Google Archive

It turns out that when you make an unconventional phone that lets you swap out its core components, it can be hard to make that same phone stay put together - at least compared to today's smartphones. Google's Project Ara team has tweeted an explanation for why its pilot test plans were reworked and delayed: the current model wasn't faring well when dropped. "No more electropermanent magnets," the team tweeted.

While we count on Wi-Fi more than ever to be entertained, productive, and stay connected, we're streaming and sharing in new ways our old routers were never built to handle. So today, with our partner TP-LINK, we're launching OnHub, a different kind of router for a new way to Wi-Fi. Instead of headaches and spotty connections, OnHub gives you Wi-Fi that's fast, secure, and easy to use.

That wasn't all. Vestager (pronounced Vestayer) announced a new investigation into whether Google had abused its dominant position with the Android operating system for smartphones. She suggested other cases were possible, too - regarding Google’s expansion into the markets for local search, maps, images, travel, etc. For Google, this was a nightmare portending years of scrutiny, a fine of up to $6 billion, and edicts that could forever limit the effectiveness of its products. The company must file a response to Vestige's "statement of objections" by Aug. 17.

In the span of just 15 months, Google somehow lost Europe.

Google may soon offer a new version of its Google Glass wearable later this fall. A new report says that the company will keep the hype down on this release, as it plans to offer it to businesses working in healthcare, manufacturing, and energy.

No, I think the real value of Glass lies in an entirely different area Google seems to have been ignoring so far. It's a far less sexy area than the world of designer glasses and paragliders, but one that offers far, far more potential: 'traditional' workplaces. Construction. Road works. Law enforcement. The military. Farmers. Firefighters. Plumbers. Roofers. You name it. People who work with their hands in potentially dangerous environments, who can use the heads-up display for at-a-glance, crucial information while out in the field.

With Google Drive, you can keep all your important files in one place, then open them with your choice of apps and devices. Building on this open approach, we recently made it possible to launch your favorite desktop applications directly from Google Drive. And today we're taking it a step further by bringing Google Drive to Microsoft Office. Using the new Google Drive plug-in, people using Office for Windows can now open their Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents stored in Drive, then save any changes back to Drive once they're done.

Google Inc.'s life sciences group has created a health-tracking wristband that could be used in clinical trials and drug tests, giving researchers or physicians minute-by-minute data on how patients are faring.

The experimental device, developed within the company's Google X research division, can measure pulse, heart rhythm and skin temperature, and also environmental information like light exposure and noise levels. It won't be marketed as a consumer device, said Andy Conrad, head of the life sciences team at Google.

One of the big complaints about Chrome currently is that it's a battery hog, especially on Mac where Safari seems to do better.

The team has been working on addressing this; here are some cases that have recently been improved on trunk.

Such attention to detail used to be Apple's thing. Today, that distinction falls to Google. Unveiled last year, Material Design - Google's evolving design language for phones, tablets, and desktop - offers relentless consistency in interactions; invisible rules that govern everything, so that every app feels familiar; and beauty in the service of function. It's why so many designers will tell you, as they've told me, "I just like Android better." Whereas iOS is still inching along without improving much, Google is creating a coherent, unified language that easily scales across phones, with enough flexibility to jump to watches and cars. "It's not even about composing a UI in one place," says Nicholas Jitkoff, who helped lead the creation of Material Design. "It's about composing interactions from one device to the next."

This was Google. And this was Larry Page, a man who, when asked by one designer what Google's aesthetic was, responded, "Pine." That is, a command-line email system common during Page's college years, whose main draw was its speed.

Page's answer spoke to a philosophy that still dominates in the minds of many engineers: That the best design is no design at all, because speed is the only metric that matters. Adding anything charming to a computer interface simply slowed down. For many years, that made sense. In the dawn of computing, and the dawn of the internet, it didn’t matter of the computer spat out something ugly, so long as it spat out something as soon as you asked. This was a version of the so-called two second rule, formulated in the 1970s: If a computer didn't respond within that time frame, humans naturally drifted away. For a computer to actually augment your mind, it had to respond almost instantaneously.

Project Vault is a secure computer contained entirely on a micro SD sized device. Google's ATAP said the micro SD format made sense because there's already advanced security features on your phone, contained in the SIM card, which protects the things important to carriers. Vault is designed to be an equivalent, but designed to project a user's important content.

While Apple's WWDC is of little interest to hard-core Android customers, Google I/O can and often is of significant interest to Apple customers. It's where Google shows off its big new initiatives and previews updates for its existing services. Some years, those are blips on the radar, here for a moment, gone the next. Other years their scope and implications shake the world. This year, for me, fell somewhere in the middle. Google was restrained, relatively speaking, and focused. Yet as much as they acknowledged the need to shore up what came before, the company's focus is clearly on what's coming next. And that's worth a deeper discussion.

At its developers conference this afternoon, Google announced two pieces of software for the smart home and the broader collection of connected devices around us, increasingly known as the internet of things. Those two pieces are Brillo, an operating system, and Weave, a common language for devices to talk to one another. And importantly, Weave doesn't have to run on Brillo - so appliance manufacturers can theoretically add it on to their existing products.

We're working to make Google Now a little smarter in the upcoming Android M release, so you can ask it to assist you with whatever you're doing - right in the moment, anywhere on your phone. With "Now on tap," you can simply tap and hold the home button for assistance without having to leave what you’re doing - whether you're in an app or on a website. For example, if a friend emails you about seeing the new movie Tomorrowland, you can invoke Google Now without leaving your app, to quickly see the ratings, watch a trailer, or even buy tickets - then get right back to what you were doing.

Following a Reddit AMA on government surveillance, Google has admitted that while it does encrypt Hangouts conversations, it does not use end-to-end encryption, meaning the company itself can tap into those sessions when it receives a government court order requiring it to do so. This contrasts with the end-to-end encryption used by some services, like Apple's FaceTime, which cannot be tapped even by the company offering the service.

So today we're announcing the Patent Purchase Promotion as an experiment to remove friction from the patent market. From May 8, 2015 through May 22, 2015, we'll open a streamlined portal for patent holders to tell Google about patents they're willing to sell at a price they set. As soon as the portal closes, we'll review all the submissions, and let the submitters know whether we're interested in buying their patents by June 26, 2015. If we contact you about purchasing your patent, we'll work through some additional diligence with you and look to close a transaction in short order. We anticipate everyone we transact with getting paid by late August.

"Google's patent purchase program is promising to the extent it puts patents that could end up in the hands of trolls into Google's own patent portfolio," she said by e-mail. "While it's frankly troubling that a single entity would own as many patents as Google already does (and presumably will), this is an unfortunate byproduct of a broken patent system and a technology culture that often prioritizes the grant of patents above all else. Google has time and again shown its commitment to clean up the patent system, which is cause for some cautious optimism with regard to its new purchase program."