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31

In 2019, Google G Suite feels incomplete without a proper graphics editor

Ryne Hager

This might seem like wishful thinking at best, but hear me out: Google should make a photo editor. I'm not talking about the simple crop-and-filter tools built into Google Photos, but a "real" raster graphics editor with layers and more flexibility, not just to enhance the already great camera chops of the company's Pixel phones, but to help with modern productivity. The nature of work has been changing since the productivity side of G Suite — Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive — landed back in 2012, and in 2019 many modern workflows can't be completed without graphics or photo editing.

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66

Diminishing differentiation: Are all our gadgets making each other redundant?

Paul Fidalgo

There sure are a lot of gadgets around. Consumers today own laptops, desktops, tablets, televisions, e-readers, smartphones, smartwatches, smart speakers, smart displays, smart TVs, and smart everything-elses in myriad combinations. If you’re economically fortunate enough, you might own at least one of each of these categories of products, and for some categories, probably more than one.

As much as I delight in this abundance of gadgetry, sometimes I take a step back and think, isn’t this a bit much? Not because of some penchant for minimalism or an anti-consumerist attitude, but because of all the overlap. So many of these devices do the same things.

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349

25 things Apple announced for iOS 13 that we want on Android

Rita El Khoury

Every year, just like Google conducts its I/O press conference to introduce developers to the new Android version and announce all the upcoming features and APIs it will bring, Apple does the same. Its WWDC event took place this past Monday and, as any mobile enthusiast, we tuned in to see what the company has in store for its operating systems. While the dominating rhetoric over many years has been Apple's uncanny ability to announce an Android feature that has existed for years as innovative and ground-breaking, things have changed recently. 2019 was one of the most interesting thanks to plenty of both small and big additions to iOS 13 that leave us a little doe-eyed and jealous.

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371

Can we talk about how Stadia absolutely nailed its pricing model? (Opinion)

Eric Ravenscraft

Yesterday, Google finally announced pricing for its upcoming Stadia platform. Upfront costs for the hardware, a monthly subscription for 4K gaming, and you still have to pay full price for new games. If you don’t look too closely, it sounds just like buying a console. Yet 'broke me' still would’ve killed for this years ago.

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109

Apple sold out kids' privacy yesterday under the guise of 'screen time' apps

David Ruddock

I am far from an Apple "hater" - I applaud a great many of the company's decisions around its products and the more fully-baked state in which it tends to execute them (except keyboards, apparently). But yesterday during the onslaught of WWDC announcements, Apple quietly put the lid back on a boiling pot of a controversy, and it has seriously soured the company's messaging for me on respecting privacy.

Last year, after Apple introduced built-in screen time parental controls into iOS, it began to slowly cull similar - but not functionally the same - apps from the App Store. It did so under what, to me, is a perfectly fair piece of reasoning: these apps were all using VPNs or iOS's MDM (an enterprise device management system) explicitly for the purpose of monitoring a person's activity on their iOS device.

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131

Plastic fantastic: The Pixel 3a is a refreshing break from the delicate glass sandwich

Ryne Hager

Sometime in the last few years, "plastic" became a dirty word in smartphones. The reasons for this — like evoking the kind of cheap and unpleasant designs that defined early Android phones — are probably less important the outcomes. A whole class of materials were re-branded as low-rent, and today even many relatively affordable phones have made the switch to fully aluminum or metal-and-glass sandwiches for the superficially premium look they impart.

But Google's newest smartphone bucks the trend, and in just the right way: the Pixel 3a stands apart with its genuinely nice, unapologetically plastic design.

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100

In-display fingerprint readers are a mistake — right now, anyway (opinion)

Ryne Hager

Six months ago, I was excited: The OnePlus 6T had just been officially announced bringing in-display fingerprint sensors to the mainstream US market. This was a genuinely new technology, after all, in a field of nearly-identical gadgets. It gave us all something to talk about as we anticipated all the ways it would change The Phone Experience for the better. But, six months later I've come to the conclusion that in-display fingerprint readers, as they stand today, were a mistake.

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126

'Superzoom' lenses will be the biggest thing to happen to smartphone cameras in years

David Ruddock

For all the fanfare ultra wide angle cameras receive on the internet, it’s getting closer that has long presented the greatest frustration in smartphone photography. Digital zoom has been the stuff of tech-savvy humor for years, a feature reserved for those so illiterate in their usage of cameras as to not understand that it achieves the same end effect as cropping an un-zoomed photo with a simple editor. Why zoom at all, we say, when the camera isn’t able to gather any more data, but instead actually destroys it, and all for the sake of a noisy, blurry photo? While this has a strong ring of “technically true,” I also believe it fundamentally ignores and misunderstands why people use zoom in the first place - and also why I believe optical superzoom systems are the future of smartphone cameras.

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The Best Of AP

112
I bought a Galaxy Fold and used it for ten days—here are my thoughts
90
[Update: Clarification, more countries] 'New Google Assistant' on Pixel 4 exclusive to US at launch, only speaks English
153
[Update: Supercross 3] All the games on Google Stadia
59
Google is giving some Assistant and YouTube Premium users free Home Minis
90

Hey Google, you had one job: 13 examples of Assistant being absolutely clueless

Rita El Khoury

Google Assistant knows a surprising number of things. Ask it for the distance between the earth and the moon or who won the last Superbowl, and it will give you the correct answer right away. But like any virtual assistant, there are times when it just doesn't get it. It either takes things too literally or comes up with a completely unexpected answer. We've collected a few of these instances over the past months and thought we'd brighten up your weekend with them.

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40

Samsung's Galaxy Watch Active would be a lot better with a little more Google [Opinion]

Florence Ion

Up until recently, I’ve felt like every Android-based smartwatch available had been too big for me and too uncomfortable to wear for extended periods. I swore off the Wear OS platform after the LG Watch Style I was wearing couldn’t even make it through the first day of Google I/O.

I decided to give smartwatches a try again, but it was after I had worn Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active at an event. I was excited by the 40mm size of the watch, and its silicone band looked just as stylish and as comfortable as the ones my friends had on their Apple Watches.

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