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Five perspectives on Wear OS for its five-year anniversary

Android Police Team

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the original announcement of Wear OS (née Android Wear). The platform has iterated through several different generations of hardware, a change of name, and its software has evolved a lot through the years. With half a decade of experience now behind it, some of us here at Android Police decided to sit down and hash out our feelings for Wear OS in 2019.

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Google Assistant can read your screen and offer contextual info, just make sure you want it to

Rita El Khoury

Google Assistant does a lot of things. This invisible artificial intelligence residing (partly) inside our devices can answer all kinds of questions, control our homes, help us plan our day, play our favorite music, and, with the addition of features like What's on my screen and Google Lens, glean more from what we're looking at and provide contextual answers. What you may not be aware of, and something I recently discovered (though it isn't very new), is that Assistant can read your screen even when you don't explicitly ask it what's on your screen. That has the potential to be very handy, but also extremely creepy if you didn't know it was possible.

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Huawei has now tried passing off DSLR photos as smartphone shots three times - it should know better

David Ruddock

A few days back, stories broke that Huawei had tried to pass off not just one, but at least two photos as part of teaser images for the upcoming P30's telescopic optical zoom. Both were professional DSLR shots, one of which was easily reverse-searched as being from a stock image repository on the web, the other outed as shot by someone back in 2009. The facts came to light quickly and without much effort: Huawei was caught red-handed, and its later attempts to sidestep an apology seemed half-hearted at best (which, no: Huawei has not apologized - its statement admits no fault of any kind).

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Android Q's dark theme must be picture-perfect at launch, lest developers ignore it

David Ruddock

Android Q has a dark theme - but you wouldn't know it reading any of Google's posts about the newest version of its latest mobile OS. There's not even a deeply-buried way to enable it inside Android - the only access point is via command line over ADB. It's the sort of thing you might have expected in the Android of 10 years ago, but that is hardly consistent with the highly polished image of the operating system Google tries to communicate today. It is, in a word, janky.

All jokes about Android's stability the bugginess of Pixel phones aside, Google has generally become much better about introducing new features in a usable and largely finished state in recent years.

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Foldable phones don't seem ready yet, and they're definitely not worth $2000

David Ruddock

"It's the first generation." I heard it over and over during Mobile World Congress whenever the topic of foldable smartphones inevitably arose. Everyone is talking about foldables (which yes, that's not a word, except now it is), and everyone has a take. They're the game-changing future our ever-expanding screens require. They're going to be huge with [insert demographic/region/niche here]. They're expensive now, but they won't always be. They're not going to be very good now, either, but just wait - this is only the first generation.

But it isn't - not exactly. Take a closer look at that image at the top of the post - do you recognize that foldable phone?

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Moto Mods: How a modular hardware platform locked Motorola into a cycle of failure

Ryan Whitwam

We all wish our phones could do more from time to time, but you can't just add new features without buying a new device, right? Oh, you're forgetting about Moto Mods. You can add new hardware capabilities to your phone like a speaker, a zoom camera, or projector. It changed everything... actually, that's wrong. Smartphones are largely the same as they were in 2016, but Motorola is still at least going through the motions to pretend Mods are a good idea. The evidence is unavoidable at this point: they're not.

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Very bad news site says Pixel 4 "could be" modular because you'll click on it

David Ruddock

It's early, but my least favorite news story of 2019 so far is this awful garbage from T3, a tech news site from the UK, about the Pixel 4 potentially being "modular." I won't link to it (nice try, T3!), but I will give you the title and a synopsis.

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Five improvements we want from the Google Home 2

Corbin Davenport

The original Google Home speaker launched all the way back in late 2016. A lot has changed since then — Assistant has become more powerful and multi-lingual, the Home Mini has been a wild success, the Home Max became a great option for audiophiles, and dozens of third-party Assistant speakers have hit the market.

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The Best Of AP

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[Update: Maybe on Wednesday] The Android Q Beta is likely launching in just a few hours
58
Shield Software Experience 7.2.3 brings NHL app and much-needed option to restart WiFi
95
New Galaxy Fold video shows a clear crease in the display
187
[Update x2: Fix rolling out] Sony appears to be blocking Kodi on its recent Android TVs
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Rant: The obnoxious screen notch/punch-hole debate needs to end

David Ruddock

In 2019, the most talked-about feature of any new smartphones is not the camera, processor, modem, or software. It is the shape and size of the area reserved for the sensors and cameras on the front - and it is time to just stop it.

Notches, punch holes, screen cutouts - whatever the hell you want to call them - are part of phones for the time being. They’re part of phones because the companies making the phones are desperate to find ways to excite us with new visual elements that keep our historically low attention spans long enough to sell us thousand dollar glass and aluminum bricks.

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Ready or not, 5G will probably be the death of these 3 smartphone companies

David Ruddock

5G is either the biggest change to our wireless world in decades or the most overhyped marketing spin from carriers in as long - and it all depends on just who you’re asking. Cynical tech journalists like me have real reason to downplay the technology’s importance and relevance to ordinary consumers, but we needn’t get into all that here. Carrier and phone manufacturers, meanwhile, believe it will usher in a new age of devices and use cases we can’t yet fully imagine. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle - closer to the cynical end, I’d argue! - but I think regardless of how 5G plays out, it means very bad things for struggling phone manufacturers.

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