It seems that 2017 is a large year for Google. In fact, CEO Sundar Pichai rattled off numbers to show how much growth the technology giant is amassing—Android is now being used on more than two billion active devices globally, and numbers are continuously coming in.
Which is why the atmosphere at the three-day Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, is said to be electric. All sorts of announcements, from the already-known Android O to the surprisingly useful Google Lens, dropped bomb after bomb—and we’ve compiled the one which took away the breaths from the crowd.
Hello, Android O and Android Go
The successor to Android Nougat still doesn’t have a name (and most are still shipping “Oreo”), but Android O is now available in beta. It’s still an early stage, which means there are still more bugs on the run, but if you’re itching for the next big thing such as picture-in-picture or improved notifications via “channels,” you can now enroll a compatible Nexus or Pixel device for this.
Accompanying Android O is Android Go, an optimized operating system built on Android O and is especially designed for entry-level devices in data-restricted environments. Smartphones and tablets having only up to 512MB of RAM can actually run this, complete with support for lightweight apps specifically designed for Android Go, such as YouTube Go. This is still an internal project to date, but Google unveiling the plan somehow concretizes this—and further weaves Android into our daily lives.
Kotlin support
Developers who want a break from Java can now rejoice. Kotlin, a robust programming language that is fully interoperable with Java, is now supported on Android O. This is a major breakthrough for programmers and enthusiasts alike, as Kotlin is the first language to be added to Android since its beginning.
VR minus all the attachments
Google’s Daydream, the virtual reality platform which requires a smartphone, is still relatively new and yet it’s now becoming second-in-line. All thanks to talks of standalone VR headsets or wearables that don’tt require a companion smartphone to run a virtual environment. This standalone VR employs “WorldSense” built from Tango to track virtual space, and the tech giant is confident that its partners including HTC and Lenovo can live up to this vision. There’s no word on release dates yet, but with the clout the company exercises, we expect the wait won’t be too long.
Beefing up Google apps
There are some pretty exciting news when it comes to Google’s host of apps, too. Google Photos, for one, will now support Suggested Sharing, or the ability to share snaps to people included in the pic. Then, there’s also Shared Libraries, or an album where members can add photos to a single place. Shared Libraries is said to respect privacy, too—users can filter what to share based on time or things present in the picture. For those who prefer hard copies, Photos also offers printed photo books with prices starting at US$9.99 or roughly P500. Future support is also expected for the smart removal of any unwanted portion of a picture, say the fence in your child’s baseball photo, with the help of new computer-vision tech (more on that later).
YouTube, on the other hand, will soon support 360-degree videos in its TV app. Its paid promoted message system, Super Chat, is also getting a boost: a new API is set to trigger real-world actions from viewers in the chat—such as turning on or off the lights in a studio.
Google Home, Google Assistant, and Google Lens
Once upon a time, Google meant an unfathomable number (10 to the 100th power for you, number geeks). Now, it means the connected world as we fathom it, thanks to the company’s set of software and devices such as the speaker Home and the personal digital Assistant. Now, a new brother is in the mix: Google Lens.
But first things first. Smart speaker Google Home gets new features such as control for HBO Now, Hulu, SoundCloud, Deezer, and many more. The Home’s Bluetooth radio is also now open for access, making it available to be just like any other speaker. Home can now also direct correct information to the correct connected screen, such as Chromecast-connected TV or your mobile phone. Aside from these, one of the new big features is what the company calls Proactive Assistance. Google Home will identify important information you might want to know and as the name suggests, it will light up on its own to let you know that it has something to tell you.
Google Assistant, on the other hand, is coming to iOS as a standalone app, going out of the box to meet Siri toe-to-toe.
A new addition to Assistant is Google Lens. Similar to Samsung Bixby, the Lens is a sight-based companion to the Assistant. It can pull relevant content from the internet just by pointing the camera to a storefront, a poster, or even an object. Essentially, through Lens, the smartphone camera will be able to understand and analyze what it sees.
The Google I/O event remains to be a large party-like experience plus all the bells and whistles of what could be the next big thing. This year didn’t disappoint; in fact, it left us all drooling for the roll-out.
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