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A few Reddit users have reported seeing a new look that features cleaner text, streamlined controls, and, most importantly, full-width artwork on albums and playlists. It’s a huge improvement over the cramped, boxed-in look of the current app. Hopefully it’ll be rolling out to more users soon.

This is definitely a proceed-with-caution situation. It’s experimental: Bluetooth doesn’t work, you’re capped at a 60HZ refresh, and there are some other bugs too. But if you’ve got an Apple Silicon machine with at least 16GB of RAM, you could install Googlebook OS and give it a test drive.

Google’s using the UK government’s Fuel Finder data for the feature, which has been available in the US for a while. What Car? warns that the real-time data is “full of inaccuracies and out-of-date information” though, so take it with a pinch of salt. Search “petrol” or “fuel” in either app to see for yourself.

Android Authority spotted code in Android 17 QPR3 Beta 1 hinting at a new “Face Active Illumination” feature that might help Pixel phones recognize users’ faces in low light. It appears to have a brightness slider and toggles for turning it on in various settings, like after bedtime or when “Do Not Disturb” is active.

Tomorrow’s event will announce more than $1 billion in commitments for the Trump admin’s “Genesis Project” AI push and investments from the NSF and Energy Department, reports Axios, including $100 million in credits from something called National Compute.

Following reports on the Google Home subreddit from many users unable to change the color of their connected smart lights yesterday, Google responded that it investigated the problem and rolled out a fix that appears to have resolved the peculiar issue.

Google warned some apps might have performance issues on the Intel Googlebooks, but now Android Authority reports that Google says only “96.6% of the top 10k+ most-used applications” work “flawlessly” on them. There are also new app compatibility ratings for the Googlebooks, but we haven’t found many with the “Made for desktop” tag yet.

The tool checks images, video, and audio files for Google’s SynthID watermark, a system that embeds a near-invisible marker into AI-generated content.

It’s now available to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in India on desktop and Android, along with the Android version of Google’s Gemini in Chrome browser assistant. Auto browse launched earlier this year, allowing Gemini to complete multi-step tasks in Chrome, like shopping, filling out forms, or researching hotel prices.

Claude for Google Workspace, now in public beta on all paid Claude plans, adds a sidebar where you can prompt Claude to edit your files, similar to Google’s Gemini sidebar. Anthropic’s also launching new connectors for creating and editing Google Workspace files directly in Claude.

EmbeddingGemma 2 can work with more than just text, featuring capabilities across coding, images, video, and audio. Google says the upgraded model has 740 million parameters and is designed to perform on-device tasks like finding a video clip from a voice memo or searching through audio recordings based on a text prompt.

I might be The Verge’s part-time PC handheld reviewer… but I don’t actually have any modern Android ones! Now there’s software that easily makes an Android handheld act like a Steam Deck, I should probably try again. Or should I wait for one with the new 6th-gen Snapdragon Elite?

In a growing thread on the Google Home subreddit many users are reporting an unusual issue today with the platform being unable to change the color of various brands of connected smart lights either through the app, or by using voice commands. Their brightness can still be adjusted, and the lights can be turned on or off, but changing the color only works in each bulb’s respective apps.

I now get notifications when my dog takes a dump on my lawn. This is Google’s Gemini for Home features in action, detailing everything going on in my garden. Jen Tuohy convinced me to pay the extra to try them out, and I’ve actually found them fun for spotting when birds or animals come to visit.

As Google explains:

According to GSMA database listings spotted by OVR Plus, the Pixel 12 Pro Fold appears to have a higher inner display resolution of 2296 x 2404, up from 2076 x 2152 from this year’s model. However, as 9to5Google points out, the aspect ratio suggests Google might not switch the next Pro Fold to a passport-style design.

A few of us in the newsroom got a Monday morning delivery of Google-powered laptops, and we’re starting to set them up. (All five of them!) We have lots of testing to do, and lots of questions to answer. Questions like, do I actually want Android apps on my laptop? But we also want to know what you want to know! If you have questions, drop ‘em here — we’ll answer as many as we can here, and in all our coverage this week.

After Samsung bumped up prices on its Galaxy S26 and midrange A-series phones last week, Google quietly did the same for its Pixel 10A. It was $499, but now starts from $599 — a hard sell for a phone that was already almost identical to the 9A from a year before.

The OSS VRP — which paid out for bugs found across Google’s open-source ecosystem — will be frozen until at least next year. It’s slop’s fault: the pause is down to a “significant rise” in AI submissions, “the vast majority of which are not valid.” Linux has been suffering from a similar problem.

To distribute an Android app in Brazil, Thailand, Singapore, or Indonesia — even outside Google’s Play Store — developers must now go through Google’s verification. It’ll roll out everywhere else from next year. Unverified apps can still be sideloaded, but the new process includes a 24-hour waiting period before apps can be installed.

A satellite equipped with Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday. The mission is part of Google’s Project Suncatcher, an experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers in space.

Advanced Protection, which launched last year as an option for people who need stronger security safeguards, will now automatically lock down a device if it detects repeated authentication failures within settings menus and apps.