Google

The New Moto G May Still Be the Best Phone for Your Money

Motorola just released a hardware Kraken the likes of which we’ve never seen. The new Moto X Style! The battery-conscious Moto X Play! And then there’s the Moto G. Only a few years ago, no one would care about the lesser budget sibling alongside these two powerhouses—but the Moto G is Motorola’s real smartphone champion.…

The Little-Known Robot Taxi That Could Outrun Google and Uber

By 2020, visitors landing in Tokyo for the Summer Olympics could be greeted by a fleet of self-driving taxis. At least, that’s the dream of Japanese tech company DeNA, which hopes to have autonomous cars shuttling tourists around the crowded, maze-like streets of that megacity within five years. You probably haven’t heard of DeNA. But…

Moto X Style Hands-On: A Great Smartphone With a Price To Match

The Moto X Style is in every way a successor to last year’s Moto X. It’s got all the requisite upgrades you’d expect: the better quad HD display, the better 21 megapixel rear camera with a front-facing selfie flash, and just an all around better look and feel. And somehow, it only costs $400. Picking…

The New Moto X Play and Moto X Style Are All About Looks and Battery

When looking for the next great phone to ride shotgun through your life, there are a few things it needs to do well. It needs to have a great display, look neat, and not have garbage battery life. With the third-generation Moto X, Motorola is laser-focused on all three. Motorola does this with two separate…

Note 5 Leaks: We Could Be Looking At One Of the Best Big Smartphones

Yesterday, Samsung sent out invitations to a New York City event where we’ll all finally (officially) meet the new Galaxy Note 5. But Samsung has done a pretty horrible job keeping wraps on what the new smartphone actually looks like, leaking everything from CAD designs to these new hi-res photos. Technology is filled with all…

OnePlus 2 Hands-On: So Good, It Makes Me Want To Leave Verizon

One year ago, the OnePlus One became the best off-contract smartphone you could buy. An unheard of Chinese company managed to deliver a high-quality Android handset for a crazy-low $300 price. Now, it looks like that awesomeness wasn’t a fluke. Behold: the OnePlus 2. Left: old and busted. Right: new hotness Starting at $330, the…

Here’s The OnePlus 2: Scary-Good Specs For $390

The OnePlus One dominated the cheap smartphone scene with a simple formula: flagship performance with a low price. For the second iteration, OnePlus isn’t fixing what ain’t broken. https://gizmodo.com/oneplus-2-hands-on-so-good-it-makes-me-want-to-leave-1720500080 Although OnePlus founder Carl Pei is keen to remind us that “specs are boring”, the internals of the OnePlus 2 are anything but: a Snapdragon 810…

Google Is Finally Divorcing from Google+ Accounts

The oft-mocked Google+ is getting stripped of features that’ll be incorporated elsewhere into the Googleverse. Google has decided to “move some features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+,” according to a post on its official blog today. That includes Google+ Photos elements being phased into the Photos app, and location…

Android Vulnerability Lets Hackers Control Your Phone With One Text

The best defense against any of your gadgets becoming flooded with malware has always been personal vigilance. “Hmm, this app looks sketchy and is from a third-party app store I’ve never heard of. NOPE!” But a new vulnerability, discovered by security experts at Zimperium, can attack your phone with just a text. According to Zimperium…

New Study Shows How Deeply Awful Those ‘Get the App’ Web Pages Are

Those web pages that stop you getting to the information you really want in favor of asking you to Download An App are deeply annoying. But now a study by Google shows just how counter-productive they actually are for the people that put them there in the first place. If any company was to test…

Go Install This Chrome Extension For Sending Self-Destructing Gmails

Gmail’s Undo Send feature gives users of Google’s free email service up to 30 seconds to change their mind on a sent email before it leaves their outbox. But a new Chrome extension called Dmail lets you send messages with a self-destruct timer—or the ability to remotely delete them whenever you want. If you send…

Google Scored a Patent for Memory-Storing Cameras, Sound Familiar?

A searchable database of all your memories—creepy? Or a blessing for your shrinking attention span? Either way, Google has scored a patent for just such a device. To be clear, this doesn’t have anything to do with your brain. We’re not talking about an embedded chip literally storing your memories, as depicted in the fantastic…

Google Voice Gets Neural Network-Powered Transcription to Slash Errors

Google Voice has an incredibly useful function that provides you with a transcribed version of your voicemail—but if often gets things wrong. Now, Google is throwing neural networks at the problem to help improve its performance dramatically. The service now uses Google’s recurrent neural networks, similar to those used by Google’s voice search in Chrome…

Don’t Ask Google Maps ‘Are We There Yet?’

The Google Maps lady might sound all friendly and helpful, but like any mom, she gets real sassy if you keep asking her if you’re there yet. As spotted by Android Police, the latest version of Google Maps for Android is hiding a neat Easter Egg. In turn-by-turn navigation mode, there’s a microphone button so…

How Lycos Almost Won the Search Engine Wars

It was exhilarating to be back in the game again, a 20-year-old college dropout with stock options, working at the center of the internet revolution. But I was overwhelmed. I’d only ever worked on a team with a half-dozen people, and Lycos was a huge company with hundreds of employees. All the developers seemed much…

YouTube Is Making Vertical Video Less Awful Because Humans Never Learn

Because we can’t be trusted to do anything right, YouTube is alleviating our long-standing pain and anguish over watching vertical videos in landscape by finally giving us the option to watch those horizontally-challenged bits of cinema in full screen on Android phones. And there was much rejoicing. As Android Police reports, a new version of…

This Is Our First Glimpse of the OnePlus Two

When Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus launched the One back in 2013, it redefined what a budget smartphone could be. Now, we’ve got a glimpse of the follow-up device. These images have leaked out from the Chinese wireless regulator Tenaa and unearthed by Engadget, ahead of the expected July 27th announcement of the OnePlus Two. We…

Google Maps Timeline Lets You Stalk Yourself

Google has a serial-killer-grade stash of knowledge about its users. This is not news, but to really ram the point home, Google is releasing a tool that lets you go back through history, and retroactively follow your every move. The Timeline feature is rolling out slowly for Google users on Android and desktop. If you’ve…

As of August 1st, Google+ Photos will cease to exist. Instead, Google Photos will assume its role.

The Galaxy Tab S2 Is Samsung’s Next Flagship Tablet

Last year, Samsung redefined how many pixels you can cram into 10 inches with the Galaxy Tab S; this year, it’s back with a thinner and lighter second round. https://gizmodo.com/samsung-galaxy-tab-s-review-good-lord-that-display-1595179884 The Tab S2 will come in two sizes, just like the tablet it’s replacing: a smaller 8-inch model, and the full-size 9.7-inch version (a tad…