A couple of months ago it was announced that Apple would be expanding its headquarters with the spaceship-looking Campus 2, and it looks like it won’t be alone in the expansion process. Today it’s been reported that Google will also be expanding with the purchase of a 240,000 square-foot office complex near its headquarters in Mountain View. While Google confirmed the purchase of the office, the company declined to disclose how much it cost.
Called The Landmark, the new office complex is said to house 960 workers at the new office – a far cry from Apple’s humongous Campus 2 that was built for up to 13,000 employees. Google has been snapping up a lot of real estate and properties in the area recently, and The Landmark probably isn’t going to be the last of the company’s purchases. No word on whether Google will be making some renovations to the place, but I wouldn’t put the conversion of the office complex into a green-friendly zone (with solar panels and windmills) past the company.
[UG]
Samsung and Google have officially announced the much awaited Galaxy Nexus phone. Running the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the 8.94mm thick Galaxy Nexus is powered by 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB RAM.
Samsung Galaxy Nexus Specs
On the display front, Galaxy Nexus sports a 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED display (1280×720) and features HSPA+ or 4G LTE connectivity, a 5MP camera with full HD video recording support, 1.3MP front-facing camera, dual-band (2.4GHz/5GHz) Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, full HD playback support, 16 or 32GB internal memory, NFC and 1750mAh battery. Galaxy Nexus will be released globally in November.[SH]
Google went through a lot to buy ITA and its travel software, and we saw the acquisition first bear fruit in the form of Mountain View’s web-based Flight Search. Now the partnership has produced version 1.2 of the OnTheFly airfare booking app for Android, iOS and BlackBerry. What’s new? Flexible date searches that let you peruse departures 35 days at a time, plus a price graph that shows the most fiscally prudent times to travel. Additionally, globetrotters can access their itinerary search history and see price changes for those fares throughout the year. Nice job fellas, now let’s work on bringing bargain-basement fare finding for the final frontier in the next revision. [engadget]
Don’t you just love technology and all that it entails? Improvement is always sighted at the horizon no matter how good or “perfect” a particular product is at the moment, be it hardware or software. Google+ for Android is a mobile app that has yet to be perfected, since it is still in beta just like the full Google+ service on your desktop. This means there are bugs to be ironed out, while some features might actually go AWOL on your or work in a manner you did not quite envision.
While Google did introduce an update to the Google+ for Android app, today we see yet another update that intends to put wayward notifications to rest, in addition to ensuring sharing and navigation troubles are put to bed forever as well.
Google does seem to have heard the complaints and suggestions from its users, having introduced improved notifications reliability, where “_add to circle” notifications are shown in bulk, while you can also share stream posts to individual people. Not only that, clicking a +mention will take you to the person’s profile in a jiffy among others. Hopefully the Windows Phone 7 version will be more empowered if and when it arrives.
Google promised that iPhone users would soon be getting a Google+ app of their own, and it’s now here. Not surprisingly, it looks a lot like the Android app, including views of your main stream and nearby users, sharing via Circles, and support for the Huddle group messaging feature. It’s not a universal app, though, so iPad users are still left out for the time being, as are those with an iPod touch, for yet reasons unknown.
Google’s Punit Soni notes that there was a small issue that initially caused a test version of the app to to be served from the App Store. If you grabbed the app as soon as it was available (within the first hour and 40 minutes, specifically), you’ll likely have to re-download it to get the current version (1.0.1.1809).
The Le-Pan TC970 Android tablet comes jam packed with a 9.7-inch (1024 x 768) touchscreen display and supports 720p HD video playback. The gadget is powered by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor with a 512MB of DDR2 RAM, Bluetooth 2.1 wireless connectivity and a microSD card slot for storage expansion (up to 32GB). Its battery provides up to 6-hour of operation time. The Le-Pan TC970 runs on the Google Android 2.2 Froyo with the Adobe Flash player 10.2 support for accessing Flash-enabled sites. Amazon has started selling this Android tablet for $349.99.
Google has just announced its Chromebook at Google I/O 2011 and both Acer and Samsung is ready to flood the market with their Chromebook device. Running Chrome OS, Chromebook cutting down those irritating long boot up time to just seconds. OS and software updates also will be done automatically ( as long as it connect to internet). Chromebook is a Cloud Computing notebook, means you will run software and access documents, photos, music or movies online, so it will require a decent internet connection. Another plus side from Chromebook is that it comes with built-in multi layers of security. Chromebook will be released on June 15th in the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain.
Google has just announced that The Company will release an update to the Android Market via its Facebook Page. The rollout will occur over the next two weeks to devices running Android 1.6 or higher. Google also mentions that the update will bring much needed improvements, including a “better UI, faster searches, more information of apps alike, improved ratings, and much more.” [Mobileburn]
Google’s Android OS has growing unexpectedly, and it is rapidly spreading in the market. I believe this is because Google have innovated some pretty sought after features like free turn-by-turn GPS surface in Google Maps Navigation and now Google has came with a new fantastic Voice Actions feature.
This Voice Action feature allows you to control several Android functions utilizing nothing more than your voice. This feature able to do sending a text messsage, location specific calling, set alarms, web browsing and a unique ‘find music’ function. The good news is, you don’t have to wait until Android 3.0 to get this update because it will be preinstalled on the Motorola Droid 2 with a version for Android 2.2 hitting the marketplace soon. Check out the video for a quick glance. [MW]
Yesterday Nexus One’s owner has just get a FRF85 update from google, and today Google’s taken it upon itself to release yet another update, FRF91. According to our source it’s also going out OTA, but our devices have yet to be notified. Why don’t you try it? Here is the download link for you.
