Google I/O 2014: everything you need to know – The Verge

Material world: how Google discovered what software is made of

2014-06-27T14:56:41-04:00

"It is a sufficiently advanced form of paper as to be indistinguishable from magic."

Matias Duarte, vice president of design at Google, is telling me about the central principle of Material Design. It's the unifying metaphor behind Google's new design direction, providing a unified set of physics and rules for how software should look and act. It's also a little weird.

The design team at Google felt the need to come up with a more coherent look and feel that could be applied across all of its products, from Android to Chrome OS to the web. Rather than starting with a palette of colors or a big set of guidelines, they started with a questio …

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Google’s ATAP group is a ‘band of pirates’ making the future

2014-06-26T16:18:10-04:00

The Advanced Technologies and Products group within Google is the kind of place where the smartest people on the planet might want to make their careers, but ATAP won't let them. Instead, it follows Regina Dugan's DARPA model of innovation: tiny teams pick ridiculously ambitious goals and then try to achieve them in two years - and achieve them at a real, meaningful scale.

Three teams from ATAP presented their progress here at the Google I/O Developer conference. We saw Project Tango, which is making wild 3D-sensing, spatially-aware tablets. We also got an update on Project Ara, which is moving forward with modular smartphones. Finally, we …

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Android TV is Google’s best chance yet to own your living room

2014-06-26T15:50:53-04:00

Google wants Android on every device you use - on your wrist, in your car, on your TV. The long-rumored launch of Android TV at Google I/O is one of the most notable facets of that strategy: instead of the old, overly complex Google TV product that failed to gain adoption, Android TV is based on the exact software that'll soon roll out to millions of phones and tablets. And while Google failed in the living room for years, the company is taking what it learned with Chromecast, Google Play, and Android to finally build a true competitor to Apple TV and Roku.

Perhaps the most important lesson Google learned came from the extreme simplicity of …

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You can now watch Google’s entire two-and-a-half-hour I/O keynote

2014-06-26T12:46:44-04:00

We've already gone over the most important announcements from yesterday's Google I/O keynote, but if you're after the small details, the entire presentation can now be streamed on demand. Google broadcasted the event live as it happened, but if you missed out, this is your chance to hear all about Material Design and the visual changes it's bringing to Android L. And of course there's plenty of time devoted to Android Wear, Android Auto, and Android TV too. The whole thing clocks in at over two and a half hours, so it may prove a bit much for one sitting. At the very least you can safely skip the video's first 17 minutes; the keynote gets un …

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Google turns on its crazy modular phone in public for the first time

2014-06-26T12:42:28-04:00

Speaking today at Google I/O, the technical lead for Project Ara, Paul Eremenko, showed off the progress his team has made since we saw the very early first prototypes this past April. He showed off a functional, form-factor prototype. Which is a nerdy way of saying that for the first time publicly, we saw a modular Ara phone power on. It took its sweet time, but after several rounds of supportive applause from the audience, it booted. And froze. But over the course of the session, the team kept at it to get it past the boot screen (though to no avail). So not the most successful demonstration, but enough to show progress.

Eremenko also ann …

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Google’s insane all-seeing Project Tango tablet is coming to consumers next year

2014-06-26T12:39:05-04:00

The day after Google gave its developers a vision for the immediate future, Regina Dugan and the ATAP team - "a small band of pirates trying to do cool shit," as she calls them - have taken the stage to talk about a few slightly more ambitious things. One is Project Tango, the tablets and smartphones equipped with incredible cameras that allow them to see the world in 3D. We've seen it before in prototype form, but the team announced on Thursday that next year, it's partnering with LG to build a consumer tablet that will go on sale next year.

The announcement came after a handful of demos that make clear how much potential Project Tango rea …

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iPhone or Android: it’s time to choose your religion

2014-06-26T11:45:07-04:00

It's impossible for Google or Apple to introduce a new feature, let alone a whole new revision, to their mobile operating systems without it instantly being compared to the other's alternative. The sparks that inflame heated discussions about who's got the better notifications or smarter multitasking come right from the top of both companies. While unveiling Android L yesterday, Google's Sundar Pichai took a subtle dig at Apple's new iOS 8 by saying that custom keyboards and widgets "happened in Android four to five years ago." Three weeks earlier, Apple CEO Tim Cook was more direct in his critique:

Many of [our new] customers were switcher …

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With Android One, Google is poised to own the entire world

2014-06-26T11:21:52-04:00

In the developed world, smartphones are ubiquitous. They're so common, many device makers have given up on selling non-smartphones entirely. But that's not the case in the developing world, where consumers are still in transition. This market opportunity has often been referred to as "the next billion," and many companies have made it their priority to focus on it. Research firm IDC reports that in India, smartphone sales have exploded 186 percent in growth in just the last year, with 78 percent of sales coming from devices priced below $200.

Nokia has made the next billion a big part of its business for years, first with the Asha line of p …

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Android Wear preview: this is how Google makes a smartwatch

2014-06-26T10:00:04-04:00

After months of teases and previews, including yesterday's demo-mode units at Google's I/O developer conference, we've finally gotten the chance to try out Android Wear for ourselves. It's Google's take on the smartwatch, and that's more than just a way of saying it's an Android smartwatch. Instead, Android Wear is Google through and through, from the look and feel that foreshadows the coming "Material Design" aesthetic of Android to the deep integration with Google Search.

After just a few hours with Android Wear on the LG G Watch, consider us impressed. The Pebble smartwatch shows how paring down features to the bare minimum is a compelli …

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You can now order an Android Wear smartwatch

2014-06-25T19:13:10-04:00

The first Android Wear smartwatches are now available to order. Both the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch have gone up for preorder on the Google Play Store, selling for $199 and $229 respectively. The LG G ships on July 3rd, while the Gear Live ships beginning July 8th.

Motorola's watch arrives later this summer

These will be the first two smartwatches to hit the market running Android Wear, a new version of Google's operating system tailored specifically to wearables. The OS was announced just a few months ago, and today Google finally gave people a real chance to try it out. Android Wear watches appear to make for a smart extension of …

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