’ll be ready to do text translations whether you’re online or not—and it works with Tap to Translate too. We’ve just added a Filipino language pack, bringing our
total number of offline languages
to 52.
Finally, we’re adding
Word Lens in Chinese.
It’s our 29th language for instant visual translation, and it reads both to and from English, for both
Simplified and Traditional Chinese
. Try it on menus, signs, packages, and other printed text. As with all Word Lens languages, it works offline.
With Tap to Translate, improved Offline Mode, and Word Lens in Chinese, we hope you’ll find the latest version of Google Translate a helpful companion. These updates are rolling out over the next few days.
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUxnF0FcUkPM0fhG39Oh0FLl3qrymS8MeScV7SggcnO8oBq-UwBzm4rjrRs9QB6FFu9uQ5UTJWgH8bKEJAyAbkBNZUBI5HtXdaRDOBiOCfBWalZo-maNMMyunRQE-I8WBs7xN3/s1600/Milk_Chinese-English.gif
Barak Turovsky
Product Lead
Google Translate
Building the search engine of the future, one baby step at a time
August 8, 2012
Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as understanding exactly what you mean and giving you back exactly what you want. It’s very much like the computer I dreamt about as a child growing up in India, glued to our black-and-white TV for every episode of Star Trek. I imagined a future where a starship computer would be able to answer any question I might ask, instantly. Today, we’re closer to that dream than I ever thought possible during my working life—and here are some of the latest steps we’re taking today to make search even more intelligent:
1. Understanding the world
In May we
launched the Knowledge Graph
, our database of more than 500 million real-world people, places and things with 3.5 billion attributes and connections among them. The feedback has been phenomenally positive and we want to extend this feature to people outside the U.S. So starting today, you’ll see Knowledge Graph results across every English-speaking country in the world. If you’re in Australia and search for [chiefs], you’ll get the rugby team—its players, results and history.
We’ll also use this intelligence to help you find the right result more quickly when your search may have different meanings. For example, if you search for [rio], you might be interested in the Brazilian city, the recent animated movie or the casino in Vegas. Thanks to the Knowledge Graph, we can now give you these different suggestions of real-world entities in the search box as you type:
Finally, the best answer to your question is not always a single entity, but a list or group of connected things. It’s quite challenging to pull these lists automatically from the web. But we’re now beginning to do just that. So when you search for [california lighthouses], [hurricanes in 2008] or [famous female astronomers], we’ll show you a list of these things across the top of the page. And by combining our Knowledge Graph with the collective wisdom of the web, we can even provide more subjective lists like [best action movies of the 2000s] or [things to do in paris]. If you click on an item, you can then explore the result more deeply on the web:
So far we can produce hundreds of thousands of lists involving millions of items, and we’ll keep growing to match your curiosity. A quick preview:
2. Putting your info at your fingertips
Sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email. We think you shouldn’t have to be your own mini-search engine to find the most useful information—it should just work. A search is a search, and we want our results to be truly universal. So we’re developing a way to find this information for you that’s useful and unobtrusive, and we’d love your
feedback
. Starting today, we’re opening up a limited trial where you can
sign up
to get information from your Gmail right from the search box.
So if you’re planning a biking trip to Tahoe, you might see relevant emails from friends about the best bike trails, or great places to eat on the right hand side of the results page. If it looks relevant you can then expand the box to read the emails:
We’re working on some even more useful features. For example, if you search for [my flights] we will organize flight confirmation emails for any upcoming trips in a beautifully easy-to-read way right on the search results page:
3. Understanding your intent
Often the most natural way to ask a question is by asking aloud. So we’ve combined our speech recognition expertise, understanding of language and the Knowledge Graph so that Voice Search can better interpret your questions and sometimes speak the answers back as full sentences. This has been available on Android for a few weeks and people love it. It’ll soon be available on your
iPhone or iPad
(iOS version 4.2+).
You just need to tap the microphone icon and ask your question, the same way you’d ask a friend. For example, ask “What movies are playing this weekend?” and you’ll see your words streamed back to you quickly as you speak. Then Google will show you a list of the latest movies in theaters near you, with schedules and even trailers. It works for everything from celebrity factoids to the height of Kilamanjaro and more. When Google can supply a direct answer to your question, you’ll get a spoken response too.
These are baby steps, but important ones on our way to building the search engine of the future—one that is much more intelligent and useful than it was just a few years ago. It’s a very exciting time to be working in this field.
Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP Google Search
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